By Matthew Russell Lee
UNdisclosed Location, March 20 -- Does the UN have a track record of objective and impartial investigations and reports? The question was raised by at least four speakers Wednesday at the UN Security Council stakeout.
Syria's Permanent Representative Bashar Ja'afari in the morning said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had been asked to send a specialized, independent and neutral technical mission to look into the use of chemical weapons, he said by the opposition.
After a Security Council session on the Central African Republic, which few covered, March's Council president Vitaly Churkin of Russia came out and described France counter-asking in consultations for an investigation of “rumors” of chemical weapons use by the government.
He said this might just be a way to slow things down, or to widen the scope as was done in Iraq where, he noted, nothing was found.
France's Permanent Representative Gerard Araud had been waiting to the side of the stakeout. When he came to the microphone -- the same microphone that his countryman Herve Ladsous had seized to avoid Inner City Press'questions about the 126 rapes in Minova by his partners in the Congolese Army -- Araud said, “Now you will hear the side of truth.”
Araud spoke in French, leaving UK Deputy Permanent Representative Philip Parham to deliver the message in English.
But when are the UN's reports impartial? What ever happened to the report into the disputes massacre in Houla in Syria?
Why didn't Ban Ki-moon stand behind his own report on killings in Sri Lanka -- then went and accepted and praised a “whitewash” report handed to him by Japan's Permanent Representative Nishida, without making the report public?
UN reports are changed, like a recent one on Eritrea; UN reports get redacted, like the Petrie Report on Sri Lanka. So what kind of report can be expected about chemical weapons in Syria? We can only imagine. Watch this site.
