By Matthew Russell Lee, Book
Patreon - BBC - Guardian UK - Honduras
UN GATE / SDNY Court, Nov 27 – China's "Belt and Road Initiative" is swallowing up the United Nations, invited in by gluttonous UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who has personal financial links to it, see below.
Now this: A huge Belt and Road financed hydroelectric dam in NE Cambodia, completed in 2018, has undermined the lives and livelihoods of thousands of Indigenous and ethnic minority people. The Lower Sesan 2 dam flooded large areas upstream of the confluence of the Sesan and Srepok Rivers, two tributaries of the Mekong River, displacing almost 5,000 people whose families had lived in the area for generations. Many were coerced into accepting inadequate compensation for lost property and income, provided with poor housing and services at resettlement sites, and given no training or assistance to secure new livelihoods. Other affected communities upstream and downstream of the dam received no compensation or assistance - like the Haitian families whose bread earners were killed the cholera the UN brought.
China Huaneng Group, a large Chinese state-owned electricity generation company, built and operates the dam. Cambodia’s Royal Group and Vietnam’s state-owned electricity company, EVN, hold minor stakes. Chinese government banks provided most of the financing, reportedly budgeted at over $800 million....
Speaking of money, Guterres omitted from his public financial disclosure money he took from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. When Inner City Press, which reported exclusively on the UN bribery trial of Patrick Ho of CEFC China Energy in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asked about the omission at the UN where it was a resident correspondent since the last days of Kofi Annan, Guterres had Inner City Press thrown out, and banned since.
So now: how corrupt is the United Nations? What is the line between real world injustice and fiction, black comedy?
A just published novella, "Belt and Roadkill," raises these questions.
The corruption of the UN, its documented domination by China as evidenced by two recent real-world bribery prosecutions in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, are the soil or message of the text. But the meta questions about what is a novel(la) is raised by its form and length. (It is available, first on Kindle, here).
Earlier this month Parul Sehgal in The New Yorker bemoaned the democratization of literature, or content, by Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing. But who are the gatekeepers? Who should they be?
The author of Belt and Roadkill, years ago, was on the threshold of elite / elitist publishing, summoned to a venerable firm on Union Square in Manhattan and told that if only the actual names of Citigroup's predatory lenders could be dropped, it might be possible to move forward.
But aren't public figures open to satire, without danger of libel lawsuits?
Aren't those Predatory Benders who foreclose on thousands of homes just targets, like those at the UN who cover up hundreds of rapes by peacekeepers, and ten thousand Haitians killed by cholera, as only two examples?
Belt and Roadkill does not mention Haiti, even once. It does, however, name-check Cameroon and Western Sahara, Huawei and the January 6, 2021 insurrection, breach or protest, whatever your politics.
Let a hundred flowers bloom, as Mao said before moving to cut them down. There will be more.
[Belt and Roadkill: A Story of Dis-United Nations, by Matthew Russell Lee, Inner City Press is on Kindle, and by paperback soon.]
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