By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell Book
BBC - Guardian UK - Honduras - ESPN - Review
LITERARY UN GATE, Jan 24 -- Kurt Wheelock had first heard of the Uighurs in the form of three lost traders, in leather coats, who wandered from East Turkestan into the long arm in the far northeast corner of Afghanistan.
It was right after Nine Eleven. Kurt was living in an abandoned building - one that he was fixing up, he hastened to tell those he now knew - and running an early blog that came after the attack on New York to focus on money laundering and funding of the Taliban.
The three Uighur traders had been grabbed by some self-promoting Afghan ethnic groups and traded to the Americans, like leather jackets, for a best place at the dusty trough of post-Taliban Afghanistan. They had bags put off their heads and were flown, wearing diapers if Kurt remembered it correctly, to Guantanamo Bay to be interrogated. But of course, this time for real, they knew nothing. This took years for the US to admit.
By then Kurt was blogging from inside the UN, reportedly the first blogger there, at least that's how the New York Times put it. Kurt asked the UN about these Uighurs a number of times, mixed in with thousands of smart-aleck questions he asked about genocide in Rwanda and then Sri Lanka and then Cameroon and Nigeria - and finally Xinjiang itself, the old East Turkestan.
The UN, to put it lightly, didn't like the questions. Especially about China, and especially by the Chinese sponsored Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. Kurt exposing Guterres for accepting a golden statue from Cameroon's long-ruling dictator Paul Biya, along with favors in the UN Budget Committee which Cameroon chaired at the time, in exchange for silence on the slaughter of Anglophone had been once thing.
From the UN's point of view, few had heard or cared about the part of Cameroon, Ambazonia some residents insisted on calling it. But China was a bigger deal, with more power over Guterres. To allow an independent blogger to come out of an office and take the then-working escalator one story down and ask questions about Chinese genocide was not acceptable. Something would have to be done.
In those days Kurt got along with China's Ambassador to the UN, a genial older man name Li Baodong. The two had spoken at length and became friends of sorts during a UN Security Council trip to Africa, waiting in a long line to board the UN plane in Kinshasa, DR Congo.
Why had Baodong spoken so freely with Kurt? Maybe it was part of his job, part of the approach of an earlier stage of the Chinese Communist Party. Baodong had represented the CCP in southern Africa, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, during a time of existential battle with Taiwan.
His job had been to get countries to switch diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China, away from the Republic of China or Taiwan. This often involved the payment of briefcases of cash to whatever official could effectuate the switch.
Later in the UN, CCP-sponsored hotel magnate Ng Lap Seng would hand paper bags of cash to General Assembly President John Ashe for changes in already-passed GA resolutions, to add in the name of his company the Sun Kyan Ip foundation as the contractor for a casino cum convention center in Macau.
Kurt covered that trial too, for the first time attending every day of a trial down at the Southern District of New York courthouse. Again, the UN had not liked it, and refused to answer on its role. Finally they threw him out of his cushy two-man office, the one he shared with a Brazilian photographer named Luis. It was the beginning of the end.
The next Chinese government briber, Patrick Ho of the China Energy Fund Committee run by Ye Jianming soon to be disappeared by the CCP after giving a diamond to the son of the current US president for a stake in a strategic oil refinery in Louisiana, a Belt and Roadkill special, gave directly to the UN Secretary General and not just the lower profile President of the General Assembly.
Guterres took money from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, which was entirely funded by the oil company of a long ago swashbuckler. China Energy Fund Committee, as a way to bribe Guterres and cement China's control over him, over-bid for the oil company. But Guterres, being Guterres, did not disclose the money he took from Gulbenkian.
Kurt fastened on this and started asking every day about it in the UN briefing room, before rushing down to the SDNY courthouse for the trial of Patrick Ho, at which more and more UN sleaze was coming out.
By then Li Baodong was no longer China's Ambassador to the UN, having been returned to Beijing for a higher but never too high position in the foreign affairs bureaucracy. There followed a series of new Chinese Ambassador, each worse than the last at least in terms of Press access. Each, however, had more access to the UN Secretariat through Guterres.
Beyond blocking the access of journalists from Taiwan into the UN, and using the UN Correspondents Association to encourage or enforce silence about China's increasing control of the UN, now the Chinese Mission on 35th Street could tell Guterres and his head of media accreditation Melissa Fleming which journalists to stop calling on.
In Kurt's case it went so far as to have him targeted by UN Security guards, pushing out of the UN building once with machine guns. That time they still let him back in the following Monday, thinking that had made their point. But Kurt insisted on asking about the ouster, again and again on camera. Guterres lead spokesman Stephane Dujarric said he refused to answer about security matters. His deputy Farhan Haq went further. He called Kurt a liar, on camera.
Soon one night when Kurt was covering the pro Guterres and pro China UN Budget machinations down in the basement of conference rooms and the Vienna Cafe, just after he interviewed Paul Biya's Ambassador Tommo Monthe who like Li Baodong before was for some reason friendly with Kurt, they grabbed him.
Two UN Security guards forced him to stand up from his laptop on the marble table of the Vienna Cafe, that reminded Kurt of those in an retro ice cream parlor up in Cambridge, Mass; the broke his laptop in the process, a faint echo of what China did to journalists on its own territory and increasingly elsewhere.
As more UN Security swarmed in and UN Budget committee bureaucrats looked on and looked away, they twisted Kurt's arm, literally, and frog marched him out through the UN parking garage, up to the traffic circle and out onto First Avenue. Kurt had blogged about it, from the park across the street from the UN, under the carved sign urging the beating of swords into plowshares. He had gone to the 17th precinct on 51st Street and asked to file a formal complaint.
After a whispered telephone call, the police officer had told him that the UN was immune and that nothing could or would be done. They still took down a handwritten complaint, as if to assuage Kurt. But nothing every came of it, and Guterres, Fleming and Dujarric, with China's plant Farhan Haq cackling in the back, never let him return to the United Nations.
For month Kurt did his blogging for a bus stop just outside the UN delegates entrance on First Avenue, in the shadow - welcome in that summer sun as Kurt was thrown out in July - of the US Mission to the UN, which never did anything for him. When it got cold that winter, Kurt found another nearby place to run his blog, a public library on 46th Street with free Wifi and electrical outlets for his laptop that now only intermittently would charge its battery.
Kurt would watch UN Security Council proceedings, in which China blocked even lame statements that would have condemned or expressed concern about North Korea, then write stories about them or now tweet them out in real time. He would email in questions to Dujarric and Haq each morning, cc-ing Guterres and Fleming, then watch the UN noon briefing which he had used to dominate.
The briefings were shorter now, more like sessions in North Korea. Did Mr. Secretary General have a concern about the killings in Syria. Yes, he did. But not enough to do anything about it.
For a time, as a accommodation to a temporarily concerned UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, who soon turned away, landing a tenured professor's job in the process, Dujarric or Haq would periodically email Kurt responses to his questions.
But when he starting asking more about China Energy Committee and other China-related cases he stumbled on in SDNY and now EDNY in Brooklyn which he visited in the afternoons watching the UN noon briefings, even the canned answers from the UN stop.
It was a total freeze out, and China's new Ambassador Zhang blocked Kurt on Twitter, full circle from the days of Li Baodong.
By now Kurt had found a new and better place to work, in the SDNY. He covered a dozen cases a day in the SDNY, and some cases across the Brooklyn Bridge in EDNY, not only R.Kelly but also the case of a Chinese spy working in the NYPD to report to the Mission about Tibetan dissidents in Queens. The defendant's name was Angwang and Kurt wrote that story too.
The Chinese Mission, while blocking him, was still watching. Strange things began to happen on his computer, and even to blog posts he post up. Kurt just put up more.
And he began, after the Ghislane Maxwell case moved into the stage of possible mistrial due to a Carlyle Group green-lighted juror known as Scotty David, to focus on the Beijing Winter Olympics. Genocide Games of Guterres.
From January 21, 2022: UNSG Antonio Guterres: This visit to the Olympics is not a political visit. We consider that the Olympic Games are an extremely important manifestation in today's world of the possibility of unity, of the possibility of mutual respect, of the possibility of cooperation, of peoples of different cultures, of different religions, of different ethnicities. And this is more important than ever when we see xenophobia, when we see racism, when we see white supremacy, when we see anti‑Semitism, when we see anti‑Muslim hatred proliferating all over the world... That is the reason why I am going to the Olympic Games. And it has nothing to do with my opinions about the different policies that take place in the People's Republic of China.
Spokesman Dujarric: Okay, sir, I think you're then off the hook.
Will Guterres be taking his Deputy Amina J. Mohammed, supportive of the killing and targeted detentions perpetrated by Buhari of Nigeria? See, Identity Thieves - and, forthcoming, Genocide Games of Guterres. For now, Belt and Roadkill.
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