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By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

UN GATE, April 3 –  Just as WHO and Antonio Guterres are purchased by China, so is UNESCO controlled by France. Call it FrencESCO. Since February 29, Inner City Press has exclusively published on the internal UNESCO situation regarding the agency's contact with the Coronavirus COVID-19 and its systematic cover up. 

Evidently, the administration of DG Azoulay should have been much clearer about its coordinated plans to effectively protect staff and their families, to ensure the functioning of UNESCO and guarantee its core activities. It hasn’t done any of that. And still, member states remain silent.  Other UN agencies regularly report on their respective COVID-19 situations. Opposite to those agencies, UNESCO opted for a total blackout regarding the virus spread and after-effects, in a secret hope that employees will opt to decease as silently and inconspicuously as they work and deliver.

Under the leadership of the French DG Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO is getting closer to the information-sharing tactics of North Korea. This policy of total embargo on the real situation consolidates the culture of fear that reigns at UNESCO.

  Regrettably for DG Azoulay, information is regularly leaked to Inner City Press about recent cases proving that her criminal silence is having dramatic consequences. A staff member and two people from African permanent delegations to UNESCO infected by the virus passed away since last week.

 Yet, no information shared about those cases whatsoever by UNESCO. Will the French DG Azoulay take the personal responsibility for keeping staff and permanent delegates totally in the dark? Only member states can decide on investigating and consequently imposing sanctions on those senior managers warding off the necessary updates. 

   UNESCO keeps bragging about its activities promoting freedom of expression, but this is all fake. Supporting freedom of speech is limited to condemning at large the killings of (some) journalists with no effect at all. A wall of silence reigns over UNESCO nowadays. Freedom of expression is a principle that seems to be far easier to promote than to apply to the functioning of UNESCO under the DG Azoulay regime.

The Medical service of UNESCO is getting request for assistance every single day of the week from infected members of the personnel. No direct assistance is provided in order to avoid the risks of taking decisions that can be a basis for legal cases against UNESCO later-on. The Director of Legal Affairs service works hand in hand with DG Azoulay in insisting that staff must not be given any information about the infection that could be used to sue the organization. As a result, the Chief of the Medical Unit, Dr Cordier, got imperative instructions from the Cabinet of the French DG Azoulay to remain silent on that issue and to skip notifying and updating staff members who could have been contaminated by their infected colleagues in order to avoid panic and complaints against the administration for managing so poorly the crisis and for failing to protect the staff. Criminal. 

  Such scandalous lack of transparency in the current dramatic situation, is a crime towards all staff and their families, said one high official to Inner City Press. “We hope member states’ representatives who are directly concerned by this shameful fiasco of Audrey Azoulay will finally wake up and decide to step in by placing her under a form of trusteeship and thus extending their control over her hopeless administration”.

  The COVID-19 crisis hit the corrupted UNESCO totally unprepared. The proven incompetence of the senior management team is putting at risk the lives of thousands of staff members but also affects those of permanent representatives of member states to UNESCO.  After remaining dumb-mute for months, despite that the French authorities decided to strengthen the procedures for locking down the population, the French DG Azoulay still remains silent and absent from her duties and constitutional responsibilities.  

 These secrecy schemes can only work in a limited time frame though. Sooner or later the actual figures of those infected and deceased will have to be divulged and the French administration of UNESCO held accountable for lying about the facts and camouflaging the truth.  Last week the Japanese Deputy-Prime Minister called the WHO a CHO (“Chinese Health organization”).

So, in the same vein, it is but time to rename UNESCO - “FrenchESCO”? This is where FrenchESCO stands today, a Zombie land propitious to the flourishing of abuse of power and nepotism dangerously detrimental to staff members and to their families.  Watch this site.

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