By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, February 24 -- In two weeks, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is slated to have a new spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric. Two years ago Dujarric was re-introduced to UN journalist as the chief of the News & Media Division, in a reception in what the UN called "UNCA Square." And then the censorship attempts began.
A journalist for Iranian TV, found to have a rubber gun which was a prop in an independent film he was working on,had his UN accreditation revoked, permanently. Dujarric was in charge of Media Accreditation, and Inner City Press asked him for a justification of this "one strike and you're out policy." No answer was ever provided by Dujarric.
Also in his Media Accreditation role, Dujarric chastised Inner City Press for daring to go stand outside and try to cover a meeting of Ban's Senior Advisory Group on Peacekeeping Operations, which included controversial Sri Lankan military figure Shavendra Silva. After the Sri Lankan government directed a complaint letter to the aforementioned UNCA, Inner City Press was told it could not cover the meetings.
Inner City Press, then on the board of UNCA, was not notified when the organization's then president agreed to screen a Sri Lankan government film denying war crimes. After it published an article noting that the UNCA president had in the past rented one of his apartments to Palitha Kohona, Sri Lanka's Permanent Representative to the UN, demands were made that Inner City Press remove the article from the Internet.
UNCA took to sending copies of correspondence to Dujarric, about articles Inner City Press had written about officials and diplomats of Dujarric's native France. Finally, UNCA first vice president Louis Charbonneau of Reuters sent a complaint against Inner City Press to Dujarric, calling it "for the record."
More recently, Charbonneau has gotten one of his complaints to Dujarric banned from Google's Search, using afiling under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- straight up censorship. What does Dujarric say?
In fact, Dujarric solicited complaints against Inner City Press from other big-media UNCA board members, through a private, including through non-UN email address. Freedom of Information Act responses show that UNCA board members met with "the UN" to request that Inner City Press be thrown out. Once Inner City Press published some of these, Dujarric on June 29, 2012 asked to meet Inner City Press.
Dujarric told Inner City Press not to refer to Ban Ki-moon as "Wan Ki-moon" and not to refer to Herve Ladsous, the fourth Frenchman in a row atop UN Peacekeeping, as The Drone despite Ladsous proposing the UN's first use of drones and refusing to answer Press questions about it.
This and a specious criticism for having signed Nobel Peace Prize Winner Tawakul Karman of Yemen into the UN, where she dared speak on the UN microphone after a Security Council meeting on Yemen, were linked by Dujarric to re-accreditation he controlled.
Criticism of stories, coverage and even tweets is fine -- but when done by an official in charge of accreditation, and even tied to accreditation, we call it what it is: censorship.
Disgusted, Inner City Press and another long time correspondent from Brazil founded the Free UN Coalition for Access as an alternative to the insider UNCA, which did not for example offer any defense to the cameraman thrown out for the rubber gun. (Reuters' Charbonneau, in fact, wrote a story playing up the Iranian angle.)
But Dujarric became the interlocutor for FUNCA. He said only UNCA was needed. After convening a meeting between FUNCA and UNCA, at which Inner City Press openly said "this is on the record" and UNCA president Pamela Falk of CBS said, "He's going to write about this," Dujarric sent Inner City Press a letter which claimed the meeting was off the record and said FUNCA was not a DPI interlocutor for reform.
There have been no reforms since, quite the opposite. Dujarric, who earlier refused a New York Civil Liberties Union request that the UN provide due process to journalists, continued the Kafka-esque atmosphere in March 2013 when Reuters and Agence France-Presse filed stealth complaints leading with how Inner City Press asked a question to Herve Ladsous.
When Dujarric's Accreditation Unit led a raid on Inner City Press' office, photos from which quickly appeared on BuzzFeed, Dujarric denied any role in giving out the photos. But the published photos are identical to the ones his unit took that day.
Since the letter with the false "off the record" claim, the raid and photos and attempt to censor tweets, there has been very little contact (though there was an attempt to essentially ban FUNCA, another limitation on freedom of association, speech and press). FUNCA has continued, working with UN-focused journalists not only in New York but as far afield as Somaliland and Colombia.
Now Stephane "The Censor" Dujarric is set to become the spokesperson. Can he use this position to pursue the censorship he's sought for the past two years? FUNCA opposes it, and says these questions must be answered. Watch this site.
