UN GATE / FEDERAL COURT, Aug 30 – France
assumes the Security Council presidency September 1, a
month expected to include two further straw polls in the
selection of the tenth UN Secretary-General — more
consequential timing than almost any other presidency this
year.
As a permanent member, France's vote in
those polls is not treated the same as the ten
non-permanent members': straw-poll ballots for the five
veto-holders are color-coded separately, precisely because
their preferences, unlike everyone else's, can become a
veto.
France's relationship to the UN's own
machinery runs deeper than a Council seat. By
longstanding, informal P5 arrangement, France has held the
Under-Secretary-General post for UN Peacekeeping
Operations for most of the last three decades — a position
with direct authority over missions across Francophone
Africa, the region of France's own colonial history.
Inner City Press has reported before on how
close that arrangement came to including Ambassador Jérôme
Bonnafont himself: while Inner City Press still covered
the UN in person, Bonnafont was a serious contender for
(had in fact informally gotten) the Peacekeeping post,
until he reportedly spoke too openly about expecting to
get it, to jump to the then huge French Mission apartment
on Park Avenue from New Delhi . The job went instead to
fellow Frenchman Hervé Ladsous. The then AFP correspondent
began moves using UNCA, the UN Correspondents Association,
to try to get Inner City Press out, which later happened.
That history is worth keeping in mind now
that Bonnafont holds the Council presidency itself, at the
exact moment the Secretary-General selection he will help
gavel through is unfolding.
On August 29, Inner City Press wrote to
Ambassador Bonnafont with two distinct requests: that
Inner City Press be included in France's September press
conferences and given access to this month's straw-poll
stakeouts, and, separately, a formal legal request under
France's Code des relations entre le public et
l'administration, asking what became of an earlier,
unanswered letter sent to France as a Committee on
Information member. France has not yet responded to
either. We will report on their response, and that of long
time UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric. It is not
too late.
Whether a presidency held by a
diplomat who once nearly ran UN Peacekeeping himself will
treat this September's process with more transparency than
Denmark's August did is now, itself, the test. Watch this
site.