UN
Guterres Takes 5 Qs from Ex-Reuters, VOA,
Cites Lebanon Loans, Now UN
Covers Up Cameroon
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Photos,
Video
UNITED NATIONS,
October 4 – When UN Secretary
General Antonio Guterres took
five media questions on
October 4, all of them were on
climate change, and his trip
to Antigua and Barbuda. With
the UN for example refusing to
given any estimate of how many
civilians Paul Biya killed
this week in Cameroon,
Guterres' spokesman Stephane
Dujarric gave the first
question to Voice
of America (on climate
change), then AP and SABC,
then an ex-Reuters reporter
who called the US the "elephant
in the region." For this,
Dujarric canceled the UN's
noon briefing on all other
topics, while refusing to
answer the majority of questions
which Inner City Press submits
to him and his deputy by
email. Guterres cited as a
precedent the World Bank loans
to Jordan and Lebanon. Inner
City Press previously asked
him about these, before he
became responsible for UN
censorship of the Press and
cover ups in Cameroon and
elsewhere. On September 5 when
Guterres took stakeout questions,
more than half of them were
about North Korea, an issue on
which Guterres and the UN
Secretariat have almost no
impact. Inner City Press,
which has seen 15 of its 17
questions in the past week to
Guterres' spokesman UNanswered
from Cameroon to Sri Lanka to
Burundi, loudly asked Guterres
if he has any update to its
praise of Kenay's now reversed
election. Guterres stopped -
and then bragged that his
official letter (a belated one
on Myanmar) will be in
Dujarric's answer. How
transparent. Not a single
question, or even sentence,
was about Africa, where most
of the UN's peacekeeping
operations are. When Guterres
took five questions on August
16 after a two week vacation,
Inner City Press tried to ask
him about the UN bribery
verdict against Ng Lap Seng
rendered by a jury in lower
Manhattan just before he left.
Guterres heard the question,
but did not answer. Video
here.
Instead, his
deputy spokesman Farhan Haq
handpicked five questioners,
two on U.S. President Donald
Trump and the first on
Venezuela, in response to
which Guterres read from
notes. Reuters was called on
second, asked two questions
then later began a third. The
UN Correspondents Association
president invited Guterres to
distinguish himself from
Trump, which Guterres coyly
did and didn't do.
Then when Inner
City Press asked about the Ng
Lap Seng guilty verdict,
Guterres swept the question
away with his and and left
with Maher Nasser the acting
chief of his Department of
Public Information, which
without due
process evicted and
still restricts Inner City
Press for pursuing the Ng Lap
Seng bribery scandal in the UN
Press Briefing Room.
Guterres and his
deputy Amina J. Mohammed have
both received a petition
with over 2,000 signatures to
end the restrictions on the
Press, particularly after the
Ng Lap Seng UN bribery guilty
verdicts.
But there is
silence, invisibility, then
pre-screened questions. Even
among those, nothing on Syria,
Yemen,
or Libya
where Guterres' envoy has
praised the Italian Navy's
cooperation with the Libyan
coast guard, or Kenya
where a recent UN official has
been banned from travel in
connection with electoral
irregularities, much less Burundian
refugees and abuses by Cameroon.
On Western
Sahara, moments after
Guterres' stakeout, Horst
Kohler was belatedly named to
the long empty envoy position.
We'll have more on this.
***
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