Before
Guterres & Kotzias Tension at
Cyprus Talks in Geneva, Greeks
Bearing Gifts At UNHQ
By
Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED
NATIONS, January 15 -- Amid
reports on Greek Foreign
Minister Nikos Kotzias at the
Cyprus talks in Geneva with
Antonio Guterres, it's worth
revisiting the more staged
meeting of the two back on
January 6 (Inner
City Press photos here, Periscope here.)
Guterres joked that Kotzias'
gifts, a book, music CDs and a
box, were too heavy.
(Earlier in the day Guterres has
been led around to take selfies
with the correspondents the UN
has not, like Inner City Press,
evicted from their offices for
covering UN corruption, like the
Ng Lap Seng / John Ashe bribery
case. Video
here, story
here.)
The Greek meeting followed one
on January 5 with Turkey's
Foreign Minister Mevlüt
Çavusoglu. Photo
here; video
here.
Present at both meetings was
UN's Cyprus envoy Espen Barth
Eide, and Ban's Under
Secretaries General Feltman,
Ladsous and O'Brien. The "P3
men," some call them. Will they
be switched not only for gender,
but nation?
Guterres'
new chief of staff Maria Luiza
Ribeiro Viotti was there; his
Deputy SG Amina J. Mohammed
won't formally begin until next
month. Will that trigger the end
of Ban Ki-moon's era of
censoring and restricting the
Press?
Has
Guterres been
informed and digested that
one of the most active media at
the UN, Inner City Press which
at the January 5 noon briefing
asked about Myanmar, the Central
African Republic and Gambia, was
thrown
out of its office in 2016
and is still
being restricted and confined
to minders in 2017 for
merely trying to cover a
meeting, relevant to the Ng Lap
Seng UN bribery case, in the UN
Press Briefing Room?
On
January 3 when Guterres formally
took the reigns at the United
Nations on Tuesday, he said of
the UN, “We have to earn the
right to do the right thing.” Vine here.
He
might have added, “re-earn” the
right, because in recent years
the UN has been bleeding
credibility, from shirking for
six years its responsibility for
bringing cholera to Haiti to
letting peacekeepers who have
raped in the Central African
Republic and elsewhere enjoy
immunity, and even as in the
base of the Burundian contingent
in CAR, to rotated 800 more
troops in to get paid.
And so any implementation of
Guterres' message of hope would
have to include replacing the
Ban Ki-moon era officials who
brought the UN into disrepute. 45-second
tweeted video here.
UN Peacekeeping's Herve Ladsous,
who said that his troops would
rape less frequently if they had
been R&R or “rest and
recreation,” is slated to leave
in March. Longer
YouTube here.
But a real litmus test will be
replacing the head of Ban's
Department of Public Information
Cristina Gallach, who bought the
UN down first by neglecting to
do any due diligence as
now-indicted Macau businessman
Ng Lap Seng bought events in the
UN including its slavery
memorial (audit
here, Paragraphs 37-40 and
20b) then by ousting,
evicting and still
restricting the
investigative Press
which asked her about it.
There's
also the Wonder
Woman as UN ambassador fiasco,
and spending taxpayers' funds on
a DPI trainer who, among other
things, called
Detroit, Michigan a “third
rate city” in “flyover
country.” Four strikes and
you're out. Busca una otra.
***
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