By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 12 -- There was no mention of Africa when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon emerged Thursday from his meeting with US President Barack Obama.
Ban gave a 740 word summary of the meeting, and not one of them was Mali, or Sudan, or Congo, or Somalia, much less Haiti.
This is strange, since it is in these countries and countries like it that the UN actually has billion dollar peacekeeping missions, and actually does its work. So why didn't Ban mention it?
In Darfur, Sudan, over 50,000 have had to flee from fighting into Chad.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the day before Ban's meeting with Obama, the UN's inaction on 126 rapes in Minova was exposed on BBC, putting UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous' stonewalling of Inner City Press' questions about the rapes for months into sharp contrast. (Video here, here and here).
In Haiti, the UN mission closest to the UN, the introduction of cholera was met with legal claims which Ban tersely dismissed. The mission continues without a permanent head, as Ban tries to force the Haitian to accept the Trinidadian candidate he selected.
For Mali, which the US says it cares about, Ban is poised as Inner City Press has exclusively reported to name Italian deputy foreign minister Staffan De Mistura as his envoy.
But all Ban spoke about after meeting with Obama was Syria, North Korea, the “Middle East” and climate change. Why?
Before writing this article, Inner City Press went to the April 12 UN noon briefing to ask. Ban's deputy spokesman Eduardo Del Buey said that in such meetings, time is limited.
OK. But what exactly is the UN's role in the Korean conflict, other than Ban's personal interest as former South Korean foreign minister?
Del Buey quickly emphasized that North Korea could fire a small nuclear weapon. So if Africa had nukes? Or Haiti?
Inner City Press asked if there was any read-out of Ban's meeting with World Bank president Jim Kim. No, there was not. On that, Team Ban is extremely sensitive when Jim Kim's Korean heritage is brought it, essentially calling this racist.
But if the UN Secretary General is supposed to base his focus not on his own nationality but on the problems of the world, particular those overlooked by leaders of rich nations, why could Ban not bring up Africa once?
At lower level, why are the noon briefings of his spokespeople often devoid of questions about Africa except, we hate to say, from Inner City Press?
And why, given this, did Ban's UN conduct a raid on Inner City Press' office on March 18, rifle through papers and take photographs, which were subsequently leaked to BuzzFeed through an anonymous “Concerned UN reporter” email account?
Who Are these “concerned UN reporters”? Why was the president of the UN Correspondents Association Pamela Falk allowed to take photographs of the raid?
When the question was raised, she responded with a legal threat from her CBSNews.com email accounting, which CBS has refused to clarify.
When Ban met with the UNCA Executive Committee for lunch, he gave them quotes but the highlights given to others hours later had nothing on Sudan or Congo or Haiti.
Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky, when Inner City Press asked, said that those had come up, but declined to say how. And none of the UNCA -- UN Censorship Alliance -- opaque apostles wrote on the topic, or released their tapes or transcripts. This UN is broken, as it breaks into Press office space. Watch this site.
