Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the United Nations to Wall Street to the Inner City

December 30, 2013: In an opening in the regime of copyright this week, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson have been declared public domain by Chief Judge Rubén Castillo of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. Decision here; news here. As relates to the United Nations, then, the fast-written story below, while the door is open. Meanwhile others try to abuse copyright, for example the specious Digital Millennium Copyright Act filing by Reuters to block from Google search a complaint its bureau chief filed with the UN seeking to get Inner City Press thrown out. That will be opposed, and free press and speech promoted, in 2014. By the Free UN Coalition for Access.

I & II Dec 30, 2013, here; III & IV; V & VI

Sherlock Homes at the UN: The Case of Sri Lanka, the Bloodbath on the Beach

By Matthew Russell Lee, Cuenta Contra Copyright

I.

..."I was living in Tudor City then, across First Avenue from the United Nations. My UN consultant's job, covering up their bringing cholera to Haiti, was coming to an end. By that I mean, the task had largely been discredited, it was just that the contracts hadn't expired so they had to keep paying us. But I was already looking for a new job, in or about the UN if possible.

  It was in a bar on 44th Street called The Cliff that I met Sherlock Holmes. We were both there for the farewell drinks for another UN consultant, one who'd worked with Romano Prodi on his delayed and ultimately empty UN strategy for the Sahel. I'd mostly gone for the open bar; perhaps Sherlock had as well. He must have already had two or three drinks, because the first words I heard him say were mocking Prodi.

  "Do you know how much he charged the UN for travel between Bologna and Rome? Do you know?"

  The departing consultant, the pretext for these drinks, shook his head. It was clear he was uncomfortable. Might he be charging for travel too?

  "Twelve hundred dollars a trip! Each trip." Sherlock was leaning closer to the traveling consultant. "It's not even a secret. It's right in the report by the ACABQ."

  To UN junkies, that's the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions. The Cliff is a bar, but one as full with such acronyms as with drunks.

  The consultant, whom I barely knew, summoned me over as if to save him from these accusations. "This is Sherlock Holmes," he said. "He'll investigate anything."

"And always with no conclusion" Sherlock cut in, "or at least no accountability, at the UN." He paused, waiting for me to say my name, or at least what I did.

  "I'm working on cholera," I finally said, hoping he'd think I was with WHO -- the World Health Organization -- or the French scheme to tax airline tickets for medicine.

  "Haiti," Sherlock said. "So you're part of the cover up."

  "Pretty much," I told him. Like I said, the gig was almost up. And what he said was hard to deny.

  "I'm working on Sri Lanka," he told me. "Or I'm trying to. I was called in by Petrie when he was writing his report" -- I'd heard mention of that -- "but now they want to cut me loose. 'Rights Up Front,' they call it. As if some plan for the future makes up for forty thousand Tamils slaughtered."

"How much longer does your contract last?" I asked him.

"I think I'm going to quit," he answered. "And I have an idea how to proceed."

And that's how we began.

II.

  "Like me, as a UN consultant Holmes had been given an office inside the UN's 38 story building. Mine was a cubicle hidden away on the 22nd floor. The UN wanted the controversy of its bringing cholera to Haiti to go away. Out of sight and out of mind, at least in Manhattan. (There are many immigrants from Haiti in neighborhoods in Brooklyn and The Bronx, where UN big shots would be hard-pressed to give speeches without bringing peacekeepers with them.)

  Holmes' office was one of the old translator booths above the Security Council. "The source of many of the world's problems," he called the chamber below. We decided we would work from there, since my 22nd floor space was a cubicle and anything we said might be heard.

  "They've probably bugged this place too," Sherlock told me, gesturing around. This seems obvious, since the old translators' microphones also remained in place. But on the third floor corridor to get here, and in the press floor outside, there were a dozen or so new security cameras.

  On our way through the press floor, Sherlock could barely contain his contempt. "Most of the big shots in this little club are hacks," he said, pointing at the door of what was, in fact, a clubhouse. "They are repeaters, not reporters. On Sri Lanka, most of them never asked questions, like why the Security Council never had a meeting on it while 40,000 were killed. Then they tried to cover it up after that." He shook his head. "They party with Ban Ki-moon, even inside there," he said. "What do you expect?"

  Sherlock reserved the most pungent of his opprobrium for the Reuters bureau chief, here called Rob Chevalier. "The guy basically just re-types documents that are handed to him, then tries to get anyone who questions it thrown out of the UN. And the UN goes along. It's symbiosis. Or dysfunction."

  Sherlock's plan, it turned out, was to try to use the UN's ham-handed unveiling of its "Rights Up Front" plan as a last chance to expose not only the UN's inaction in 2009, but its complicity in genocide. "They hid the death statistics," he railed once we were in his glassed in booth.

  Below us the Security Council was having a debate -- really just a series of speeches to which almost no one listened, even the person who's mouth was moving -- about the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "As if they care," Sherlock said. "They covered up mass rape by the Congo army, for months, even as they talk about 'sexual violence in conflict' and 'zero tolerance.'"

  "Okay let's get to work," Sherlock said when the debate was over and the Council members went behind closed doors for "consultations" with UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous, who Sherlock called a "killer" and a "defender of genocide" based on speeches Ladsous gave about Rwanda in this same chamber, before renovation, as France's deputy ambassador in 1994.

"They have some evidence left from Sri Lanka, down in the Dag Hammarskjold Library archives," Sherlock told me. "Petrie told me about it, but then they told him that his reporting time was over. My UN pass runs through the end of the year. So until then we can go to town, with the blood from the Bloodbath on the Beach."

III.

  The Dag Hammarskjold Library had a construction trailer in front. Since the General Assembly was closed down for renovations, with all its windows broken out, the UN gift shop, always a money maker with its UN branded shot glasses and ashtrays, had moved into the basement. So where had the Sri Lanka evidence gone?

  "This is typical UN," Sherlock said as he leafed through two biographies of Kofi Annan, and a slim volume of interviews with Ban Ki-moon. "When they cover something up, they go all the way."

  "It's easy when you have legal immunity," I muttered. Having helped the UN ignored and lie about the Haiti cholera claims, I often thought this. But rambling around the UN campus with Sherlock loosened my tongue.

  Sherlock must have picked up on this, at least the Haiti connection. "It was peacekeepers from Nepal, right?"

  "Even the UN's hand picked scientists said so," I told him. "But that was after their first whitewashing report."

  "There were Lankan soldiers in Haiti too, right?" Sherlock asked. "The ones repatriated for sexual abuse?"

"Yeah, they covered that one up too, never gave any update from Colombo."

"But do you think there was one - I mean, do you think DPKO ever closed out its file?"

  DPKO is the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, headed by Herve Ladsous. I'd had to deal with them to help muddy the waters about the cholera, claim the sanitation had been adequate, even try to change the date the Uruguayan peacekeepers transferred out to try to rebut a boy's allegation of sexual abuse.

  "DPKO just shreds the files if they have to. No court can make them release any information," I told him.

"That's where we come in," he said. "There has to be a reason that Ladsous won't answer questions."

I'd seen this side of Ladsous, the few times he held press conferences or spoke at the Security Council stakeout. Rather than just dodging questions with long incomprehensible answers like his putative boss, Ladsous had taken to saying, "I have a policy of not answer Press questions." And the UN let him get away with it.

  The way the UN worked, since DPKO had belonged to France even since they threatened to veto Kofi Annan, only the French could bring Ladsous back in line. And why would they? How would it help France if Ladsous answered questions?

  France was using UN peacekeepers to pick up the pieces after their interventions in Cote d'Ivoire and then Mali. They were trying to get into into Central African Republic, after they disarmed the Seleka rebels and let the anti-balaka kill and chase Muslims out. It went way beyond Ladsous' history on Rwanda twenty years ago -- if Ladsous had to answer real questions about the present, it could only hurt the French. And so, his policy.

  "Since you defend them in Haiti, you can still get into DPKO, right?" Sherlock asked me.

  It's true my ID will opened the doors there. But there were security cameras, and presumably the door entry information was saved somewhere and not moved or lost like the Sri Lanka evidence.

  "I can get in there if we have to," I told him. "But that might end my contract."

  "Let's see what we can do from the outside," Sherlock said. "It's more of a challenge like that."

And that's how we proceeded.

IV.

  There was a reception that night at the apartment -- the residence, they called it -- of the French Ambassador. It was on Park Avenue, with a doorman and the coats left in the lobby. Sherlock told me he got us on the guest list, but when the doorman asked I noticed Sherlock created a diversion, loudly greeting an Ambassador from Francophone Africa, comment allez vous? Soon we were in the wood paneled elevator.

"Follow my lead," he told me. "I'd told Ladsous will be here." He paused. "And someone else we'll want to deal with on the case."

  Upstairs there were canapes; the bar was at one side of a long two room suite. Ladsous with his bright white hair was unmistakeable. At most UN events I'd seen him at, he stood awkward and alone. But this was the French ambassador's home court. Here, Ladsous was somebody.

  The French ambassador was showing Ladsous off, as if control of the DPKO position no matter by whom was still a victoire. "Je vous presente Herve," I heard him say, to the Ambassador of a Francophone country whose presidency had been controlled by the same family for thirty years.

  I'd recently seen, based on a tweet by a diplomat from Rwanda, a YouTube documentary about Thomas Sankara, the Burkina Faso leader who stood up to Mitterand and then was killed by Blaise Campaore. Even a diplomat from Cote d'Ivoire, representing the Ouattara government which owed so much to France, had whispered to me that Sankara was the real deal. Then he shrugged and said, "Campaore."

"There he is," Sherlock told me. He wasn't pointing at Ladsous but rather the man Ladsous was now talking too. I recognized him, from a story seen online: Shavendra Silva of Sri Lanka.

Silva was the head of a battalion of the Sri Lankan army in 2009. According even to Ban Ki-moon's watered down report, Silva's battalion had shelled hospitals and engaged in other war crimes.

"What is Silva doing here?" I asked Sherlock.

He laughed. "You didn't know? He's an adviser to Ladsous, on Peacekeeping Operations." He laughed again. "Peacekeeping!"

Just then one of the French mission's spokesmen came over. "Can I help you gentlemen?" he asked.

"Not really," Sherlock said. "Unless you want to bring me a Campari and soda."

"Were you invited?" the spokesman continued.

Sherlock answered the question with a question: "Who else have you asked?"

"That's none of your business," the French spokesman replied. "I'll have to ask to see you invitation. If you have one."

"I didn't print it out," Sherlock told him. "Saving paper and all that. You know. Be kind to the environment."

"I'll have to ask you both to leave," the spokesman said.

"And if we don't?" Sherlock smiled at him, as if discussing which appetizer to order.

"Then I'll have to call the police," the French spokesman said.

"Please do that," Sherlock answered. "How very classy. How very French."

The spokesman retreated and whispered with three other men. Two I recognized as UN based reporters, or repeaters as Sherlock had called them. There was Rob Chevalier, and with him a taller journalist for the French wire service who was known as Jumpy Jim. While the others just glanced, Jumpy Jim was pointing over at us.

"I think we should leave," I told Sherlock. "I'm sure our contracts could be canceled for this. These guys have connections."

"They aren't calling the police," Sherlock said. "Do you know what else the police could find here? C'mon, let's at least get a drink before we go."

And we did.

To be continued... [Next: III & IV, here]

  Follow @innercitypress Follow @FUNCA_info