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By Matthew Russell Lee & UNESCO sources

UN GATE, Oct 21 – Inner City Press has been reporting regularly on the messy situation of UNESCO, even while banned from the UN by corrupt Antonio Guterres, now 841 days. Now this:

UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay put another incompetent French-speaking director, at a Category 1 institute in Geneva. He has zero qualification for the job, coming from a regional office in the French-speaking Africa, but he was promised the position by the Italian ADG and the French DG. Directors in the HQ in Paris are very unhappy with this decision, in which they were not consulted. Any of them would have been a better choice. A job search started but the position is already assigned. The French-speaking African is a puppet of the French DG and the Italian ADG. The Swiss look content and ready to finance the French-speaking director. The EU is pushed by Azoulay to support financially the activities of a French-speaking director too. They kicked out another African director, whom they found not servicable enough. A source at the HQ says that she was perceived as being “difficult” because she didn’t put up with the ADG’s crap. She is described as one of the very few competent persons in Unesco but out of Unesco now. Member states are fuming. Other directors in Unesco are fuming too. They feel betrayed and humiliated by the decisions of ADG Giannini and her boss. The French Azoulay, who just returned from the French-speaking Congo (during a pandemic, she continues to have “official visits”), is advancing without any stopover.

Earlier in the month half of DG Azoulay's closest collaborators from the Cabinet, including the Director of her cabinet Nicolas Kacyanides, got COVID-19 positive tests, the same staff tell Inner City Press.  They are all quarantined at home until further notice.

The whole UNESCO is therefore paralyzed because of the irresponsible managerial behavior of DG Azoulay and her senior team.  Today, all new cases have been duly reported to the Chief of the Medical service, Dr Cordier.

No internal release of information whatsoever though by HRM, since Dr Cordier is still under the imperative instruction from the Cabinet of the French Director general Audrey Azoulay not to disclose any information on that issue in order to avoid panic and complaints against the administration for managing so poorly the crisis and for failing to protect the staff.  The Agency is run by blackout on information and rumors, and no one is deeming necessary to inform the potential victims of the new COVID cluster created in the Cabinet.

From his home, Kacyanides is blocking all access to reliable information about the recent developments in a desperate effort to enforce an embargo on the spread of the virus from his office.

Meanwhile at the UNHQ, this - Guterers Spokesman Duajrricc going maskless, video here.

   On March 24th, Inner City Press wrote about it already but no measures have been taken whatsoever to improve the situation. “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. After remaining dumb-mute for months, despite that the French authorities decided to strengthen the procedures for protecting the population, the French DG Azoulay still remains silent and absent from her duties and constitutional responsibilities. Definitely, Audrey Azoulay was trying to downplay coronavirus risks, but not communicating on the contamination of half of her Cabinet is a totally new level of the usual outrageous “I-couldn’t-care-lessness” attitude of the French DG.   For how long more will member states representatives unquestioningly swallow all that, despite the huge risks even for them, remains to be verified. 

Since the very outset, the Cabinet of DG Azoulay did clearly not take the threat of COVID-19 seriously. Instead of preparing the institution for it, nasty jokes were made at internal meetings by ADG/ADM Nicholas Jeffreys and Director Cabinet Kacyanides about the coronavirus being a “great opportunity for getting rid once and for all of ambassadors criticizing the French DG Azoulay and of staff protesting against their current working conditions…”. 

This Monday, clearly, the tables have turned. Now the same who joked inappropriately are being contaminated themselves.   This is where UNESCO 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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