| After
UN Evicted Inner City Press,
Metal Detectors to Question
Forest Whitaker,
Evo Morales
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Series,
Video
I,
II
UNITED NATIONS,
March 10 – After the UN's
eviction of Inner City
Press, without an office I was
confined to the UN's bullpen.
Some in there had taken or
been assigned particular desk
spaces. But now with a hype
event coming up, the signing
or resigning of the Paris
Accord on Climate Change, the
space I'd been using was taken
over by an Italian television
crew, another by something
called “Eurovision.”
Another denizen of the
bullpen, well settled-in with
flowers, told me the Italian
landlord and United Nations
Correspondents Association
boss Giampaolo
Pioli had come through
talking about installing a
flat screen TV on the wall, as
if he owned the place.
Apparently he did, even though
the UN's Media Accreditation
and Liaison Unit insisted to
me that the UN Correspondents
Association played no role in
who got office space. Yeah,
right. I wrote about these
things, questioning the UN's
use of UNCA and its UN
Censorship Alliance, while
preparing what to ask during
the hype Climate Change day.
You had to come
through the metal detectors at
8 am, and set up in an
overflow room. I did, stopping
to talk to a woman who
translated or interpreted for
Bolivia's Evo Morales. She
suggested again questions
about REDD, a carbon credit
trading scheme, mentioning Air
France and Madagascar. That grabbed
me: what about the role
and pollution of the air and
shipping industries?
I got the U.S.'s new
climate negotiator to answer,
something about an ICAO
meeting later in the year, and
leveraged that with NGOs who
appeared in back to back press
conferences. Four different
answers to the same question:
a piece that wrote itself.
Needless to say I was cut out
of the Hollande and then the
Trudeau press conference. But
I had material. I was still in
the game.
Forest Whitaker the
actor came through, and I
asked him about South Sudan
and UN corruption. He declined
the latter, and spoke about
his friends trying to help in
Juba. What about Malakal, I asked
him, there the UN stood
accused for the deaths of
civilians. It's complicated,
he said. That was enough for
me.
Whitaker dodged the
corruption, but down in the
Vienna Cafe a Venezuelan guy,
formerly of the mission and
not on UN staff, chided me. An
attack on south-south, he
said, hurt the developing
countries, the Group of 77 and
China. Corruption
doesn't help you, I started to
say. Then took a different
tack.
The point is, they were
trying to convince people that
the scandal is only about John
Ashe, about Antigua and
Barbuda. But it was Ban's
Secretariat which sold
documents; it was Ban's
Department of Public
Information under Cristina
Gallach which let
the bribers sponsor the
UN's slavery memorial. The
point, or my point, was to
spread the fire from the G77
to the Secretariat, and
through that to the First
World Ban was serving. It was
easier said than done.
***
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