|
UN's 2017 Began
With Guterres Failing in
Cyprus & Burundi,
Rebuffed on Fayyad,
Corruption Ignored
By Matthew
Russell Lee, photos,
Video
UNITED NATIONS,
December 26 – In Antonio
Guterres' first two months as
UN Secretary General, the
longstanding Cyprus talks
began to fall apart,
and Guterres stood silent
as Burundi, for example, banned
access by UN officials.
Guterres ignored a protest by
whistleblowers against Francis
Gurry of the UN World
Intellectual Property
Organization, and that UN
agency's work on North Korea's
cyanide patents.
He did
nothing about a UN waste dump
exposed
by Inner City Press in the
Central African Republic,
despite his predecessor Ban
Ki-moon's record with waste in
Haiti and elsewhere. While he
announced that Kenyan troops
would head back to South Sudan
to join UN Peacekeeping, he
appointed the fifth
Frenchman in a row to head
this DPKO, Jean-Pierre
Lacroix.
Meanwhile he was
rebuffed in his attempt to
appoint Fayyad to head the
UN's Libya mission, perhaps
explaining his refusal later
in the year to take a single
press question after reading
out his canned statement on
Jerusalem. In a harbinger of
his approach to UN corruption
and (non) reform, his UN was
named as not providing
requested documents in the first
UN bribery case, of Ng Lap
Seng. (In the second case, of
Patrick Ho and Cheikh Gadio,
Guterres has yet to even
launch an audit).
February 2017
ended with a seeming second
wind, the belated arrival of
Guterres deputy Amina J.
Mohammed. Inner City Press was
throughout constructive;
it would later emerge that
during the delay Mohammed
signed 4000 certificates for
endangered Nigerian and
Cameroonian rosewood already
exported to China, something
Guterres has refused to
investigate despite a petition
with 92,000 requests.
Guterres' first
interaction with UN staff was
a Town Hall meeting on January
9. Even though it was on the
UN's public website, when
Inner City Press live-streamed
it on Periscope
for the impacted public to see
it received a threat that this
violated unspecified
UN's guidelines. This has been
a pattern in Guterres' first
year: threats to Press for
unspecified violations, such
as that of Maher
Nasser on October 20,
and a total failure to respond
or reform by Nasser's boss, Alison
Smale. Ultimately,
Guterres is responsible.
***
Your
support means a lot. As little as $5 a month
helps keep us going and grants you access to
exclusive bonus material on our Patreon
page. Click
here to become a patron.
Feedback:
Editorial [at] innercitypress.com
Past
(and future?) UN Office: S-303, UN, NY 10017 USA
For now: Box 20047,
Dag Hammarskjold Station NY NY 10017
Reporter's mobile (and weekends):
718-716-3540
Other, earlier Inner City Press are
listed here,
and some are available in the ProQuest
service, and now on Lexis-Nexis.
Copyright 2006-2017 Inner City
Press, Inc. To request reprint or other
permission, e-contact Editorial [at]
innercitypress.com for
|
,
