By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, December 3 -- Leave it to a read-out by US Vice President Joe Biden to defend Kyiv's suspension of pension payments in Eastern Ukraine, which many see as collective punishment.
Biden's read-out of his conversation with Arseniy Yatsenyuk on December 3 said that he and the "Prime Minister also discussed the armed robbery of cash delivery trucks and ATMs by Russian proxies in the east, as well as the 'war tax' being exacted by these proxies on pensioners and other citizens. The Vice President condemned this outrageous behavior, and welcomed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk’s commitment to hold in escrow pension and other social benefit payments to citizens in the separatist-controlled territories with the aim of delivering these payments as soon as it is safe to do so."
How long can that be? In the Ukraine meeting of the UN Security Council on November 12, UN Assistant Secretary General Jens Toyberg-Frandzen said, among other things, that "on November 5, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk announced that pensions would be halted to areas under rebel control."
Inner City Press asked, in a November 12 story and at the November 13 UN noon briefing, isn't the halting of pensions to rebel held areas by the government in Kyiv a form of collective punishment?
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's Office of the Spokesperson did not offer any substantive response -- but later, as we will explain, there would be selective background spin on the eve of the UN's release of its "new" report on Ukraine.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva issued the report and a press release on November 20. Among many problems with the report, on this issue it does not mention Yatsenyuk or the role of Kyiv in suspending pensions, even the heading "Right to social security."
Nor is Yatsenyuk's and Kyiv's role mentioned in the OHCHR press release, despites its statement that "Severe curtailment of the economic, social and cultural rights of people in Ukraine is also of grave concern."
The OHCHR press release quotes the new (September 1) head of the office, Prince Zeid of Jordan, who has yet to say anything publicly about a mounting scandal of leaked cables depicting two high employees of the Office, one still there, servicing Morocco on the Western Sahara issue.
But the Ukraine report is not primarily under Zeid's supervision within the Office. Does he know how its spin works, or doesn't, in New York? Inner City Press has put into a question on deadline on precisely this: watch this site.
On November 12, while the UN spoke about the death of children on a playground on Donetsk on November 5, they didn't say who did it. Russia's Deputy Permanent Representative Pankin said it was Ukraine's army. Later he stated that an adviser to Poroshenko said on October 24 that "the ceasefire is going to work in our favor, tank factories working around the clock."
Ukraine's Sergeyev mentioned this in his reply, neither confirming nor denying the quote. The meeting ended; Sergeyev headed up the escalator to be interviewed by scribes. And so it goes at the UN.
Last month, Ukraine was scheduled to speak at the UN about its “Committee on Information” on October 21, but as UN speeches usually go longer than allowed, its turn was postponed until October 22.
Last month, Ukraine was scheduled to speak at the UN about its “Committee on Information” on October 21, but as UN speeches usually go longer than allowed, its turn was postponed until October 22.
That didn't stop the “UN Radio” Russian service from reporting on the speech on October 21 as if it had in fact been given that day. As translated, UN Radio on October 21 reported
“The representative of Ukraine accused Russia of using the information strategy of the Cold War
“One of the main prerequisites of violence in Ukraine became a propaganda information. This was stated by the representative of the Mission of Ukraine to the United Nations, speaking at a meeting of the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly.”
The UN's Fourth Committee did meet on October 21 - but Ukraine didn't speak. Instead it was the first speaker on the afternoon of October 22. Its speech, delivered in perfect French including the word “rigolo,” linked Russia to Joseph Goebbels.
In reply, the Russian mission's spokesman brought up the recent Human Rights Watch report of the Ukrainian government using cluster bombs in and against Donetsk, and the lack of clarity on who called the snipers shots in Maidan Square.
Later in the Fourth Committee meeting, Bolivia slammed “powers” who use information technology to intervene and violate privacy, bringing to mind USAID's “Cuban Twitter” and, of course, the NSA.
Then Jordan said it was first among Arab nations to enact an Access to Information law, in 2007. The Free UN Coalition for Access has been pressing for a Freedom of Information Act at the UN, click here and here for that.
FUNCA covers the Fourth Committee, including on Decolonization, and the Committee on Information, where at least theoretically the UN's descent into censorship could be raised and resolved. The old UN Correspondents Association, a part of this trend toward privatization of briefings and even censorship -- ordering Press articles off the Internet, getting leaked copies of their complaints to the UN's MALU banned from Google's search, here -- was nowhere to be seen. We'll have more on this.
