UN
Ignored Protest from Sri Lanka
of Its Inner City Press
Eviction, 1st Interest from DC
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Part of Series,
Video
UNITED NATIONS,
February 17 – The key now, I
thought, after
the UN evicted
me would
be outreach. I sent emails to
UN officials whom I thought
might help - this list was
short - and others, just to
document that they didn't.
Ban's chief of staff Edmond
Mulet, the Haiti killer,
didn't even respond. So I
wrote to a generic “SGCentral”
address. I wrote to the
Guardian and VICE - they asked
for a pitch, but they never
wrote anything - and on the
other side of the spectrum to
Fox News. They'd helped me
once before.
I was sending out some
more, to press freedom groups,
when I saw online that there
had been a protest,
in Sri Lanka, amazingly
about me. The signs
were in Tamil but then
said “Inner City Press;” they
marched around the UN Compound
in Jaffna saying I should be
reinstated.
I went to the noon
briefing and asked then and
now spokesman Stephane
Dujarric about. “This is
getting personal,” he said.
“But I'm not the one
protesting,” I answered.
The UNCA scribes with a
new troll Twitter account
started asking, who paid for
the protest in Jaffna? Who
indeed. I showed the troll
account, soon to hit 600
tweets against me, to a second
UNCA board member from the US
Broadcasting Board of
Governors.
“I wish I could talk to
you,” he said. “But I don't
trust you to be off the
record.”
“I'm on the record,” I
told him, speaking loud so the
UNTV stakeout mic would catch
it. “And what was done to me
is on the record too.”
A minute later MALU,
the UN Media Accreditation and
Liaison Unit, emailed all
correspondents that the UNTV
microphone was there for
diplomats, and to be quiet. It
was the content they didn't
like. This was how the UN
worked.
I wrote to a US Senate
staffer who had helped before,
when Voice of America tried
to get me out. He'd moved up,
now chief staff of a
committee. But his response
was to work through the US
Mission to the UN. Like GAP's
letter to the US
Mission's Isobel Coleman, I
didn't think this would lead
anywhere. He said to come down
to DC and see him and his boss
- a possible vice presidential
candidate as it turned out -
and maybe speak at the
Heritage Foundation where I'd
spoken once before. Could the
conservatives, the last
remaining critics of the UN
other than Tamils and Haitians
whose relatives the UN killed
with cholera, get this turned
around?
The US did nothing, but
South Africa tried. Maybe it
was just that the Ambassador
was nice, or that he was
already slated for a UN
position in Darfur and wanted
to ingratiate himself to me.
Whatever it was, he said he
would speak to Gallach. I
tried to get him ready, the
way she'd lied to Jose Ramos
Horta. But he shook his head.
He knew how to speak to these
people, he said.
To be continued.
***
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