By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/un2elections100709.html
UNITED NATIONS, October 7 -- With the UN facing charges of bias and cover up of fraud in Afghanistan, Wednesday in New York the UN presented no fewer than three officials to the Press corps, all intent on rebutting and bad mouthing the UN's fired deputy envoy Peter Galbraith.
The Department of Peacekeeping Operation's second in command Edmond Mulet said the Galbraith has "personal motives" for going public with his complaints that main envoy Kai Eide has been covering up electoral irregularities in the service of Hamid Karzai. Inner City Press asked Mulet to describe how Galbraith has hired for the job, and why these personal motives, or propensity to be a loose cannon, had not been discovered at the time.
Mulet said that while Galbraith had been "a candidate among others... he was selected by the Secretary General... I cannot deny that him being a citizen of an important country that plays an important role in Afghanistan, that also was a factor we took into consideration." Video here, from Minute 1:01:56.
According to Mulet, the UN thought Galbraith's American citizenship was a plus, that Galbraith would somehow represent or be a conduit to the United States. So what now -- does Galbraith speak for the U.S.? Or, as some surmise, did Richard Holbrooke create a Frankenstein and then "leave him out to dry"?
Inner City Press asked Mulet and his colleagues to respond to Galbraith's statement in the Daily Telegraph that
"the final instruction from the Secretary-General before sacking him last week was: 'Do not talk.' He initially agreed to Ban Ki-moon's request after being given assurances that his dismissal would be presented as a dispute over how the UN mission was handling electoral fraud in Afghanistan. But he decided to break his silence, after officials announced instead that his sacking was in the 'best interests of the mission.' 'I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back months if the stakes were not so high.'"
While Mulet didn't answer, his colleague Wolfgang Weisbrod-Weber, the Director of the Asia and Middle East Division of DPKO, said that while he didn't know what Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, DPKO has told Galbraith "do not exacerbate the divergence of views in public unnecessarily."
Since Galbraith was complaining not only of electoral fraud but also of bias by his boss, Kai Eide, and was told to be quiet and then was fired, Inner City Press asked how this complied or relates to the UN's statement policy of protection of whistleblowers' rights to make such complaints. Video here, from Minute 1:04:14.
Mulet insisted that Galbraith is not a whistleblower, saying "he has a personal agenda, a person objective that will become clear in the future." Another reporter said that Ban's chief of staff Vijay Nambiar said that Galbraith was removed because he was trying to engineer an unconstitutional change of government in Afghanistan. There was no response to this, nor to Inner City Press' question about whether the UN will, as Karzai challenger Abdullah Abdullah and others have urged, conduct an investigation of Eide's actions, by the Office of Internal Oversight Services.
While Mulet and Craig Jenness, Director of the Electoral Assistance Division of the Department of Political Affairs both insisted that the UN had no monitoring role in Afghanistan, a May 11, 2009 press release by the UN stated that "UNAMA will follow these elections closely and monitor the campaign to help ensure that the fundamental political rights of the Afghan people are respected. " So which is it? Watch this site.
