By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, June 29 -- Gabon's month as president of the UN Security Council was supposed to end on June 28, with a reception in a ballroom 17 stories above Third Avenue.
But at least three agenda items slipped past the reception, including a resolution on the UN Disengagement Observer Force that was still being negotiated, as to how events in Syria should be reflected, as the party happened.
Gabon's Permanent Representative Nelson Messone greeted his Security Council colleagues in front two screens showing scenes from Libreville and the countrywide, big logs being driven on trucks, mangroves growing into rivers, even an old black and white drawing of Albert Schweitzer.
Alongside the Arab Spring turned Summer, the final flurry of Gabon's presidency centered around the resolution, unforeseen at the beginning of the month, authorizing Ethiopian troops into Sudan's Abyei region for six months.
One wag joked that UNDOF, too, began as a temporary disengagement mission -- and is still there.
The week of negotiations on the Abyei force was used to explain the delay into Germany's month as president in July -- perhaps as late as July 8 -- of the resolution needed for a new mission in South Sudan.
India's Hardeep Singh Puri, who earlier in the day had told a UN session about global governance that a “member of the Secretariat” in Monday's meetings on Libya had told the Council that Gaddafi has killed more civilians than NATO, explained to Inner City Press that this comment, made in closed door consultations, was an admission by the UN that the NATO campaign which was meant to protect civilians was having the opposite effect.
Across the room Susan Rice of the US, after a long talk with Messone, spoke with the Press. Asked about the moribund Presidential Statement introduced about the visit of African Union ministers in mid-June, she said among other things that the PRST did not advance things. The visit happened, though.Shouldn't it at least be memorialized by the Council, like a June 28 briefing about Guinea Bissau was?
At the end of the Guinea Bissau session, Messone emerged to read a press statement at the stakeout. While he declined, there, to answer Inner City Press' question about accountability for the 2009 assassinations in that country, without the month's work even completed Messone had done six televised stakeouts.
This was double what French Ambassador Gerard Araud did in May, when France was President. Araud had been spotted on June 27 back in the UN's North Lawn building, imperiously leading a delegation into the UN peacekeeping budget endgame negotiations, also still ongoing.
Earlier that day the UN had belated confirmed that Inner City Press had reported two weeks earlier: that top UN Peacekeeper Alain Le Roy will leave.
At Tuesday night's reception, some agreed and some did not with the Press' two week old prediction that Eric Chevalier, also of France, will replace Le Roy. There was a consensus, however, that it will be a Frenchman. That is how the UN works, or doesn't. Watch this site.
