UNITED NATIONS, December 28 – As Antonio Guterres entered his fifth month as UN Secretary General in May 2017, there were still no reforms, and even his budget and reform speech was withheld when Inner City Press asked for a copy of it.
Rather than propose anything but deck-chair moving changes in UN bureaucracy - new acronyms, new Departments - Guterres seemed to believe his private meetings and canned speeches could do the trick. He met with 11 Congressmembers in May - all Democrats, Inner City Press' inquiry found - and gave a speech in South Carolina. But to what effect?
By year's end the UN budget would be cut by over $200 million with Guterres nowhere in sight, already on vacation in Lisbon, not even a comment for two days. In the real world, in South Sudan for example, leaked documents published by Inner City Press showed inaction as the SPLA moved toward a violent reclaiming of Pagak.
Amid the ongoing crackdown in Burundi, the best Guterres could do was a Burkina Faso based envoy, Michel Kafando, who would be only part-time Inner City Press learned though Guterres didn't tell the Security Council members that. He never had a comment on Morocco's crackdown in the Rif, despite dozens of questions from Inner City Press, perhaps thinking that silence might help on Western Sahara (it didn't).
On nuclear North Korea, Guterres did nothing as the UN Federal Credit Union did businesswith the mission and UN WIPO helped with cyanide patents.
In continuing Cameroon failure, Guterres' Deputy SG Amina J. Mohammed appeared at the ghoulish “National Day” in a townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side; the Ambassador told Inner City Press due to her position on Biafra in “her” Nigeria, she would never support the Anglophones in his. She has yet to answer questions, initially surprising but after the rosewood scandal was revealed, more problematic. Scandals were coming...
Two months earlier: The spring thaw in Antonio Guterres' first year as UN Secretary General, in March and April, began to reveal hypocrisy. A small but telling example was when, after Guterres called on people all over the world to turn off their lights for Earth Hour, Inner City Press found the lights on at the UN-owned mansion on Sutton Place where Guterres lives.
At first the UN refused to answer Inner City Press where Guterres was - Lisbon - then accused it of “monitoring the residence.” It's called journalism: with the UN refusing to disclose even what country Guterres is in, checking the residence is the only way. The UN also refuses to disclose how much these Lisbon trips cost the global taxpayers, for example how many UN Security officials are taken, where they stay and for how much.
Likewise Guterres' 2016 financial disclosurediffered significantly from what he filed as head of UNHCR in 2013. This has yet to be explained. In April Guterres was petitioned to replace the UN's pro-Saudi Yemen envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed. But when Inner City Press asked, Guterres' spokespeople refused to even confirm receipt of the letter.
This happened on a petition by staff too, about retaliation by Francis Gurry the head of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization, whose assistance to North Korea's cyanide patents Guterres did not act on.
In late April, Guterres did nothing as Tanzania expelled his resident coordinator, a far cry from his knee-jerk defense later in the year - continuing on December 27 - of the 4000 rosewood signatures by his Deputy SG Amina J. Mohammed. Sustainable development? Try hypocrisy, and censorship and restriction of the Press which covers it - and Cameroon, here. We'll have more on this.
In Antonio Guterres' first two months as UN Secretary General, the longstanding Cyprus talks began to fall apart, and Guterres stood silent as Burundi, for example, banned access by UN officials. Guterres ignored a protest by whistleblowers against Francis Gurry of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization, and that UN agency's work on North Korea's cyanide patents.
He did nothing about a UN waste dumpexposed by Inner City Press in the Central African Republic, despite his predecessor Ban Ki-moon's record with waste in Haiti and elsewhere. While he announced that Kenyan troops would head back to South Sudan to join UN Peacekeeping, he appointed the fifthFrenchman in a row to head this DPKO, Jean-Pierre Lacroix.
Meanwhile he was rebuffed in his attempt to appoint Fayyad to head the UN's Libya mission, perhaps explaining his refusal later in the year to take a single press question after reading out his canned statement on Jerusalem. In a harbinger of his approach to UN corruption and (non) reform, his UN was named as not providing requested documents in the first UN bribery case, of Ng Lap Seng. (In the second case, of Patrick Ho and Cheikh Gadio, Guterres has yet to even launch an audit).
February 2017 ended with a seeming second wind, the belated arrival of Guterres deputy Amina J. Mohammed. Inner City Press was throughout constructive; it would later emerge that during the delay Mohammed signed 4000 certificates for endangered Nigerian and Cameroonian rosewood already exported to China, something Guterres has refused to investigate despite a petition with 92,000 requests.
Guterres' first interaction with UN staff was a Town Hall meeting on January 9. Even though it was on the UN's public website, when Inner City Press live-streamed it on Periscope for the impacted public to see it received a threat that this violated unspecified UN's guidelines. This has been a pattern in Guterres' first year: threats to Press for unspecified violations, such as that of Maher Nasser on October 20, and a total failure to respond or reform by Nasser's boss, Alison Smale. Ultimately, Guterres is responsible.
