by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack
UN GATE, June 27 – How corrupt is today's UN system leadership, from Antonio Guterres to his successor at UNHCR, Filippo Grandi? Inner City Press, banned from the UN for its reporting on and questions about Guterres including his incomplete financial disclosures, has written about Grandi before. But this is about Afghanistan, as the UN blesses a men-only conference in Doha:
...Grandi was deputy SRSG to the UN peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. It was just before his move that a female UNHCR staff member was killed on her way to the office in one of the provinces. An investigation was conducted and it was discovered that she had been having an affair with a very highly placed (married) Afghan official in the provincial government. His family was upset with this relationship and, according to the Pashtun honor code, the UNHCR girl had to be killed: shot by gunmen on a passing motorcycle.
From Inner City Press' whistleblowing sources, UN never answers questions:
Worse still, it turns out that Grandi and his then live-in partner Daniel Endres (a Swiss working at UNHCR at the time and also serving as Grandi's Deputy Chief of Mission - no conflict of interest there... especially when writing 'performance evaluations') had been advised by the UN security official in the gravest terms when he discovered the nature of the female colleague's relationship with the married Afghan official to move her out of the province as soon as possible and ideally out of Afghanistan. Grandi again justified his inaction by saying the relationship was a 'private matter' and it was inappropriate to be intervening so 'heavy handedly' in people's romantic lives.
The investigators, according to all available evidence, took a dim view of Grandi's 'management style' in this matter and apparently recommended disciplinary measures against him. Their report stalled on the then-High Commissioner's desk (the late Ruud Lubbers) who, for reasons unknown, decided not to impose any sanctions on Grandi.
The saga has gotten worse - watch this site. abs Pte Ltd. et al., 23-cv-1346 (Rakoff)
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