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For UN's Guterres,
Hypocrisy In First Spring
As SG, Lit Up Earth Hour,
Denying Yemen & WIPO
Letters
By Matthew
Russell Lee, photos,
Video,
more
UNITED NATIONS,
December 27 – The spring thaw
in Antonio Guterres' first
year as UN Secretary General,
in March and April, began to
reveal hypocrisy. A small but
telling example was when,
after Guterres called on
people all over the world to
turn off their lights for
Earth Hour, Inner City Press found
the lights on at the
UN-owned mansion on Sutton
Place where Guterres lives.
At first the UN
refused to answer Inner City
Press where Guterres was - Lisbon
- then accused it of “monitoring
the residence.” It's called
journalism: with the UN
refusing to disclose even what
country Guterres is in,
checking the residence is the
only way. The UN also refuses
to disclose how much these
Lisbon trips cost the global
taxpayers, for example how
many UN Security officials are
taken, where they stay and for
how much.
Likewise
Guterres' 2016 financial disclosure
differed significantly from
what he filed as head of UNHCR
in 2013. This has yet to be
explained. In April Guterres
was petitioned to replace the
UN's pro-Saudi Yemen
envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh
Ahmed. But when Inner City
Press asked, Guterres'
spokespeople refused to even
confirm receipt of the letter.
This happened on
a petition by staff
too, about retaliation by
Francis Gurry the head of the
UN World Intellectual Property
Organization, whose assistance
to North Korea's cyanide
patents Guterres did not act
on.
In late April,
Guterres did nothing as
Tanzania expelled
his resident coordinator, a
far cry from his knee-jerk
defense later in the year -
continuing on December
27 - of the 4000
rosewood signatures by his
Deputy SG Amina J. Mohammed.
Sustainable development? Try
hypocrisy, and censorship and
restriction of the Press which
covers it - and Cameroon, here. We'll have more
on this.
In Antonio
Guterres' first two months as
UN Secretary General, the
longstanding Cyprus talks
began to fall apart,
and Guterres stood silent
as Burundi, for example, banned
access by UN officials.
Guterres ignored a protest by
whistleblowers against Francis
Gurry of the UN World
Intellectual Property
Organization, and that UN
agency's work on North Korea's
cyanide patents.
He did
nothing about a UN waste dump
exposed
by Inner City Press in the
Central African Republic,
despite his predecessor Ban
Ki-moon's record with waste in
Haiti and elsewhere. While he
announced that Kenyan troops
would head back to South Sudan
to join UN Peacekeeping, he
appointed the fifth
Frenchman in a row to head
this DPKO, Jean-Pierre
Lacroix.
Meanwhile he was
rebuffed in his attempt to
appoint Fayyad to head the
UN's Libya mission, perhaps
explaining his refusal later
in the year to take a single
press question after reading
out his canned statement on
Jerusalem. In a harbinger of
his approach to UN corruption
and (non) reform, his UN was
named as not providing
requested documents in the first
UN bribery case, of Ng Lap
Seng. (In the second case, of
Patrick Ho and Cheikh Gadio,
Guterres has yet to even
launch an audit).
February 2017
ended with a seeming second
wind, the belated arrival of
Guterres deputy Amina J.
Mohammed. Inner City Press was
throughout constructive;
it would later emerge that
during the delay Mohammed
signed 4000 certificates for
endangered Nigerian and
Cameroonian rosewood already
exported to China, something
Guterres has refused to
investigate despite a petition
with 92,000 requests.
Guterres' first
interaction with UN staff was
a Town Hall meeting on January
9. Even though it was on the
UN's public website, when
Inner City Press live-streamed
it on Periscope
for the impacted public to see
it received a threat that this
violated unspecified
UN's guidelines. This has been
a pattern in Guterres' first
year: threats to Press for
unspecified violations, such
as that of Maher
Nasser on October 20,
and a total failure to respond
or reform by Nasser's boss, Alison
Smale. Ultimately,
Guterres is responsible.
***
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