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At UN, Cambodian Meeting
Postponed, Nepal Mission Shrunk, Political Prisoners in an Overcrowded
Room
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: News Muse
UNITED NATIONS,
July 24 -- After Cambodia requested
a Security Council meeting on its border clash with Thailand, and ASEAN
told
Cambodia to not get the UN involved, on Thursday it was announced that
the
Council meeting would be postponed. An ASEAN diplomat told Inner City
Press,
"meeting postpone, issue disappears." That was ASEAN's desire, that
no member let or get the UN involved, just as ASEAN has fought off UN
involvement in Myanmar.
Thursday in
the basement of UN Headquarters, a former political prisoner from
Myanmar Aung
Din described to a standing-room only crown how he was beaten and
locked naked
in a windowless room, for organizing a student protest. Upstairs at the
Security Council, the Vietnamese president of the Security Council for
July
insisted that all is well in Myanmar; U.S. Ambassador Khalilzad had
nothing yet
to say about Myanmar's government taking 25% of the aid that the UN has
brought
in post Cyclone Nargis. Click here
http://www.innercitypress.com/un11myanmar072208.html
for
that.
Other
prisoners of conscience representatives at Thursday event were from
Eritrea,
Uzbekistan, Belarus and Syria. It was surprising that the event took
place
inside the UN, given the power of member states to block presentations
they
disagree with. As simply one example, a film about the treatment of the
Hmong
was moved out of the UN, and shown in exile in a storefront on 42nd
Street.
Thursday in-UN presentation was also notable in that the packed room
probably
violated fire safety codes, which the UN is belatedly rushing to comply
with.
Also
belated was Thursday's announcement that Ban Ki-moon has finally
forwarded to
the General Assembly candidate Pillar for human rights commissioner.
U.S.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, asked if he had opposed her, said that the
U.S.
had asked for more time, apparently to try to dig up dirt. Khalilzad
said that
none of the allegations -- many raised by his government -- checked
out. It
sounded like the process to confirm a U.S. Supreme Court member.
The need
for the UN to increase formal vetting is shown by the growing
controversy about
possibly reappointing Rwandan general Karame Karenzi as the deputy
force
commander of the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur,
UNAMID.
He has been indicted for war crimes by a judge in Spain. Thursday it
was confirmed
that Rwanda has threatened, if he is not reappointed, to withdrawn its
3000
soldiers from the Darfur mission. Thus the UN doesn't know what to do.
Had it
done better vetting...
The U.S.
and Sudan are on the same side on this one, that Karenzi should remain.
Sudan
likes the idea of an indicted war criminal working for the UN in
Darfur: how
then could Sudan be judged? Some joked that the Rwanda troops could be
moved to
Somalia, where other peacekeepers are needed. This
led to a second joke, that perhaps in
order to gain leverage, Sudan should offer peacekeepers to the UN in
other
missions. "Janjaweed in Kosovo," quipped one wag.
Hard-news
footnote: Nepal is reducing its
"substantive staff" by seventy percent, and those who support them by
half, Mission chief Ian Martin told the Press on Wednesday. Martin came
to the
UN's noon briefing a day late, just as the Security Council's
resolution extending
and narrowing the mandate of the Mission was enacted a day late, after
a rift between
the UK and Martin on one side, Nepal and India on the other. Inner City
Press
asked Martin to explain his understanding of the resulting paragraph,
the
compromise Operative Paragraph One. It is normal that there be
negotiations, he
said. But the end result is acceptable to everyone, including the
Secretariat. Video here.
To
cut through the diplomatic haze, Inner City Press asked about staffing
reductions. Seventy percent says it all, an observer afterwards
concluded. On
the ongoing questions leading from the deadly crash of a UN helicopter
in Nepal
in March, Inner City Press has been told to wait, and so will... for a
while. For now, watch this site. And
this --
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