UNITED NATIONS, June 28 -- The politicization of the UN's sanctions process is perhaps most clear in connection with the reports on the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Usually right before UN Security Council meetings, this time just before the full deployment of the Council's “Intervention Brigade,” the reports are leaked to a Western wire service and set the tenor of the debate.
Rarely are the actually documents put online, only the wire service's gloss. In this case, Inner City Press immediately critiqued that gloss, which for example ignored Rwanda's opposition to two of the Group of Experts' members, Bernard Leloup and Marie Plamadiala, on which Inner City Press previously reported.
But now, after receiving copies from a number of Council members, Inner City Press is putting the Annexes online, exclusively, here. The report itself is, typically, watermarked each with the name of the Council member to which it was given. The annexes do not bear the mark, and even by a biased Group of Experts undercut the wire service's one-sided summary.
The Group's lack of seriousness is evident even from the first Annex, in which Uganda's 2012 letter is labeled “October 13, 2013.” Note to Leloup and Plamadiala -- that date has not yet occurred.
These are followed by self-serving “extracts” and photos of ammunition looted, a truck and tank taken, photos of the M23 headquarters taken by The Group -- from a helicopter no less -- and almost pornographic pictures of bullets and their launchers. (In the vein, in Annex 44 the Group includes some stomping at the “Hotel Pygmy in Mambasa town.”)
Finally, only in Annex 50, the Group gets into the FDLR, a militia actually linked to a genocide.
There is an annex of 509 names provided by the Rwandan government -- portrayed by Reuters as not cooperating, in an article which uploaded neither the report nor its annexes.
The UN, Reuters' partner (click here to see Reuters UN bureau chief leaking to the UN, against Inner City Press, leading to the formation of the new Free UN Coalition for Access) typically is most concerned with attacks on itself. In Annex 64 it showed burned trucks.
There are screen shots of SMS messages -- never mind that the UN denied or stonewalls on documents showing when Bosco Ntaganda was working with the FARDC they supported. The process is entirely politicized.
When Inner City Press published internal emails from the MONUSCO UN Mission on this topic, MONUSCO replied angrily via press release that it was false. Not that the Group says it too, will MONUSCO attack the Group of Experts?
MONUSCO has not responded to a request, in French no less, by the Free UN Coalition for Access, digging into the UN system's and particularly UN Peacekeeping's one-way social media, to clarify how many FARDC arrests there have been for the 135 rapes in Minova in late November.
Now what of the UN mission MONUSCO working with Congolese Army units intertwined with the FDLR? After UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous, in his previous incarnation representing France in the Security Council, argued in favor of letter the genocidaires escape from Rwanda into Eastern Congo?
Ladsous, of course, hand his information to favored scribes, at least one of which returns the favor to the UN, as recently shown. And who did this one? And now what? Watch this site.
