Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/un1banmeetsus032908.html
UNITED NATIONS, March 29 -- Saturday afternoon in the UN's near-empty Delegates' Lounge, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad came in. Inner City Press, at the UN to ask questions of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, asked Amb. Khalilzad what brought him inside on such a nice early Spring day. "A meeting with the Secretary General," he said.
Ban Ki-moon's daily schedule for Saturday, while noting the 4 p.m. meeting with Prime Minister Rudd, made no mention of meeting the American Ambassador. In fact, some who went up to the 38th floor for Ban's photo-opportunity with Rudd later told Inner City Press that Khalilzad looked surprised and not entirely happy with the arrival of cameras on the scene. "Maybe I should have worn a tie," Khalilzad ad libbed.
The impact of not listing such a meeting on Ban's schedule is that, normally, journalists would not then know to ask for a read-out on the meeting. What might Ban and the U.S. Ambassador have been meeting about, on Saturday afternoon? While some speculate it involved a report on Rudd's Washington meetings, Friday the UN budget committee voted to approve some $48 million in "Special Political Missions," as part of a $1.1 billion add-on package which Khalilzad's outgoing colleague Mark Wallace had criticized as an unprecedented 25% increase in the UN budget.
Khalilzad, asked about the increase by Inner City Press, said that the UN has to get better and setting its priority, that he might like to drive a Ferrari, but can't afford one. Perhaps a Japanese luxury car -- sources tell Inner City Press that Japan only reluctantly voted for the $48 million in budget add-ons, and even then, only with an understanding that the Secretariat will make $3 million in cuts elsewhere. It's considered strange that Japan rather than the United States made the most noise in the budget committee about the ever-rising spending. Perhaps the U.S.'s view on the budget were delivered more quietly, in an undisclosed Saturday afternoon meeting.
The end of the budget committee's March session was hard to cover: it was impossible to get audio recordings of the meeting once it finished, and the resolutions voted on Friday afternoon were not available, even as of noon. At the noon briefing, Inner City Press asked "if, hours before they vote on these things, we don’t have the documents, do the people voting have the documents now or do they just vote on them when they get them?" The General Assembly's spokesman replied, "I would assume that within the informal consultations, if we have these drafts listed, I have the feeling that probably those drafts have been worked on. Otherwise these would not be here."
We'll see. As of Saturday, 9 p.m., Ban's schedule still read as follows:
Saturday, 29 March 2008
All other appointments are internal
4.00 p.m H.E. Mr. Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia
Monday, 31 March 2008
12.00 p.m. Mr. Serge Brammertz, Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (courtesy call)
12.30 p.m. Ambassador Elbio Rosselli, Permanent Representative of Uruguay to the UN (farewell call)
3.30 p.m. Rt. Hon Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Chairman, Commission for Global Road Safety
4.45 p.m. H.E. Mr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, Foreign Minister of Bangladesh
5.30 p.m. Mr. Ibrahim A. Gambari, Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the Iraq Compact and Other Issues
Inner City Press annotations: apparently, Ban meeting with the U.S. Ambassador is now considered an "internal" meeting. Of Monday's disclosed meetings, one imagine with Bangladesh the issue surrounding the mandates combined with the Office of the Special Advisor on Africa coming up. Does Gambari being identified with reference to Iraq mean that Myanmar will not be discussed?
Footnote: While Zalmay Khalilzad has denied the reports that he might seek the presidency of Afghanistan, perhaps the rumors will revive, now that the august Tribune de Geneve has, if only as a typo, named Hamid Karzai as having joined that agro-bureaucrats at the World Food Program, click here for that (in French). It's nice work if you can get it -- a recently released ECOSOC report E/2008/36 reports that the WFP's Executive Board voted to set the housing allowance of executive director Josette Sheeran Shiner at 121,440 Euros per year, "indexed annually against the Italian retail price index." The price of food is not the only price that's going up. To be continued.
