By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/undpa2filenote101309.html
UNITED NATIONS, October 13 -- The UN's Sanctions Branch is run in such a way that when one of its Democratic Republic of the Congo experts began spending its money on prostitutes while in the DRC, he was allowed to continue by converting the working woman into his girlfriend, responsive UN sources tell Inner City Press.
The team on Sudan sanctions was stacked with non Arabic speakers, friends and acquaintances of the UN official who recruited them, costing tens of thousands of dollars in extra translation fees.
The Sanctions Branch is a part of the UN Department of Political Affairs, currently embroiled in controversy. Last week Inner City Press obtained and published a sharply worded "note to file" by DPA chief B. Lynn Pascoe reprimanding two long time staffers, Horst Heitmann and Aleksandar Martinovic, who oversees the Sanctions Branch. Since then additional whistleblowers have stepped forward, and the picture has become more complete.
It is, as is so often the case at the UN, a story about family connections, nationality and fiefdoms. To fill an opening at the P-5 level in the Sanctions Branch Mr. Martinovic, a Peruvian who came into the UN along with Javier Perez de Cuellar, favored one James E. Suttlin, whose father James S. Sutterlin wrote a central bank about Perez de Cuellar.
Lynn Pascoe's supporters recount that the Sanctions Branch under Martinovic faced complaints of sexism and "lack of gender balance."
With two long serving women leaving the sanctions branch, the hiring of Sutterlin was not positively viewed. Nor was the fact that until one of the women left, the Sanctions Branch lacked staff meetings and coordination. "Just one on one, divide and conquer" is how one insider described it to Inner City Press. And so Pascoe intervened, circumventing an already ongoing recruitment process to laterally send in someone in his office.
Martinovic and Horst Heittman protested, suddenly declaring that the position wasn't needed. The Pascoe supporters point out that while Heittman now contests USG Pascoe's lateral transfer, he himself favor a lateral move of his fellow German Gregor Boventer into the Charter Research Branch, with little background in the subject.
National fealty and power politics seem to have determined much of the make up of DPA and its Security Council Affairs Division.
It is said that when Heittman came in at D-1, then German Ambassador Gunter Pleuger pleaded his case to then DPA chief Kieran Prendergast. Now with another Germany Ambassador on his way, this level of support is not known.
Heittman is said to have offered German help to Kofi Annan's last DPA chief Ibrahim Gambari, to try to keep this post under Ban Ki-moon. This didn't work, and now Lynn Pascoe is said to not let Gambari work on any African issues.
And see, www.innercitypress.com/undpa2filenote101309.html
