On Sri Lanka, Qatar Votes Against HRC Draft, Kohona on AJE Unrebutted on Whitewash

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNdisclosed Location, March 21 -- Back during the bloodiest part of the conflict in Sri Lanka in 2009, the Al Jazeera television network ran a piece in which their reporter was embedded (or em-boated) with the Sri Lankan navy, hunting the Tamil Tigers -- and surely Tamil civilians as well.

  On Thursday with the Rajapaksa government's impunity for the 40,000 people killed back in the news, Al Jazeera's studio interviewed Sri Lanka's Ambassador to the UN Palitha Kohona, and a UN-based producer Benedict Moran proudly tweeted out the clip. Click here to view.  Embedded below.

  But in it, Kohona makes an argument at odds with Sri Lanka's argumentearlier in the day at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, where it argued that so many other abuses have taken place since 2009, why is little Lanka being targeted?

  Kohona on Al Jazeera said that four years is not enough time to assess if Sri Lanka is allowing impunity. Unmentioned is that Sri Lanka sent one of its most controversial military leaders, Shavendra Silva, to ostensibly be Kohona's Deputy at the in New York. Silva was accepted as an adviser to Herve Ladsous' UN Peacekeeping.

  Al Jazeera allows Kohona unrebutted to brag for example that not only the UN Development Program but also “a number of Ambassadors from New York” have favorably reviewed Sri Lanka's progress.

  Kohona is not questioned about either claim. 

 But the “number of ambassadors” refers to the whitewash report which Japanese Ambassador Nishida handed over to Ban Ki-moon on February 22. Other than UNTV, Inner City Press was alone in covering the hand-over, then asking on what basis Ban praised the Sri Lanka and the report without at least releasing the report.

There is a background. Nine months ago the UN Correspondents Association Executive Committee, including Al Jazeera, went after Inner City Press for its reporting on Sri Lanka, subjecting it to death threats from extremist supporters of the Rajapaksa government.

  Al Jazeera's Marcelle Hopkins, for example, was shown pro government media stories in June 2012 saying that the UNCA proceeding she pushed forward could put Inner City Press out of the UN and in jail -- an extremist called to wish jail rape on Inner City Press.

  Al Jazeera's Hopkins response was to say she was “offended” that Inner City Press would blame the UNCA proceeding -- cited in the Sri Lanka media accounts -- for the threats. Audio here.

 It was a bogus response then, and is a bogus response now.

  On March 18, Hopkins walked right on by as the UN raided Inner City Press' office and conducted a non-consensual search of its papers. 

  She and another Al Jazeera producer tweeted Thursday about Sri Lanka -- but the interview produced is remarkably like the government's “Lies Agreed To” which (some in) the UNCA Executive Committee screened in the UN in September 2011, aftermath here.

At Thursday morning's vote in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Qatar which owns Al Jazeera voted against the already weakened resolution on Sri Lanka. Now an ill-informed platform for Sri Lanka's Kohona. What's next? Watch this site.

On Haiti, EU Talks Culture Not Cholera, UN Youth Envoy Has No Answer on Dismissal

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNdisclosed Location, March 20 -- The day before Haiti became the topic in the UN Security Council, Inner City Press asked the UN's new Youth Envoy Ahmad Alhendawi if, like the UN's third highest humanitarian official John Ging, he thought the terse dismissal of claim for bringing cholera to the island hurts the UN's credibility, in his case with young people.

  Unlike Ging, Alhendawi said he didn't know much about that; instead he cited a relative who served in MINUSTAH at the time of the earthquake. Likewise, when Inner City Press asked about fairness for younger people applying to work at the UN, he answered that since he got hired, the UN must be fair. Really?

  Also on Haiti, at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva Wednesday morning Ireland for the EU spoke of helping with economic, social and cultural rights. But what about the UN saying the Haiti cholera claims were “not receivable”? Where's the rule of law in that?

  And where's the rule of law in the UN conducting a non-consensual search of Inner City Press' office on March 18 -- and then on March 19 demanding that the video shot after the raid be removed from YouTube?

  On worker fairness, Inner City Press earlier this week reported that Ban Ki-moon would meet with some in the Staff Union on March 19 -- those who didn't refuse to come based on the general membership's vote of no confidence in Ban after he called them “selfish.” 

  Inner City Press published an advance copy of what Ban would be told at the meeting, including about the use of the word “selfish.”

  Then... Ban canceled the meeting. And so it goes at the UN. Watch this site.

On Sri Lanka at Human Rights Council, Sudan's Math, Philippines' Review, UN Theater

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, March 15 -- At the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Friday, in speeches that flew by at cross purposes without response, the death of 40,000 civilians in 2009 and “Sinhalese Buddhist triumphalism” since, including attacks on mosques and on human rights defenders, were detailed.

  Sri Lankan minister Mahinda Samarsinghe bragged that his country has accepted 110, then 113, of the 210 recommendations of the Universal Periodic Review process. 

  But what accountability has there been? Military figures responsible for many of the death have been sent to the UNas diplomats.

   Sudan claimed Sri Lanka accepted 210 recommendations. Call it Khartoum math. The Philippines called the Rajapaksas' response “heart-warming.”

   Recently families of the disappeared were blocked from traveling from Vavuniya to the UN in Colombo. In New York, Inner City Press asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman how this is acceptable and was told there are other ways to get information to the UN.

  Ban Ki-moon recently accepted a whitewash report about Sri Lanka from Japan's Ambassador; repeated requests after that for a copy of the report were denied. Ban went on to praise the whitewash report when he was asked about Sri Lanka.

   NGOs got to speak. One of them, Human Rights Watch, has refused to disclose even what topics it raised to Ban Ki-moon during director Ken Roth's March 4 meeting with him. For more on Sri Lanka in the UN theater -- literally -- and continuation, click here. Watch this site.

As Ban Ki-moon Launches Book with Tom Plate, Kim Sook's Missile Joke, Sri Lanka in the Princeton Club: How the UN Works

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, March 12 -- The UN's story should be better told. That was the stated goal when the idea for Tom Plate's “Conversations with Ban Ki-moon” was born, in 2010, at Singapore's Mission to the UN.

   Plate had profiled Lee Kuan Yew as his first “Giant of Asia” and let it be known that he saw Ban as a future Giant in his series.

   Fifteen hours of interviewing later, a smallish 236-page book was belatedly launched Tuesday night at the Princeton Club in Manhattan. 

  The crowd included some press, some students from Loyola Marymount where Plate has taught for the last three years, and Permanent Representatives from the UK, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Kazakhstan and South Korea. 

  Ambassador Kim Sook, saying he's known Ban for thirty years, joked that he prefers book launches to missile launches. The word armistice, however, was not used.

  Ban said when he read the first draft of the book, it seemed to him too light hearted, like EZ-Listening music. But, he said, it might work in letting people know how the UN works.

  And how does the UN work? Earlier on Tuesday, Ban met for more than two hours with the Group of 77, mostly about “post-2015 development” but also his delayed plan for mobility, which has been opposed by staff, at least in New York. 

  Ban used the word “selfish” in referring to some of this opposition; this was followed by a Staff Union vote of No Confidence. This was not mentioned Tuesday night. But Ban's Under Secretary General for Management, Yukio Takasu of Japan, was in attendance.

   How does the UN work? Also present was the Ambassador of Sri Lanka, Palitha Kohona. The UN's failure to speak and act while 40,000 civilians were killed in Sri Lanka in 2009 is one of the UN's biggest failures under Ban, among with its unexplained dismissal of claims for bringing cholera into Haiti.

  The anti-Tamil impulse of Sri Lanka's ruling family was in fact raised by Lee Kuan Yew in Plate's first Giant of Asia book.

   But what's been done since? Ban recently accepted what's called a “whitewash” report about Sri Lanka from Japan's Ambassador Nishida, along with Bangadesh's Ambassador Monem, Kohona, the Permanent Representative of Romania and the Deputy Permanent Representative of Nigeria.

   The UN didn't release the report, which Ban went on to praise when asked in Geneva about Sri Lanka. And Ambassador Nishida, when Inner City Press asked for the report, said it would first be given to all member states.

   Kohona on Tuesday in the Princeton Club's lobby told Inner City Press this hand-over took place last week, but not in the UN -- in the Japanese mission. It seems timed to counteract the belated talk of accountability at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. This is how the UN works: Giants of Asia, indeed.

   Hardly mentioned Tuesday night was Africa, where most of the UN's work is. On March 5 Inner City Press asked Ban, at the Security Council stakeout, about inaction on 126 rapes in Minova by the Congolese Army, which the UN supports.

  After the rapes, under Ban's stated Human Rights Due Diligence Policy, the UN support was to have stopped. But it still hasn't.

   Two days later his Department of Peacekeeping Operations, led for the fourth time in a row by a Frenchman -- this is how the UN works -- offered belated spin to friendlier journalists about threatening two unidentified units of the Congolese Army with loss of support if they don't prosecute by an unspecified deadline.

  So has Ban allowed his Human Rights Due Diligence Policy to be less than meaningful, under France's Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping Herve Ladsous?

   Inner City Press' critique of this has given rise to a formal but undisclosed complaint against it, in a Kafka-esque system without rules. The head of the Ban's Department of Public Information was in attendance Tuesday night, and quite polite. 

  But despite requests, including from New York Civil Liberties Union then the new Free UN Coalition for Access, there are still no due process rules for journalists at the UN. We will have more on this, how the UN does not work.

   We will also have more about the book, about mobility, Sri Lanka, Africa, Asia and Haiti. Watch this site.