| Belt and
Roadkill in Cambodia Is Lower Sesan 2 Dam
As UN Guterres Bans Press Exposing Him
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Book
Patreon
- BBC
- Guardian
UK - Honduras
UN GATE / SDNY
Court, Nov 27 –
China's "Belt and Road
Initiative" is swallowing up
the United Nations, invited in
by gluttonous UN Secretary
General Antonio Guterres who
has personal financial links
to it, see below.
Now this: A huge
Belt and Road financed
hydroelectric dam in NE
Cambodia, completed in 2018,
has undermined the lives and
livelihoods of thousands of
Indigenous and ethnic minority
people. The Lower Sesan 2 dam
flooded large areas upstream
of the confluence of the Sesan
and Srepok Rivers, two
tributaries of the Mekong
River, displacing almost 5,000
people whose families had
lived in the area for
generations. Many were coerced
into accepting inadequate
compensation for lost property
and income, provided with poor
housing and services at
resettlement sites, and given
no training or assistance to
secure new livelihoods. Other
affected communities upstream
and downstream of the dam
received no compensation or
assistance - like the
Haitian families whose bread
earners were killed the
cholera the UN brought.
China
Huaneng Group, a large Chinese
state-owned electricity
generation company, built and
operates the dam. Cambodia’s
Royal Group and Vietnam’s
state-owned electricity
company, EVN, hold minor
stakes. Chinese government
banks provided most of the
financing, reportedly budgeted
at over $800 million....
Speaking
of money, Guterres omitted
from his public financial
disclosure money he took from
the Gulbenkian Foundation in
Lisbon. When Inner City Press,
which reported exclusively on
the UN bribery trial of
Patrick Ho of CEFC China
Energy in the U.S. District
Court for the Southern
District of New York, asked
about the omission at the UN
where it was a resident
correspondent since the last
days of Kofi Annan, Guterres
had Inner City Press thrown
out, and banned since.
So now: how
corrupt is the United Nations?
What is the line between real
world injustice and fiction,
black comedy?
A just published
novella, "Belt and
Roadkill," raises these
questions.
The corruption of
the UN, its documented
domination by China as
evidenced by two recent
real-world bribery
prosecutions in the U.S.
District Court of the Southern
District of New York, are the
soil or message of the text.
But the meta questions about
what is a novel(la) is raised
by its form and length. (It is
available, first on Kindle, here).
Earlier this
month Parul Sehgal in The New
Yorker bemoaned the
democratization of literature,
or content, by Amazon and
Kindle Direct Publishing. But
who are the gatekeepers? Who
should they be?
The author of
Belt and Roadkill, years ago,
was on the threshold of elite
/ elitist publishing, summoned
to a venerable firm on Union
Square in Manhattan and told
that if only the actual names
of Citigroup's predatory
lenders could be dropped, it
might be possible to move
forward.
But aren't public
figures open to satire,
without danger of libel
lawsuits?
Aren't those
Predatory Benders who
foreclose on thousands of
homes just targets, like those
at the UN who cover up
hundreds of rapes by
peacekeepers, and ten thousand
Haitians killed by cholera, as
only two examples?
Belt and
Roadkill does not mention
Haiti, even once. It does,
however, name-check Cameroon
and Western Sahara, Huawei and
the January 6, 2021
insurrection, breach or
protest, whatever your
politics.
Let a
hundred flowers bloom, as Mao
said before moving to cut them
down. There will be
more.
[Belt and Roadkill: A Story of
Dis-United Nations, by Matthew Russell
Lee, Inner City Press is on Kindle,
and by paperback soon.]
***
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
SDNY Press Room 480, front cubicle
500 Pearl Street, NY NY 10007 USA
Mail: 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 2006-2021 Inner City
Press, Inc. To request reprint or other
permission, e-contact Editorial [at]
innercitypress.com
|
,
