By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, August 22 -- A French-proposed draft press statement on fighting in Eastern Congo has not immediately been adopted by the UN Security Council. Why?
The draft for example asserted without qualification that any attack on a member of the UN's MONUSCO, including its new Intervention Brigade, would be a war crime.
But as Inner City Press first reported as the only media covering a legal roundtable with outgoing UN top counsel Patricia O'Brien, the new Brigade would be a party to an armed conflict.
And another legal expert answered Inner City Press, at a UN session on mercenaries, that to shoot at a party to a conflict is NOT a war crime.
Still, the proponents of the draft press statement were angry; Reuters quickly wrote it up without any analysis, and blamed Rwanda.
Earlier on Thursday, Inner City Press and another journalist twice asked UN Peacekeeping acting chief Edmond Mulet Thursday if the M23 rebels had entered the security zone established around Goma.
"No," Mulet said. "Just mortars." He went on to refer to the separate "red line" established when M23 agreed in Kampala to pull out of Goma. (The portion of that agreement that gave M23 one third of the security force at the Goma airport remains unimplemented.)
But later on Thursday, the wire service Reuters reported "a senior U.N. official, who asked not to be named, said that on Thursday the rebels entered a security zone surrounding Goma" -- which Mulet, the acting chief of DPKO, had just denied. Inner City Press and the other journalist waited to ask Mulet again, and got the same answer.
So who is this "senior UN official who asked not to be named"? In UN Peacekeeping, only Herve Ladsous, long absent from UN Headquarters, is senior to and could over-rule Mulet.
Ladsous has in the past spoon-fed answers of dubious veracity to this same Reuters UN bureau bragging for example about the Congolese Army imposing accountability for the 135 rapes in Minova in November 2012.
But with only a few arrests for the 135 rapes, Ladsous' DPKO continues supporting the 391st Battalion, even as it is now implicated in corpse desecration.
That the UN would try to use Reuters, willingly, resonates with a documented instance in June 2012 when Reuters UN bureau chief Louis Charbonneau gave to UN official Stephane Dujarric an internal UNCA anti-Press document,three minutes after saying he would not do so. Story here,audio here, document here, in which Charbonneau tells Dujarric, "You didn't get this from me."
So is Reuters' "senior UN official who asked not to be named" someone junior to Mulet, or as another journalist suggested, no one at all? Watch this site.
