www.innercitypress.com/tfv1unodc051209.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 12 -- Complete with Alec Baldwin and a slew of fashion designers, Tuesday night at the UN saw the type of hype event that often debases the Organization. In the name of the children of Uganda, a country where the UN Development Program funded a forcible disarmament program which resulted in burned villages and children chained until exchanged for guns, the UN held a fundraiser, $250 to enter. The honored guest was painter Ross Bleckner, who garnered praise from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
The UN Office of Drugs and Crime had issued a press release puffing a "group of distinguished leaders in the arts, entertainment and business communities to serve on the Benefit Host Committee for the exhibition opening, including: Graydon Carter, artists Jeff Koons, Chuck Close and Brice Marden, designers Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Rachel Roy, Harry Belafonte, Academy Award winning actors Nicholas Cage, Rachel Weisz and Mira Sorvino; actors Alec Baldwin, Carey Lowell, Candice Bergen and Ashley Judd, Russell Simmons" -- and that was only on the front page.
There was sushi and fashion photographers, a slew of UN high officials drinking in the scene. But the cause, as it turned out, seemed to be a pure one: the Trust Fund for Victims (TFV), which works in Uganda and the Congo, and is trying to get into Sudan.
Inner City Press interviewed TFV director Andre Laperriere, who described soliciting the art work from former child soldiers, and paying villagers in seeds to rebuild roads to their communities. He took great pains to distinguish the TFV from the International Criminal Court, headed by Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, who was also in New York on Tuesday, chatting with US deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff. Moreno Ocampo has become a controversial figure, leading the ICC to be fine for retaliation against a whistleblower and living only for the press.
Laperriere, on the other hand, seemed focused on the victims, on raising money to help better their lives. He said Germany's a major funder, and two corporations - then the head of UNODC, Antonio Mario Costa, swept him away, with talk of an after-party dinner, and of tomorrow's press conference. Watch this site.
Footnote: on the sidelines of the night of hype, the Permanent Representative of Security Council member Uganda told Inner City Press of Sri Lanka that for his country "there would be no problem to discuss it in the Council... There is urgency to do something about it."
This is counter to the common wisdom at the UN, that those Council members opposing addressing Sri Lanka include not only China, Russia, Viet Nam and Libya, but also Burkina Faso and Uganda, and Turkey and Japan (the latter two, it is predicted, would abstain). Now, Uganda has said it would have not problem having Sri Lanka on the Security Council's agenda. So why are those countries which supposedly care waiting? Again, watch this site.
