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On Africa's Day, Ban and Lee Myung-bak Walk Is
"For Koreans Only," UN Says, Darfur Unanswered
Byline:
Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at
the UN: News Analysis
UNITED
NATIONS, April 16 -- As African presidents
and prime minister gathered in the Security Council chamber to debate
the
Continent, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was upstairs holding a
meeting with
the president of South Korea. Half an hour later he emerged with a
scrum of
security to parade past the stakeout, where Seoul-based media had been
assembled. "How did the meeting go?" one reporter asked.
Inner City
Press followed-up, "Did you discuss Darfur? Is South Korea going to
send
peacekeeping troops to Sudan?" Lee Myung-bak smiled and proceeded down
the
hall. Dozens of reporters, at
least three of them not from the Korean
peninsula, followed. A UN official tried to profile and separate the
press.
"This is for Koreans only," Inner City Press was told. "That is
how they wanted it."
Earlier this week Inner City Press asked
Ban's spokesperson to confirm that South Korea has an advance team in
Darfur,
with an eye toward sending troops. At Wednesday's noon briefing, Ban's
spokesperson said she has not been able to confirm that. The Korea
Times of April 11 reported that "the
government dispatched an on-site inspection team Friday to Sudan's
Darfur region to prepare for the possible deployment of peacekeeping
troops there, an official of the Ministry of National Defense (MND)
said." Can such dispatching take
place with no notice to the UN?
Lee Myung-bak brings flowers (not at the UN)
Footnotes:
1) More cynical
observers wonder what weight Mr. Ban might give to raising Seoul's
profile with
a Darfur deployment, and what might be the quid for such a quo.
2) Last
week they did a walk-through,
from which the press was also pushed-back. So
this walk down the hall in the midst of Africa's day was carefully
scripted.
Limiting access by nationality, then, was not invented on the fly.
While
perhaps proposed by the South Korean mission, it was implemented by Ban
Ki-moon's UN.
* * *
These reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
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