Global News Journal

UNsensational? Five more years of Ban Ki-moon

It’s hard to find a delegate to the United Nations who despises U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. But it’s even harder to find someone who thinks he has the gravitas and charisma of his Nobel Peace Prize-winning predecessor Kofi Annan, who invoked the wrath of the previous U.S. administration when he called the 2003 invasion of Iraq “illegal.” As one senior Western official, who declined to be identified, said about Ban: “It’s not as if he’s lightning in a bottle, but we can live with him.”

The former South Korean foreign minister is in the final year of his first five-year term and is widely expected to run for another stint as the supreme U.N. official. The formal re-election process is likely to commence in the coming months. In the meantime, Ban is visiting the capitals of key U.N. member states to gauge his chances of keeping his job. Those chances, U.N. diplomats say, are excellent. So far, no country has nominated any candidate to oppose him. “I’d put my money on Ban Ki-moon getting a second term,” said a Security Council diplomat.

The 15-nation Security Council nominates the secretary-general, though the choice has to be confirmed by the 192-nation General Assembly. Despite the veneer of democracy, it is the five veto-wielding permanent council members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — who choose the top U.N. bureaucrat in New York. And none of the five has any serious objections to a second and final term for Ban, diplomats say.

Some people say that running the United Nations is the toughest job on earth. With little real power, he spends his time mediating and negotiating behind closed doors, getting blamed for member states’ failures and receiving no credit for his off-camera successes. National lobbyists push and pull him in all directions. The five permanent Security Council members, known as the “P5″, regularly insist that he acquiesce to their demands, often pressuring him to reserve a healthy portion of top U.N. jobs for their nationals or preferential treatment for themselves or their allies. Journalists harangue the secretary-general to disclose the details of sensitive negotiations, which he usually tries to keep secret under the label of “quiet diplomacy.” Human rights groups routinely skewer him for not being tough enough on the rulers of despotic countries, which are, after all, member states like all the others and don’t take kindly to criticism.

Ban has been no exception. He has been publicly clobbered for not congratulating jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo for winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize or raising his detention with President Hu Jintao during a recent visit to China. He was hung out to dry for not being tough enough on Sri Lanka’s government and Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Sudan’s western Darfur region. Arab and other delegations from the developing world accuse Ban of being a U.S. lackey, noting how often his statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other issues echo those of the U.S. State Department or White House.

As much as Ban has sought to please his P5 kingmakers, he has managed to run afoul of each of them in the past. In 2008 Russia accused him of siding with the United States, France and Britain in supporting the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, which Moscow fiercely opposed. U.N. officials said at the time that Russia even threatened to block his second term over Kosovo (Ban made it up to them later). Both China and Russia complained that Ban had voiced public support for Egyptian demonstrators calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, who resigned last week. The United States, Britain and France were annoyed with Ban in 2009 for departing from past practice and not referring to the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia as part of Georgia. The Georgian ambassador accused Ban of succumbing to pressure from Russia, which fought a brief war against the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008. Ban denied the charge.

Ban’s unwavering stance against Ivory Coast’s incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to recognize U.N. certified election results from November 2010 that say he lost to rival Alassane Ouattara, surprised many U.N. watchers who are more accustomed to seeing him sitting on the fence on tough issues. Philippe Bolopion of Human Rights Watch, who has been one of the secretary-general’s toughest critics, welcomed Ban’s “swift and unequivocal reaction” to Gbagbo, who ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the world’s top cocoa producer. So far the secretary-general has refused to withdraw his blue helmets and the deadlock continues.

UN victory for gay rights supporters

Suporters of rights for gays and lesbians worldwide secured a major victory at the United Nations this week. The 192-nation U.N. General Assembly voted to restore a reference to killings due to sexual orientation that had been deleted from a resolution condemning unjustified slayings. The shift came after the United States submitted an amendment to restore the reference, which the General Assembly’s human rights committee removed last month from a resolution on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions that is adopted every two years.

The U.S. amendment that restored the reference to sexual orientation was adopted with 93 votes in favor, 55 against and 27 abstentions. The amended resolution was then approved with 122 yes votes, one against and 62 abstentions. (Saudi Arabia cast the sole vote against the resolution, and the United States was among those who abstained.)

The committee’s deletion of the reference last month — at the proposal of African and Arab nations — had outraged Western countries and human rights activists. Similar resolutions adopted in previous years have explicitly mentioned killings due to sexual preference, along with slayings for racial, national, ethnic, religious or linguistic reasons and killings of refugees, indigenous people and other groups.

Cary Alan Johnson, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), was pleased with the outcome. “The outpouring of support from the international community sent the strong message to our representatives at the U.N. that it is unacceptable to make invisible the deadly violence LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people face because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation.”

Not everyone was happy. Zimbabwe’s U.N. Ambassador Chitsaka Chipaziwa told the General Assembly that there was no need to refer explicitly to sexual orientation: “We will not have it foisted on us. We cannot accept this, especially if it entails accepting such practices as bestiality, pedophilia and those other practices many societies would find abhorrent in their value systems.” A European diplomat later told Reuters that Chipaziwa’s statement was “disgraceful.”

The opposition to the U.S. amendment came mainly from African and Muslim states. However, they had powerful support from diplomatic heavyweights like China and Russia, both of which voted against including a reference to slayings of people because of their sexual orientation. Several states that had voted against the inclusion in November reversed their positions and voted for the U.S. amendment this week, among them the African nations South Africa and Rwanda.

Although President Barack Obama himself welcomed the adoption of the U.S. amendment, Washington sent an ambiguous signal of support by abstaining from the vote on the amended resolution condemning extrajudicial, arbitrary and summary executions. The U.S. delegation did not explain its abstention. Several Western diplomats suggested that the U.S. abstention was unrelated to the issue of sexual orientation, but was connected with the U.S. use of unmanned drones to kill suspected Taliban and al Qaeda militants in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Sentenced to death: On Pakistan’s minorities

Earlier this year I asked someone who had been a senior minister in the government of Pakistan why the country could not change laws which discriminated against minorities. I asked the question because more than 80 people from the minority Ahmadi sect had just been killed in two mosques in Lahore, which at the time served as a wake-up call of the dangers of growing religious intolerance in Pakistan.

His answer was unhesitating. You could not possibly do something like that in Pakistan.

Such is the power of the religious lobbies that no government dares challenge them. Each "wake-up" call is soon forgotten until another injustice against religious minorities punches its way to the surface.

The latest was the sentencing to death for blasphemy of a Pakistani Christian woman.  According to press reports Aasia Bibi had been working in the fields in Punjab province when she was sent to fetch water. When she returned, some Muslim women refused to drink it, saying it was unclean because it had been carried by a Christian.  As the argument escalated, police became involved and Aasia Bibi was charged with blasphemy for allegedly insulting Islam. After a year in jail, she was convicted and sentenced to become the first woman to be hanged for blasphemy in Pakistan.

Aasia Bibi's sentence has garnered unusual international attention, with human rights groups like Amnesty International calling for her release and the Pope using his weekly public audience to plead for her life. President Asif Ali Zardari has now stepped in, asking his government to look urgently into the case. Her plight has also prompted a fresh round of calls for a change in the law.

Yet whatever happens in her particular case, it is hard to escape the idea that once the noise dies down, everything will go back to the way it was before.

The blog Changing Up Pakistan complained that Aasia Bibi's case was not noticed until she was sentenced to death rather than when she was first accused.

Liu who? UN’s Ban silent on rights in talks with China’s Hu

(Updates to include U.N. statement on Ban in China)

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is gearing up for a campaign to retain his seat as the United Nations’ top official for another five years, U.N. diplomats say. This, rights advocates suggest, may be the reason he sidestepped the issue of human rights during his latest visit to China, his fourth in as many years. Ban did not raise the issue of Beijing’s alleged rights abuses during a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday. Nor did he call on the Chinese government to release jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“It is correct he did not discuss human rights (in China),” Ban’s spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters in New York, adding that he also did not raise the issue of Liu’s detention. He noted that the secretary-general’s Oct. 8 statement on the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize “still stands.”

Ban’s carefully worded statement on the award, which was criticized as “mealy-mouthed” by Foreign Policy magazine’s Turtle Bay blog, did not call for Liu’s release and offered only indirect praise of his work as a dissident. (In contrast to Ban, the Nobel Committee praised Liu for his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights” and reiterated its belief in a “close connection between human rights and peace.”) In the same statement the U.N. chief was full of praise for Beijing: “Over the past years, China has achieved remarkable economic advances, lifted millions out of poverty, broadened political participation and steadily joined the international mainstream in its adherence to recognized human rights instruments and practices,” he said.  Beijing was infuriated by the decision to give Liu the award, describing it as ”an obscenity.”

It’s not as if human rights are off-limits for the secretary-general. Hardly a week goes by in which Ban doesn’t publicly call on the military junta of Myanmar to release Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. His latest appeal to the leaders of the former Burma was issued on Friday, when he urged the government to release all political prisoners ahead of the country’s first election in 20 years, scheduled for Nov. 7.

(After news reports quoting Nesirky’s remarks appeared, the U.N. press office issued a statement saying that while Ban did not discuss human rights with Hu, the issue was raised in meetings with “other Chinese leaders.” The statement did not identify those other leaders.)

Interview with North Korea border crosser Robert Park

 (Photographs by Lee Jae-won)

North Korea said on Tuesday it had  detained a U.S. citizen who entered its territory, apparently confirming a report that an American activist crossed into the state to raise awareness about Pyongyang’s human rights abuses.   Robert Park, 28, walked over the frozen Tumen river from China and into the North last Friday, other activists said. The Korean-American told Reuters ahead of the crossing that it was his duty as a Christian to make the journey and that he was carrying a letter calling on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to step down.

Park had an exclusive interview with Reuters last week before starting on his journey. The following are excerpts from the conversation. He requested that the comments be held until he was in North Korea.  

Reuters: Why are you planning to go into North Korea?

Robert Park: The North Korean human rights crisis by murder rate is the worst in the world. An estimated 1,000 people a day die by starvation and starvation is a murder case. North Korea has been sent more food aid than any nation in the world but the food has not gone to the people who need it. So this is murder.

But not only that, there are concentration camps in North Korea that are of the same brutality as in Nazi Germany.

The “hostile racket” that comes with North Korea’s human rights season

Once a year, North Korea’s often vitriolic rhetoric machine fires up with special intensity to attack those who attack its human rights record. The exchanges usually come toward the end of the year when the U.N. General Assembly approves what has become an annual measure criticising North Korea for having one of the worst rights records in the world.

Reclusive North Korea is a member of only a few international organisations so the annual rebuke at the United Nations stings particularly hard for the state that bills itself as a workers’ paradise, or as it said in a state media report on Tuesday: “the best socialist state in the world as it is centred on the popular masses”.

North Korea comes under special scrutiny this year because it will be subject to official international questioning of its human rights record at the United Nations in December, which could provide even more embarrassment for the North’s thinned-skinned leaders as the prickly state is put on the defensive. North Korea has prepared for this event by changing its Constitution earlier this year and adding clauses about human rights protections.

But many of the rights of North Korean citizens spelled out in the document are not carried out. For example, it guarantees freedom of assembly, but Pyongyang can send to political prison anyone who gathers without permission of authorities. The regime guarantees freedom of religion, but jails those who try to exercise the right. Privacy is a right, but the government’s large internal spy network keeps tabs on almost all citizens.

According to human rights groups, the United States and other leading democracies, North Korea maintains a vast political prison system to stamp out dissent. It intimidates the masses through public executions and by guilt by association where it can jail family members of those it accuses of crimes.

North Korea’s official media usually unleashes some of its harshest rhetoric during this human rights season, saying this is all part of a plot by a hostile United States to topple its leaders. Already this week, the North slammed “the ceaseless mean ‘human rights rackets’ kicked up by the U.S. and its followers.”

A costly U.S.-Mexico border wall, in both dollars and deaths

By Robin Emmott

Securing the United States’s border from illegal immigrants, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction “continues to be a major challenge,” says the United States Government Accountability Office in a new report. It is also proving to be expensive in both lives and money.

In dollar terms, the outlay is substantial. Every time someone breaks a hole in the U.S.-Mexico border wall, it costs about $1,300 to repair. The estimated cost of maintaining the 661-mile (1,058 km) double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile (3,000 km) border with Mexico over the next 20 years is $6.5 billion, the GAO report says. 

That is on top of the $3.7 billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative since 2005 to build a system of fencing, lighting, sensors, cameras and radars to keep out job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers.

While border agents say the wall is a tool that helps them protect the United States, the GAO report found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection cannot accurately determine the fence’s impact on improving border security, suggesting the money might not be well spent.

“What a waste in resources and creativity ,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera Valladares of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). “Our tax dollars are being wasted on an ineffective, old strategy instead of urgently working on serious, long term, workable immigration reform,” he said.

from Africa News blog:

Do Guinea’s dark days reveal junta’s colours?

In Guinea this week, at least 157 people were killed when security forces opened fire on a demonstration against military junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, according to a local rights group.

Much has changed since I visited the country in April and May this year. Then, the young Camara -- or "Dadis" as most Guineans refer to him – did not look particularly dangerous despite his images staring out from walls, buildings and roundabouts all over Conakry, and cassettes of his speeches on sale in the markets.

"Long live peace" was the graffiti of choice, and if expectations of real improvements in living standards were low, at least soldiers were in the barracks rather than shooting in the streets.

What was clear then was that a certain degree of patience had been extended to Camara both domestically and internationally.

Relief that the power vacuum opened by the death of former President Lansana Conte had not collapsed into violence, and populist anti-corruption rhetoric carried most Guineans through the first uneasy months. At the same time the international community swallowed its distaste for a military regime with the sweetening promise of elections by the end of the year.

As long as peace and the election timetable held, and Camara himself wasn't tempted into standing, Guineans and foreign partners would grit their teeth and give Camara and his National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD) breathing space to manage the transition.

That patience, which had shown signs of strain in recent months, has now run out. International condemnation has been swift and harsh for the deaths at the demonstration.

Saviors or conquerors? UN mulls “responsibility to protect”

By Patrick Worsnip      What’s more important — the right of a sovereign state to manage its affairs free of outside interference or the duty of the international community to intervene when massive human rights violations are being committed in a country?   The United Nations — nothing if not a talking shop — has been debating that question this week in the General Assembly. It goes to the heart of what the U.N. is all about.   At issue is a declaration issued four years ago by a summit of more than 150 world leaders asserting the “responsibility to protect” — R2P in U.N. jargon — populations threatened with genocide or other mass atrocities. It was a somewhat belated response to widespread criticism of the United Nations for failing to stop massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s.      The carefully crafted declaration said the responsibility began with the government of the country concerned. If that failed, it foresaw a sliding scale of international action, ranging from advice through mediation to — in a last resort — intervention by force. And such a use of force could only be authorized by the Security Council, meaning the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China would all have to agree.   Cautious as it was, the summit document was seen by many advocacy groups as a step on the road to fulfilling their dream that if a government was committing atrocities against its people, the United Nations would march in and stop it.   In the real world, U.N. officials say, that is not going to happen, at least under the peacekeeping rules that have applied in recent decades. These do not authorize U.N. forces to go to war against the national army of a sovereign state — a move that would amount to invasion. Witness the six-year-old conflict in Sudan’s western region of Darfur — branded by some as genocide — where a U.N./African Union peacekeeping force is only now being slowly deployed with the consent of the Khartoum government. The only time that R2P has been invoked in practice — and even then retrospectively — was in former U.N. secretary-General Kofi Annan’s mission to mediate in post-election violence in Kenya last year, U.N. officials say.   This week’s debate was to take stock of R2P and discuss how to take it forward, although no immediate action is expected. It came against the background of a determined attempt by radicals led by General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto, a former Nicaraguan Sandinista government minister, to kick the issue into the long grass.

For D’Escoto and those who agree with him, R2P is code for an attempt by big Western powers to impose their will on the weak. In a contentious “concept note” issued to all U.N. members he declared that “colonialism and interventionism used ‘responsibility to protect’ arguments.” One member of a panel of experts D’Escoto convened to launch the debate, U.S. academic Noam Chomsky, said R2P-type arguments had been used to justify Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and Nazi Germany’s pre-World War Two move into Czechoslovakia.   While some radical states, such as Venezuela, echoed D’Escoto’s line in the assembly debate, human rights groups expressed relief that most cautiously supported a strictly defined interpretation of R2P and backed proposals by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for developing it. Ban has proposed periodic reviews of how countries have implemented R2P and regular reports by himself on the issue. “To those that argued this week that the U.N. was not ready to make a reality of the commitment to end mass atrocities, the majority of the General Assembly gave its answer: you are wrong,” said Monica  Serrano of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Despite that, there have been clear signs of concern among developing countries that unless tightly controlled, R2P could be used in support of future Iraq-style invasions of countries that have angered the big powers.   What’s your view?

Back to the future in Malaysia with Anwar sodomy trial II

By Barani Krishnan

A decade ago, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was on trial for sodomy and corruption in a trial that exposed the seamy side of Malaysian justice and the anxieties of a young country grappling with a crushing financial crisis and civil unrest.

Anwar is Malaysia’s best known political figure, courted in the U.S. and Europe and probably the only man who can topple the government that has led this Southeast Asian country for the past 51 years.

Anwar vowed in a recent interview to fight what he says are trumped up charges.

The 14 months I spent covering the 1998 trials saw Anwar accused of sodomy with three men and having sex with a woman over a period of years. This case is simpler, there is just one accuser. All homosexual acts are illegal in this mainly Muslim country and sex outside marriage is illegal for Muslims.

The first trial was gruelling. Lines began as early as four in the morning as people tried to get into the court that could seat less than 200. Most of the spectators were ordinary people, but there was a sprinkling of dignitaries and businessmen who had known Anwar when he was in office.

There was a separate media queue and again a fight to get in line as dozens of reporters from local and international outlets jockeyed for space. Ringing the court were hundreds of riot police, backed by watercannon, waiting for trouble in a country where there were daily protests at the time, often involving tens of thousands of people.