On UNGA Day 5, Of Syria & Terror, Cover Ups of Rapes in Sudan, Cholera in Haiti, RIghts of Reply (Serbia and Albania, China and the Philippines, Turkey on Syria, UK on Mauritius and Chagos)

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, October 2 -- By the fifth day of the UN General Debate, when countries such as Syria and Sudan, Myanmar and Jamaica were scheduled to speak, the NY Police Department barricades were removed and life returned to normal, at least UN-normal, inside the Secretariat building.

  UN Spokesman Stephane Dujarric wouldn't tell Inner City Press if Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with Haiti's Martelly had even mentioned cholera, which UN Peacekeeping brought to the island. Ban's read-out with Sudan's foreign minister Ghandour did not mention the mass rapes at Thabit in Darfur, which UN Peacekeeping's Herve Ladsous helped cover up.

  When Inner City Press asked Dujarric about Ladsous so controlling the UNGA stakeout that he Banned questions to Mali's foreign minister Diop, Dujarric said not to worry, “It's a stakeout, just shout your question.” Duly noted.

  In the increasingly empty General Assembly Hall, Ghandour complained about the sanctions on his country. Syria's Walid al Moualem said that Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all support terrorism. One expected rights of reply, at least at some point. Myanmar's foreign minister spoke surreally about a “culture of peace” with the Rohingya in Rakhine State. With the OIC's Madani, Ban Ki-moon did discuss Myanmar - but not Yemen, where OIC host Saudi Arabia is blasting away with airstrikes.

   Inner City Press asked Ambassador Matthew Rycroft of the UK, penholder on Yemen, if he'd met with envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed. Yes, he said, back on October 1. Francois Delattre of France, penholding on such countries as Burundi and the Central African Republic, went into the Security Council affably but without news. Inner City Press, since Ladsous blocked Press questions to CAR's ministers, asked UN Spokesman Dujarric if the UN thought the violence in Bangui is a coup. Apparently not.

  Turkish Cypriot leader Akinci met with Ban Ki-moon then did a stakeout; Inner City Press asked him about bilaterals with Sweden, the EU and New Zealand (no answer) and about hydrocarbons (long answer.) Many other such entities would like to be in the UN this week but are denied, even in what is increasingly called garbage time. Watch this site.

 As the UN removes its maze of metal detectors until next year, and New York City traffic flows up First Avenue again, what did this week's UN General Assembly debate come down to?

   Perhaps the moment of the week was US Secretary of State John Kerry finding Syria's Walid Moualem in the clubhouse of the Security Council's Permanent Five members, then looking around for another place to pass time. (Inner City Press first tweeted it, here.)

 While Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov then made back to back statements at the Security Council stakeout without taking any questions, the next day October 1 Lavrov took an hour worth of questions, in the UN Press Briefing Room.

  This UN Press Briefing Room became a battleground, with Brazil trying to follow France in reserving the front rows for its diplomats rather than journalists - they relented- and France innovating, in its way, by using seat-holders who rose to their feet to cede their place to French minister Laurent Fabius and, in one case, Segolene Royal.

   Fabius scowled when Inner City Press asked “his” President Francois Hollande about French soldiers rapes in the Central African Republic and UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous linking rapes to “R&R.” Then on October 1Fabius refused to take a Press question whether Turkey's airstrikes on Kurds met the three conditions he had just announced.

   Ladsous, apparently angrier than usual at the question to Hollande, scowled up at the photo booths during the Peacekeeping Summit, then directed his flunkies to control the UN microphone at the cramped third floor UNTV stakeout, to the extent of Banning a question to Mali's foreign minister. On that, we'll have more.

  This too: Turkey used the UN Press Briefing Room for a staged “press conference” where it chose the question in advance then told Inner City Press, when it asked a follow-up, not to “interfere.” The old UN Correspondents Association, typically, did nothing about this (instead they lured the Syrian Coalition's Khaled Khoja into their clubhouse from which no live-stream or comments onjournalists' arrest in Turkey ever emerged); the new Free UN Coalition for Access fought this and other forms of UN decay.

  As if in a parallel world, China made a number of financial commitments -- $2 billion to a South-South fund, money to UN women, training to the African Union - and drew praise in later General Assembly speeches, which were increasingly ill-attended. Once US President Obama left, after the briefest of photo ops with Russia's Vladimir Putin and a longer one with Raul Castro, much of the security was withdrawn and the air came out of the balloon.

 The UN again closed its big cafeteria, in which food workers were told to dine in a separate room, and after a week of speeches about transparency refused to answer the Press even on how many candidates there are to head the UN refugees agency UNHCR, and who is heading the panel to make the recommendation. We'll have more on this.
  

At UN, Bid to Strip Out Language on Sexual Orientation From Resolution Also Targeted "Foreign Occupation" / Palestine, and Lost 53-82

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, November 19 -- At the UN when the terms “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” come up, the culture wars begin. But in the November 19 votes on a resolution on “Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,” it was a culture-war double-whammy.

  Egypt on behalf of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation put forward an amendment which would have stripped out the paragraph, OP 6(b), which included killings “persons... because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.” 

  But also in the paragraph to be stripped was a reference to “persons... living under foreign occupation.” In UN-ese: Palestine.

  Inner City Press was told about this double whammy on November 18, and early on November 19 asked the Permanent Representative of an OIC member country how it would be resolved. The answer was that yes, Palestine was an issue; the prediction was that the conflict would be resolved.

  But it wasn't: during the debate on the OIC amendment, put forward by Egypt, delegates inter-mixed the terms sexual orientation and Palestine, along with the words laundry-list and, in the case of Sudan, International Criminal Court. 

 Call it a triple-whammy, then.

  Albania said that would vote against the OIC amendment, citing the killing of gays. When the vote was called the Egyptian / OIC amendment lost, with 53 in favor, 82 against and 24 abstaining.

  A recorded vote was called for on the resolution as a whole, and Finland asked to know who'd asked for it. “Egypt,” came the answer. And while the resolution was adopted with 111 for, one against and 64 abstentions, even that one “no” was called into question when Kiribati belatedly tried to change it to “abstain.” 

 The Committee's Secretary, who previously played the same role for the Fifth (Budget) Committee, explained that while the Secretariat “took note” of what Kiribati said, it “will not alter outcome.” So that one “no” stands - stands alone. And the culture wars will continue.

   

At UN, Deal On Rwanda Genocide Description Voted Through 15-0, US Policy UNexplained So Far

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, January 30, longer form here -- After stand-offs including on how to describe the 1994 Rwanda genocide, on January 30 the Democratic Republic of the Congo sanctions resolution was adopted by the UN Security Council, 15-0. 

  The language compromised on is "the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, during which Hutu and others who opposed the genocide were also killed."

  Sources exclusively told Inner City Press that the United States resisted calling it a genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda, even saying that there is a US policy against referring to it in this way.

   Inner City Press has asked the US Mission to the UN for an explanation. It was said one might be forthcoming after the vote.

  Where would such a US policy be written down? It seemed strange, particularly during a time of Holocaust events at the UN, from one about Hungary to another about Albania.

   On January 29, Inner City Press asked a US Council diplomat, who said spokespeople would be asked. Inner City Press was told to wait for the language to be final, then, for the vote.

  In the Council's January 29 debate, the representative of the DRC spoke about Rwanda and the M23 rebels. Rwanda's Deputy Permanent Representative replied with a series of questions: was it Rwanda who killed Lumumba? Was Rwanda responsible for Mobutu? Who hosted and failed to separate the genocidaires from Rwanda in 1994?

  This continued on January 30 after the vote.  Rwanda Permanent Representative Gasana said UN Peacekeeping should investigate links between the DRC Army and the FDLR.

  The DRC representative asked to be given specifics about links between his country's army the FARDC and the FDLR militia. The resolution voted on provides:

"Noting with deep concern reports indicating FARDC collaboration with the FDLR at a local level, recalling that the FDLR is a group under United Nations sanctions whose leaders and members inchide perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, during which Hutu and others who opposed the genocide were also killed, and have continued to promote and commit ethnically based and other killings in Rwanda and in the DRC, and stressing the importance of permanently addressing this threat"

   As Inner City Press exclusively put online last June, some of these links were even specified in the UN Group of Experts report, for example:

"107. The Group interviewed 10 FARDC soldiers in Tongo, in North Kivu, who reported that FARDC and FDLR regularly meet and exchange operational information. These same sources stated that FARDC soldiers supplied ammunition to the FDLR. Col. Faida Fidel Kamulete, the commander of FARDC 2nd battalion of 601st Regiment based at Tongo, denied such collaboration, but declared to the Group that FARDC and FDLR do not fight each other."

  Going further back, it is impossible not to note, particularly given the lack of explanation or transparency, that US Permanent Representative Samantha Power began her 2001 article "Bystanders to Genocide" in the Atlantic with this sentence: "In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority."

  Given that, why would the US Mission be saying it had a policy of describing the genocide as being against the Tutsi minority? Inner City Press asked again: Since I'm told that the US has said that there is a government position not to say the 1994 genocide was against the Tutsis, can you say what that policy is? Why does it exist? Does it apply to other genocides or atrocities?

 As noted, Inner City Press also has pending with the US State Department a number of requests, including a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the Administration's Atrocities Prevention Board.

  A Rwandan diplomat told Inner City Press these were Hutu killed not because of their ethnicity but because they opposed the genocide against the Tutsi. "This is a precedent," the diplomat said. Watch this site.

   

At UN, Iran Denounces UAE, Serbia Mocks Albania, Congo War Forgotten

By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/un64ga2m092609.html

UNITED NATIONS, September 26 -- In the UN's version of Saturday Night Live, at the end of a day of mostly boring speeches, Iran used its "right of reply" to defend its nuclear programs and treatment of protesters, and to denounce the United Arab Emirates for bringing up the issue of three disputed islands.

Then Serbia mocked Albania's statements about progress in Kosovo and the return of Serbian families there. To the contrary, the Serbian representative said, the Serbians in the "province of Kosovo" at the most endangered people in Europe, in what has become a crime haven.

Albania replied that Serbia's rhetoric was "old fashioned," of the type that led to "the worst war since World War Two." One question: ever heard the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

Among the four countries which voted to allow the coup leader of Madagascar to speak were Ecuador and Denmark. Who knew?

Footnote: Like the Ever-ready bunny, Ban Ki-moon just keeps motoring along. Saturday at six p.m. he and his advisors came out of a meeting with the ASEAN foreign ministers. While there were journalists including Inner City Press huddled against a stakeout barricade, the type of gaggle to which Ban usually at least waves, this time he proceeded without looking over. He will brief the press on Tuesday, then leave on another trip. Monday he's to meet, back to back, withe Prime Minister of Sri Lanka and Myanmar, then Cameroon's Paul Biya. Watch this site.

And see, www.innercitypress.com/un64ga2m092609.html