UN GATE,
Dec 30 –
As inside the increasingly
marginal United Nations a
process begins to select a
successor to Antonio Guterres
who banned
Inner City
Press from the
UN as it
reported on
his links
with briber
CEFC China
Energy and to
sex trafficker
Ghislaine
Maxwell,
it is time to review the
history. Part 11:
Even after
the UN bribery trial of the CCP's Ng Lap
Seng resulted in six guilty verdicts,
Guterres had not comment or moves to reform.
He went on a two week vacation, location
undisclosed (until Inner City Press named
it: the Dalmatian coast).
Upon his return to
UNHQ, Guterres for the first time made even
the swearing of a new UN official to a
publicly funded posted - DESA - "closed
press."
And more was
closing down, including with conflicts of
interest. The President of the UN General
Assembly who swore Guterres in, then was
supposed to oversee him? Guterres gave Peter
Thompson a new UN job, on Oceans, in
September 2017, before Guterres' first UNGA
"High Level" week.
During the
UNGA week, the last one that Inner City
Press was able to cover in person before
Guterres' outright ban, Guterres gripped and
grinned for example with Cameroon's Paul
Biya; Inner City Press out on 47th Street
interviewed Southern Cameroonians - they
called themselves Ambazonians - who
denounced Guterres. But what did he care?
His handpicked media didn't ask him about
it. And the Press that did, he could evict
and oust.
During this
UNGA week, even the frothy part, the photo
ops, was corrupted by Guterres. On September
26, 2017 at 5:30 pm, Maldives foreign
minister Mohamed Asim was listed on the 38th
floor. Team Guterres' desire to keep Inner
City Press from seeing anything and
especially reporting anything during the
photo op was so strong that instead of
having it stay waiting behind a wall on the
38th floor after the previous one with
Patricia Cornwall of the Commonwealth, as
was done for UNTV and the other
photographers, Inner City Press was made to
go back down to the second floor, to the
office of MALU with its sniffing Germany
shepherd dog.
By the time
it was brought back up, Guterres' handshake
with Asim was already over. Unlike for the
Commonwealth, of which Inner City Press
posted photos to Alamy, the Maldives photo
op was useless, or at least unusable.
Guterres' office of the spokesman, also on
September 26, declined to allow Inner City
Press a question to Guterres' South Sudan
envoy David Shearer, on whose watch a
journalist was killed, by the government
there, in August.
This was Guterres'
UN, nine months in. It would grow worse.
More on this
UNgutted 11 - and on Arabian
Gulf media pressing for
censorship in the UN -
on X for Subscribers here
and Substack here
***
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