Comments on Race Attributed To UN-HABITAT Chief Joan Clos Trigger Complaint, Online, to Ban Ki-moon

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, February 16 -- Within the UN system there are racial tensions, some time at the fore, often under the surface. Now comes a complaint concerning the head of UN-HABITAT Joan Clos, that at a staff retreat at a restaurant in Nairobi he held forth, in English and Spanish, about “a good White man looking for a poor 'Negro' to help.” See complaint, here.

   Clos appears to have been quoting the title of a book by author Gustau Nerin, “Blanco Bueno, Busca Negro Pobre.” But Clos' other reported comments at the HABITAT retreat, held at the Lord Errol Restaurant, also gave rise to the complaint, including a reference to Nairobi, that “there are no serious people here who can think.”

   UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the addressee of the complaint, has been asked to act on this. In his UN system, it is usually politics and not the facts that determine the outcome.

  Ban has for example continued the pattern of giving the post position at UN Peacekeeping to France (now in the person of Herve Ladsous, who as Inner City Press has reported and asked about linked peacekeepers' rapes in the Central African Republic to “R&R,” here).

 Ban kept the UK atop the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the US in charge of the Department of Political Affairs.

   That Ban did not discipline Ladsous for linking rapes to R&R, the type of comment which would get a military figure fired or demoted in many countries, may be well for Clos. Or does Spain have so much less political juice in the UN system that the outcome will be different?

 The complaint was also addressed to the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services, which is currently engaged in an audit of NGOs affiliated with Macau based businessman Ng Lap Seng, Frank Lorenzo and Sheri Yan, indicted in the US for bribery at the UN.

It was also sent to UN human resources and the UN Ethics Office, which along with OIOS was implicated in the cover up of (French soldiers') alleged rapes in the Central African Republic. This is Ban's UN.

  Clos also reported criticized the Japanese development agency JICA; Japan is not only a large UN donor, but current has an elected seat on the UN Security Council.

Inner City Press has been sent multiple copies of the complaint, which was sent to 37 countries' missions; we note that an image of the complaint was Tweeted on February 11 by a Kenyan activist. Contrary for example to Reuters, whose UN bureau chief at first sought to minimize or discredit, and then simply stole, Inner City Press February 12 exclusive about new UN rapes in CAR, we note all that. The point now is, what will the UN do? Watch this site.