By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/un3monte010910.html
UNITED NATIONS, January 9 -- With the UN still desperately claiming no decision has been made to name Staffan de Mistura as its envoy to Kabul, de Mistura bragged to the U.S.' Richard Holbrooke that the job is his. Holbrooke in turn told Foreign Policy's nimble Cable, which published it late Friday, to the Web and yes, to Inner City Press, which earlier in the week had predicted de Mistura and asked Ban Ki-moon about it.
This UN is the gang that can't shoot straight. By Saturday, Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky was insisting to AFP's Washington bureau that no decision had been made, that Ban was the only one who could make it. But the moment for him to have done so was, at latest, on January 6, when he briefed the Security Council on Afghanistan.
Afterwards Ban read notes to the Press and took some questions. Inner City Press asked about the New York Times' editorial, which plugged Jean Marie Guehenno over de Mistura, who it called a low key bureaucrat. The choice is "my prerogative," Ban told Inner City Press, not for the NYT to make. This telegraphed the choice. But still Ban let his choice and Richard Holbrooke scoop him.
Why would de Mistura brag? Perhaps to nail it down, and not wait until the January 28 conference in London. Anything could happen, between now and then.
Inner City Press and the Washington Post (and Friday's Foreign Policy, which Ban and the South Korean press have previously been quick to point out is owned by the Washington Post) have already noted that de Mistura's stock rose with Ban when he hired Ban's son in law Siddarth Chatterjee as his chief of staff while serving in Iraq.
(This pattern of nepotism by proxy, or by Chatterjee, has continued in Copenhagen, where Jan Mattsson of UNOPS in turn hired Chatterjee, for a D-1 post in the process of being upgraded to D-2, another leap).
But de Mistura whole rise has been fueled by "suck-up hires," as one long time observer put it. Under Kofi Annan, de Mistura hired the son of Annan's chief of staff Iqbal Riza. Since as Ban's Congo envoy Alan Doss knew and worked around, parent and child can't both work for the UN, Riza's son got his paychecks through another name. But the effect was the name: rise by hiring the close relatives of Turtle Bay's powerful.
Just as Hamid Karzai previously vetoed Paddy Ashdown, Inner City Press is told he'd like to veto de Mistura, probably even more so now that Holbrooke has endorsed him. But he'll likely lack the leverage to do so at the January 28 conference. So what can happen, between now and then? Watch this site.
Footnote: late Friday in the UN's new three story building on its East River fronting Norht Lawn, Inner City Press informed three well placed officials about Holbrooke's use of The Cable. One who said Holbrooke was behind the NYT editorial shook his head and called it deft and even devious, while asking, "What has Holbrooke accomplished, in either Af or Pak?"
Another said the puppet master behind the NYT editorial wasn't Holbrooke but rather the U.S.' Permanent Representative to the UN. (She was in DC Friday, among other things meeting with Hilary Clinton.) The third mused that Guehenno, something of a dandy and man about town, might have met the retired NYT editorial writer Unger at some expensive restaurant. The rest, as they say, is history.
