Covering
UNSC From Park After Eviction
by UN, Press Asked the UN to
Investigate Itself
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Part of Series,
Video
UNITED NATIONS,
February 14 – How long
could I keep it up, covering
the UN from out on First
Avenue? I'd told myself,
forever. Walking back over to
the 46th Street library when
my laptop went dead, I heard a
voice calling me as I passed
Uganda House. “I see you're
still reporting,” an African
diplomat told me. I nodded.
“Then I have a few
stories for you,” he said. The
first was that even the UN's
Rwanda Tribunal was being
given to a white European
prosecutor, Serge Brammertz.
I'd covered him on the Lebanon
Tribunal, then Yugoslavia. But
Rwanda? I took some notes. A
second story concerned the UN
Department of Peacekeeping
Operations' Herve Ladsous,
throwing South Africa out of
Darfur. He was the fourth
Frenchman in a row to run DPKO
[to be followed, a year after
this eviction, by a fifth.]
Over in the library,
staring out again at
Artetsky's Patroon, I wrote
and uploaded my two new
scoops, one after the other.
When I was done I found an
email from one of my side
employers, saying they'd heard
what happened and it might be
difficult to keep me on
retainer. I hit reply and
said, don't worry, I'll be
getting back in. But would I?
When the library
closed, once again in the
rain, I returned a call to a
UN number. The guy had
presided over three of the
GA's six committees, and had
thrown me out of two of them.
But it was all in good fun -
this time he was calling with
advice.
“You should come back
in,” he told me. “If you stay
out people will conclude that
you must have done something
seriously wrong. Just getting
back in would be a victory.”
“If I go back in
with a reduced pass, I'm
giving up my claim to my
office,” I told him. “It's
like I'm giving in." It was
time to call a lawyer.
But who to call?
I'd worked on a case with
Center for Constitution
Rights, but now their website
said they didn't take new
cases. There was a guy who'd
tweeted me online, and I
settled on him.
“I've been
reading all your tweets,” he
said, “it's like the stations
of the cross.” The reference
was ironic given his location.
“I'd be happy to write you a
'without prejudice' letter,
that no precedent is set by
you accepting the Green P
pass.”
“We can't sue them
anywhere?”
“I'm still looking into
it,” he said. He was being
diplomatic. If the UN could
kill 10,000 people in Haiti
and not even go to court, this
one was a slam dunk.
“How about the Ethics
Office?” I asked him.
“Anything to slow them down.”
“Now you're talking,”
he said. “I can draft
something up overnight.”
But it would soon become
apparent just how deep corruption runs at
the UN.
***
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