Amid Libya Rift, Western UNSC Members Try to Have African Union for Lunch

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

UNITED NATIONS, June 7 -- With African Union ministers scheduled to come to New York concerning Libya on June 15, there is a fight in the Security Council about what format to meet them in.

South Africa, which pushed for the ministerial meeting, would like it to be an open, inter-active dialogue. They have support on the Eastern Front of the Permanent Five for this.

Western P-5 members, on the other hand, have despite their stated respect for and even deference to the African Union proposed that interaction with the AU ministers be confined to a non-public lunch, non Western Council sources have complained to Inner City Press.

They say the United States wanted there to be no public meeting with the African Union, and that the UK then proposed it merely be a lunch.

This is “disrespectful to the African Union,” they say. They explain it as an attempt by Western members to avoid airing in public the disagreement the African Union expressed to the Council when it visited Addis Ababa last month.

The Western members of the Council like to “use” the African Union, it's said, until the AU disagrees with them. Then it's time to retire to a private lunch.

Inner City Press asked French foreign minister Alain Juppe to respond to the African Union criticism of how Resolution 1973 is being implemented. Juppe avoided any specifics, merely stating that the actions of France, and presumably of NATO, are in compliance with the resolution. Bon appetit!

At UN, Ban Lunches with Reporters, Menu Includes Corruption, Maybe Congo

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, August 31, 11:45 am -- What's in a lunch? For a week now, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been holding lunch meetings with groups of four to five journalists at a time.

These come after attacks on Ban for a failure to fight corruption in the UN, following by the scandal of the UN's inaction as 154 women were raped 20 miles from one of its peacekeeping bases in the Congo.

At the August 27 UN noon briefing, two journalists not invited to the lunches inquired into Ban's criteria for issuing invitations, and afterward linked the lunches to an attempt by Ban to improve his image with an eye toward winning a second term. Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky returned fire, figuratively, at the journalists.

Inner City Press has been invited to lunch with Ban later today. Neither in the invitation nor subsequent back and forth was the lunch described as off the record. (This report is being written and published an hour before the lunch, for the record.) Inner City Press asked who else would be present, but has not been told.

At least at the first of the lunches, Under Secretary General for Management Angela Kane was present, and the charges in former USG Inga Britt Ahlenius and her stinging End of Assignment Report were discussed.

Will Ms. Kane be present at the August 31 session? Inner City Press asked, but was not told. A session later last week included Ban's speechwriter Michael Meyer, as well as spokesman Nesirky.

We return and will return to the question, what are these lunches for?

A member of Team Ban has said he likes to meet the press. Ban is certainly cordial: earlier on Tuesday on his way into the General Assembly's meeting on human trafficking, he greeted Inner City Press, amid glad handing with many ambassadors. But he rarely speaks on the record, for example on the Congo rape scandal. Will he, at the lunch?

Some of Ban's better moment have been off the record. He gave a speech full of jokes, in the photo op room next to his office. Inner City Press was told not to film it, not to report it. He told a story about landing in Afghanistan - off the record. His handlers don't seem to know what they are doing. We'll see. Watch this site.