CERCLE DIPLOMATIQUE - issue 03/2020

LE MONDE IAEA | INTERVIEW
Rafael Mariano Grossi
“Nuclear medicine is indispensable nowadays.”
The Director General talks about the impact of the IAEA’s role as a “nuclear watchdog”, the efforts
of the magnificent labs in Seibersdorf and the organisation’s new
fellowship to attract more women to science.
Interview: Daniela Pötzl
PHOTO: RALPH MANFREDA
RAFAEL MARIANO GROSSI
was born in Buenos Aires in 1961. In 1983, he
graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of
Argentina with a BA in Political Sciences, and in
1985, he joined the Argentine foreign service.
In 1997, he graduated from the University of
Geneva and the Graduate Institute of International
Studies with a MA and PhD on International
Relations, History and International Politics.
Since 3 December 2019, he serves as Director
General of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) which is based in Vienna. He is the first Latin
American to head the organisation. He was formerly
the Argentine Ambassador to Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia
and the International Organisations in Vienna
(2013-2019).
CD: You assumed office on December 3 of last
year. Yet, the last few months have been
challenging for all of us and our world has been
turned upside down by Covid-19. How did the
IAEA act and react since March and how and in
which countries has the Agency been particularly
helpful in the last few months?
Rafael Mariano Grossi: We are all impacted
by Covid-19 in our private lives or
even at the national level, but the nature of
our work being an international organisation,
is the international contact – the travelling,
the visiting, the inspecting, the moving
around the world. This was denied to
all of us all of a sudden, because the world
turned into a lockdown world with closures
and restrictions, with the inability to move.
For a place like the IAEA that is a huge
challenge as we for example need to inspect
hundreds of places all over the world. How
should we give assistance to developing
countries if you don‘t travel?
I will always remember that Friday, on
March 13, when Austria announced the
lockdown. We said at that time that the
IAEA would not stop. And this is exactly
what we did. We needed to adapt dramatically
and immediately because we had to
make sure that we would be travelling even
in the absence of commercial flights. We
didn‘t put wings in our inspectors (laughs),
but indeed we did hire the first private planes
in the history of this organisation. We
had to ask for special overflight permits
and flight permits in a world which was basically
locked. Thanks to the right nuclear
technologies, we were able to send out protective
equipment, detection equipment for
viruses and pathogens and particularly for
Covid-19 cases to 125 countries. This is the
biggest assistance operation ever in the history
of the IAEA, not only to developing
countries. Also, around ten European
countries turned to us as well because it
was a time of great need. For the first time,
the IAEA was accepted at the table of the
humanitarian and health global assistance.
We were invited to participate in the
UN Covid-19 crisis management team. We
were consulting with the secretary-general,
with the director general of the WHO and
other international organisations. So, we
were able to quickly turn our operation
around and see how we should be acting in
this completely unusual circumstance and
to deliver. It was a huge challenge but also
the opportunity to rise to the occasion.
I was telling our staff: “Look at this as a
privilege. When you go back home, you
can tell your children you are doing something.”
Then you can take it with pride,
helping so many that are suffering and this
ignited our people to work with double determination.
I don‘t want to talk about this as if we
had succeeded in anything because as we
speak, there are people dying and this is
not over. In Austria, we are privileged to
live in a country that handled this in an exemplary
way, with early on very clear guidelines
to the population, a very well educated
and disciplined society that followed
what needed to be done. And the results
are there, that is not the case in many of our
member states. And we continued by putting
together follow-up programmes of assistance
for them for following phases of
the pandemic. We assisted in the whole region
of African and Latin American countries.
We were concentrating on sending
detection equipment, RT-PCR equipment,
also protective gear and testing sets. We
have member countries where they didn‘t
have the ability to test people in order to
know what was going on. We were sending, >
what I would call “a lab in a box”.
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