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By Matthew Russell Lee & sources, Exclusive

UN GATE, Feb 26 – UNESCO, like the whole UN system under Antonio Guterres is falling apart in corruption and fraud.

  Inner City Press has been reporting on serious malfeasance by the French Audrey Azoulay administration at UNESCO in Paris, almost as bad as Antonio Guterres' corruption in and of the UN in New York. A fish rots from the head.

  And with Guterres, who took the golden statue from Cameroon's octogenarian dictator Paul Biya, it often comes back to CameroUN.

  In our exclusive story of 13 February, we pointed out the unacceptable situation in which top senior managers like Ottone Ramirez in the Culture sector or Gabriela Ramos in SHS Sector can exert totalitarian control over the staff including by using intimidation and harassment that force staff members into fear and obedience.  

  Despite all this exposure though, little progress has been achieved mainly due to the criminal complicity of the member states. Their uncaring political attitude is in fact a green light given to DG Azoulay to continue these practices. The member states are therefore entirely responsible for the unopposed moral and financial bankruptcy of UNESCO.  In the IOS-related revelations that Inner City Press is disclosing today, some member states, especially Nordic countries, may see a chance for redemption though. Since the term "member states" is usually vague, it's time to put names behind their immoral passivity that is OK'ing the collapse of UNESCO. Nordic countries, for instance, are represented at UNESCO by: Mr Halvor Hvideberg, Ambassador of Norway, Ms Mervi Kultamaa Minister Counsellor, Chargé d'Affaires a.i. representing Finland, Ambassador Anna Brandt for Sweden, Ambassador Carsten Staur for Denmark, and for Iceland Audbjörg Halldórsdóttir, Permanent Delegate. 

The questions open to these distinguished representatives are: why do you blindly allow so many scandals to spread with impunity; why did you allow institutional accountability to be reduced to zero under the DG Azoulay regime, and - the ostrich not being a Nordic bird - why do you keep your head in the sand made of diplomatic irresponsibility?

 There is now another case of fraud and abuse of power concerning the Director of UNESCO’s Internal Oversight service (IOS) Mr Bernardin Assiene from Cameroon. Last September, Inner City Press already wrote the following about him: “At UNESCO, anything is possible to an extent never seen before. It should also be noted that under Azoulay's tenure, not a single French staff has been sanctioned for wrongdoing despite the long list of misconduct committed by her fellow citizens. All of her heavy sanctions were directed at staff of nationalities other than French.   The role of Bernardin Assiene, the Director of IOS, who is normally the one in charge of proposing sanctions for such huge violations of rules, should also be questioned and challenged in his behavior of covering up the misdeeds of French nationals at UNESCO.” (here)

 Five months later, we have discovered more about Mr. Assiene. So much more, in fact, that member states may well begin to regret his appointment, which is a perfect fit for DG Azoulay, since Mr. Assiene has proven to be an experienced investigator in covering up all sorts of unpleasant business for senior management. And he has been playing this dirty game for many years, long before his appointment to UNESCO. 

According to our sources within the World Food Program (WFP), the Cameroonian Bernardin Assiene had a wide reputation there as a totally dishonest man. That is why, for many WFP staff, his appointment to UNESCO came as a surprise. Most of them thought that UNESCO had not checked his previous transgressions, but in fact UNESCO did, and that is probably the main reason why he was appointed to the post by the Frenchwoman Audrey Azoulay. 

For example, in his previous job at WFP, Assiene duly covered up for WFP Deputy Director Amir Abdulla, who was going through an embarrassing love affair, very similar to those currently being experienced by ADG for Culture Ernesto Ottone or Azoulay’s cabinet director Kassianides at UNESCO.

 In addition to this well-known case at the WFP, Bernardin Assiene, as director of investigations at the WFP, covered up several other high-level officials, always using the same technique - he kept all the complaints by staff in his desk drawers without sharing them with the members of the investigation team and then discredited and discouraged the complainants from the beginning of the procedure, which was totally against the rules.

 Bernardin Assiene became an expert in violating these rules and was covered in all his misdeeds by Inspector General David Johnson, who himself was fired in 2017 for leaking confidential documents.

Former WFP Executive Director Erharin Cousin, between her junkets back to Chicago, took advantage of Mr. Assiene's qualities and kept him in office with full impunity as the "useful idiot" needed in every UN organization to cover up the mess of the powerful.

Today, Bernardin Assiene enjoys the same impunity at UNESCO. The question is whether member states will wait for Audrey Azoulay's departure to push him out, or whether they will become indignant and do it right away.  Since the beginning of 2023, Mr. Bernardin Assiene has been deploying all his skills in the service of Azoulay's scrambling management team.

In less than a month, he closed the investigation of harassment complaints filed by Social Sciences and Humanities (SHS) staff against Mexican ADG/SHS Gabriela Ramos, and the question now is whether Mr Assiene will do the same with the formal complaint filed against ADG for Culture Ernesto Ottone.  All this is quite unpleasant for Azoulay's administration, of course.

 But she has still to count on Bernardin Assiene because without him, she will have to fire half of her ADG team for misconduct, and that's bad enough because Madame Azoulay has other political ambitions later on than simply retiring to France or Morocco.  Mr Assiene himself was under investigation for abuse of power and one of the reasons was related to the 'private' investigative training courses he was giving to a Nigerian young woman with whom he later became intimate. 

 This is the photo of Bernardin Assiene with his longtime girlfriend that was sent to Inner City Press by a former WFP staff. And this is where the case of Bernardin Assiene becomes even more interesting for the UNESCO public.

 To recap, Mr. Bernardin Assiene was having an affair with a Nigerian investigator who worked for him during his WFP days. And guess what, by sheer coincidence certainly, the same Nigerian investigator was hired at UNESCO to assist Mr Assiene in his work.

 This is a blatant case of abuse of power and favoritism on the part of the IOS director himself. It is in the same vein as the cases of Head of Cabinet Kassianides and ADG Ottone's mistresses, and Legal Affairs Director Santiago Villalpando who appointed his wife to UNESCO. The question is, who will investigate the principle investigator of UNESCO? If he himself is corrupt, what are the chances of fighting corruption within the agency, that is the legitimate question.

 On the UNESCO website, the following can be read about the IOS vision: “To be an agent of change supporting the strategic transformation of the Organization to enhance performance, learning, accountability, transparency, and efficiency, therefore contributing to building stakeholder's trust in UNESCO”. Trust?

Building stakeholder's trust in UNESCO with this person as Director of IOS? Are you convinced of this, dear ambassadors of Nordic and other EU countries, experts in lecturing the rest of the world about corruption?  Bernardin Assiene is certainly not morally and ethically up to the job of Director of IOS at UNESCO. The French DG Audrey Azoulay has allowed this total disqualification of IOS as well as that of most of the Program Sectors of the agency.

 The case of her ADG for culture, the Chilean Ernesto Ottone Ramirez is a blatant example in this direction. After promoting his previous mistress to the position of P-5 in charge of the executive office of the sector, Ottone is now working to get his current mistress a job. With IOS Director now exposed as playing on the same lovers' field, UNESCO has clearly become the place for sexual appointments and promotions.

 One persisting mystery though is the reason why influential member states remain silent, while no other previous Director-General benefited from such indulgence and for how much longer the deep moral crisis in which UNESCO is swimming today will be considered within acceptable limits by those funding the Organization.  We will have more on all that. Watch this site!

We will have more on that. Watch this site

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