Global News Journal

UN tells Mbeki he got it wrong on Ivory Coast

This week U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon‘s chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, defended the United Nations’ record on Ivory Coast.  In a highly unusual public rebuttal, Nambiar told former South African President and African Union mediator for the Ivory Coast conflict, Thabo Mbeki, that it was he – not the international community — who got it wrong in the world’s top cocoa producer.

In April, Ivory Coast’s long-time President Laurent Gbagbo was ousted from power by forces loyal to his rival Alassane Ouattara, who won the second round of a U.N.-certified election in November 2010, with the aid of French and U.N. troops. According to Mbeki — who has also attempted to mediate in conflicts in Sudan and Zimbabwe – there never should have been an election last fall in the country that was once the economic powerhouse of West Africa.

Mbeki wrote in an article published by Foreign Policy magazine at the end of April: “The objective reality is that the Ivorian presidential elections should not have been held when they were held. It was perfectly foreseeable that they would further entrench the very conflict it was suggested they would end.”

Ivory Coast was split in two by the 2002-3 civil war and the failure to disarm the northern rebels meant the country held an election last year with two rival armies in place, leading to a new outbreak of hostilities when Gbagbo rejected the internationally-accepted election results.

The solution to the conflict, Mbeki wrote, was not to insist that Ouattara take office as president, as the United Nations, France and others did at the time, but a political solution that would have satisfied everybody in the francophone nation. “The African Union understood that a lasting solution of the Ivorian crisis necessitated a negotiated agreement between the two belligerent Ivorian factions, focused on the interdependent issues of democracy, peace, national reconciliation and unity.”

The United Nations took nearly four months to come up with a public response to Mbeki. It finally appeared this week in an article in Foreign Policy by Nambiar entitled “Dear President Mbeki: The United Nations Helped Save the Ivory Coast.” In his rebuttal, Nambiar vehemently rejects the idea that that the world should have pushed Ouattara to negotiate a power-sharing deal with election-loser Gbagbo.

UN sends mixed signals on civilian deaths in Libya

The United Nations has been sending mixed signals lately about NATO’s record with civilian casualties in the alliance’s sixth month of air strikes against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s troops and military sites. U.N. officials and diplomats said it was hardly surprising that different senior officials at the world body are finding it hard to keep a consistent line on the conflict, which, back in March, most of them had hoped would be over in a few weeks. 

But it has dragged on. Now Gaddafi’s government is complaining about what it says are mounting civilian casualties caused by NATO bombs, many of them children. Diplomats from alliance members acknowledge that there have been some civilian casualties, which they regret. But they question some of the figures that have been coming out of Tripoli. Libya’s state television, which was targeted by NATO late last month, regularly broadcasts gory images of blood-soaked bodies it says are civilians being pulled from rubble after NATO bomb attacks.

Last week the head of the U.N. cultural and scientific agency UNESCO, Irina Bokova, issued an unusually sharp rebuke of the alliance for its July 30 air strikes against Libyan state television, which she said killed several “media workers.”

“I deplore the NATO strike on Al-Jamahiriya and its installations,” Bokova said in a statement. “Media outlets should not be targeted in military actions.”

Several U.N. diplomats from NATO member states privately expressed surprise at the statement from Bokova, herself a citizen of NATO member Bulgaria. Asked about her criticism, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s deputy spokesman Farhan Haq suggested that Ban was not overly concerned with the performance of NATO in Libya.

“In terms of that, we would need further details about what the operations were that were conducted. But certainly, the Secretary-General believes that resolution 1973 has been used properly in order to protect civilians in Libya and he has continually emphasized the need, as this proceeds, to make sure that civilians in Libya will be protected.”

NATO defended the attack on Libyan television and said it had no evidence that anyone was killed during the strikes.

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.

Indian minister plays musical speeches at UN council

Those who spend much of their working week listening to speeches at the United Nations — U.N. correspondents, for example — might be forgiven for thinking there’s not much difference between most of them.

But it’s seldom you get as dramatic an illustration of this as happened on Feb. 11 when India’s Foreign Minister began inadvertently reading out to the Security Council a speech written for another country’s delegate without anyone, including himself, initially realizing anything was amiss.

The gaffe by minister S.M. Krishna occurred during a debate on the worthy but less than sensational topic of “the interdependence between security and development.” This month’s council president, Brazil, had organized the debate and invited as many foreign ministers as possible to take part.

The speech problem seems to have started when the speaker before Krishna, Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amado, decided to make off-the-cuff remarks to the council instead of his prepared text, which was instead circulated in written form to other participants. It was this that Krishna picked up and started to read when his turn came, thinking it was his own.

So general was the opening section that it could as well have come from India as Portugal, although it did seem a little odd when Krishna welcomed the fact that there are currently two Portuguese-speaking nations — Portugal and Brazil — on the Security Council. But hey, the Indian state of Goa was for centuries a Portuguese colony and Portuguese is still spoken there by some people.

It was when Krishna began to hail cooperation between the United Nations and the European Union that it really did appear that there had been some mistake. India’s U.N. ambassador, Hardeep Singh Puri, suddenly appeared at Krishna’s elbow, handed him another speech and whispered in his ear.

“Start all over again?” muttered Krishna, in remarks picked up by U.N. microphones. “Start again, yes sir,” Puri replied. Without a word of explanation to the council, Krishna plowed on, this time reading from the right text: “Mr President, Mahatma Gandhi, the father of our nation, said …”

WikiLeaks Scandal: Is the United Nations a Den of Spies?

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice has dismissed suggestions that her diplomats are part-time spies, as suggested by the latest batch of documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.   “Let me be very clear — our diplomats are just that, they’re diplomats,” Rice told reporters at the United Nations where she was peppered with questions about the latest chapter in the WikiLeaks scandal. “Our diplomats are doing what diplomats do around the world every day, which is build relationships, negotiate, advance our interests and work to find common solutions to complex problems.”   She didn’t exactly deny the charges of espionage. But the top U.S. diplomat in New York did reject the idea that there would be any diplomatic fallout from the release of thousands of documents obtained by WikiLeaks, some of which have been published by The Guardian and other newspapers.   One U.S. diplomatic cable published by The Guardian shows how the State Department instructed diplomats at the United Nations and elsewhere around the world to collect credit card and frequent flyer numbers, work schedules and biometric data for U.N. officials and diplomats. Among the personalities of interest was U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, as were the ambassadors of the other 14 Security Council member states.    There is nothing new about espionage at the United Nations, but it’s always embarrassing when classified documents proving it happens surface in the media.   Most Security Council envoys declined to comment on the WikiLeaks documents as they headed into the council chambers on Monday for a meeting on North Korea. Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, however, told reporters, “Surprise, surprise.”   Churkin should know. One of the diplomats in his charge was implicated earlier this year in a high-profile Russian espionage case in the United States in which nearly a dozen people were accused of being part of a Russian spy ring that carried out deep-cover work in the United States to recruit political sources and gather information for Moscow. The U.S. Justice Department said that an unnamed diplomat at the Russian mission to the United Nations had delivered payments to the spy ring.      And then there was the man known as “Comrade J”, a Russian spy based in New York from 1995 to 2000. Working out of Russia’s U.N. mission, Comrade J directed Russian espionage activity in New York City and personally oversaw all covert operations against the United States and its allies in the United Nations. According to a book about his exploits, Comrade J eventually became a double agent for the FBI.   Nor does the history of U.N. espionage end there. In 2004, a former British cabinet minister revealed that British intelligence agents had spied on Ban Ki-moon’s predecessor Kofi Annan, who fell afoul of Washington and London by opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.       Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was also the victim of a phone-bugging operation, according to media reports from 2004. He had also opposed the invasion of Iraq and angered the United States by saying that their intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged revival of his nuclear arms program was not only incorrect but partly based on falsified evidence. U.S. officials pored over transcripts of ElBaradei’s telephone intercepts in an attempt to secure evidence of mistakes that could be used to oust him from his post, the reports said. Not only did they fail to unseat him, he went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Macedonia and Greece could look to EU for help

“What’s in a name?” asked love-struck Juliet by way of justifying her love for Romeo, whose Montague family was so loathed by the Capulets.

For Macedonia, rather a lot.

The name has been fought over by Greece and “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” for nearly two decades. Now European Union diplomats are telling them to ask for mediation help from the bloc. It may be the only chance, they say, for the two countries to solve a dispute that is preventing Macedonia from joining NATO and starting accession negotiations with the EU.

After a decade of talks facilitated by the United Nations to try to get the two to agree a new name for the former Yugoslav state, there is little sign of progress. EU diplomats argue that closer involvement in the talks by, say, the EU’s executive Commission or representatives of its new diplomatic service, might help the two come to an agreement.

The lack of progress frustrates some officials in Brussels, who say it sends the wrong signal to the rest of the EU-bound Balkans. It tells them that bilateral disputes can effectively block the Commission as it steers the bloc’s enlargement policy. Having officials from Brussels directly involved in talks would make it easier to use EU policies as ‘carrot and stick’ to coax the two capitals towards agreement, they say. “The EU is the missing link,” one EU official said recently.

At the core of the dispute is the insistence by Athens that Skopje has usurped a name that implies a claim on Greece’s own region of Macedonia. A U.N.-brokered deal in 1995 allowed the newly independent Balkan state to join the United Nations under the temporary designation “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. A fair amount of diplomatic creativity followed. Its envoys have sat at U.N. meetings between representatives of Thailand and Togo — the country name being considered to start with “The”. A handful of proposals for a new name have been circulated, mostly tacking on a descriptive word such as ‘Upper’ or ‘Northern’ to the name Macedonia. Other suggestions included Democratic Republic of Macedonia, Constitutional Republic of Macedonia, Independent Republic of Macedonia and Republic of New Macedonia.

But the two capitals have dug in their heels, even though both say publicly they want a solution. The latest round of talks between Macedonian and Greek leaders, who met in Brussels in October, produced no result so far.

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.)

UN General Assembly: NYC’s annual headache

For world leaders, foreign ministers and diplomats from the 192 members of the United Nations, the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly is a chance to stand at the iconic dark green marble podium and trumpet their countries’ successes, voice their concerns — or occasionally to attack their enemies. (Such as when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called former U.S. President George W. Bush “the devil” during his address to the assembly.)

But for people who live or work in, or travel through, the east side of midtown Manhattan, the General Assembly is a headache that runs for three or four days every September. It causes regular traffic jams as official motorcades speed through the city. It’s difficult to book a hotel as prices soar and availability plummets. Scores of heavily armed NYPD officers line the streets. The city’s trademark incessant honking of car horns is punctuated with the roar of helicopters overhead scanning for suspicious activity on the streets below. NYPD checkpoints are set up to screen everyone trying to get within a few hundred yards of U.N. headquarters and those without proof that they live or work in the area are told to get lost.

This year’s General Assembly is an extended headache for the neighborhood. In addition to the assembly’s annual General Debate, world leaders agreed to spend an extra three days discussing the need to redouble efforts to meet a set of U.N. targets aimed at drastically reducing poverty and improving the quality of life for the world’s poor by 2015.

During their speeches, leaders pledged to step up efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — agreed 10 years ago — but offered little in the way of new resources. Among those addressing the summit later in the week are U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose annual attacks on Israel and the United States inevitably prompt a mass walkout by U.S. and European delegations.

Ban has described the MDG summit, and the draft declaration leaders are expected to approve before the week is over, as evidence of an “unprecedented level of support” for the world body’s crusade to improve quality of life for the poor.

Another unprecedented aspect of this year’s General Assembly is the difficulties journalists face covering the world’s top newsmakers, who the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (DSS) are taking extra precautions to keep away from journalists.

With much of the building closed due to a $1.9 billion renovation, the traditional areas where delegates and journalists could quietly mingle are gone. It was only after reporters complained that a media stakeout area was set up in the so-called North Lawn Building, a temporary structure where many of this week’s most important meetings — on Sudan, the Middle East peace process and other issues — are taking place. (The chalk-white container-like North Lawn Building has acquired a number of nicknames, including Bantanamo and Walmart.)

from Environment Forum:

Attack survivors at UN: Save the sharks!

Jaws needs help.

Nine shark-attack survivors from five countries headed for the United Nations in New York City to plead the case for shark preservation. U.N. member countries could take this issue up this week as part of an annual resolution on sustainable fisheries. They'll also be reviewing the Millennium Development Goals -- a long-range set of global targets that includes stemming the loss of biodiversity, including sharks.

"I'm very thankful to be alive," said Krishna Thompson, a Wall Street banker who lost his left leg in a shark attack while visiting the Bahamas in 2001.  “I have learned to appreciate all of God’s living creatures. Sharks are an apex predator in the ocean. Whether they continue to live  affects how we as people live on this Earth. I feel that one of the reasons why I am alive today is to help the environment and help support shark conservation.”

Another survivor, Yann Perras of LeMans, France, had his leg severed while windsurfing off the coast of Venezuela in 2003. "Even if the movie 'Jaws' has scared entire generations, we have to remember that it is only fiction," Perras said in a statement.

The nine who survived shark attacks gathered at the U.N. Environment Programme offices in an event organized by the Pew Environment Group, which among other projects aims to conserve shark species.

As many as 73 million sharks are killed each year to support the trade in shark fins, driven by demand for shark fin soup; 30 percent of shark species are either threatened or near-threatened with extinction and there is insufficient data to assess the population status of another 47 percent, the Pew Environment Group said.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom (A child looks at sharks at Siam Ocean World in Bangkok August 16, 2010.)

U.N. plays down “guidance” on Kashmir

(Updated August 6, 2010 at 5:05 p.m. EDT with new remarks from U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky.)

The United Nations is playing down a statement on Kashmir a U.N. spokesman sent to a small group of reporters last week. After India made clear that it was very unhappy with the language on Kashmir issued by the U.N. press office, the world body explained that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had  never uttered the offending words — at least not in an official statement.

This is the full text of what U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky has described as “media guidance” on Kashmir, as provided to Reuters by one of the reporters who received it by email on July 28:

“In relation to recent developments in Indian-administered Kashmir, the Secretary-General is concerned over the prevailing security situation there over the past month. He calls on all concerned to exercise utmost restraint and address problems peacefully.

“The Secretary-General welcomes the recent resumption of Foreign Minister-level talks between India and Pakistan. He encourages both sides to rekindle the spirit of the composite dialogue, which was initiated in 2004 and had made encouraging progress on some important confidence building measures, and to make renewed efforts to address outstanding issues, including on Jammu and Kashmir. He underlines the need for patience, perseverance and compromise on all sides.”

On Aug. 3 Nesirky played down that email during the daily U.N. briefing:  “The Spokesperson’s Office released to the media guidance which was prepared by the U.N. Secretariat, and that seems to have been taken out of context. This was not a statement of the Secretary-General.”

Nesirky was asked a number of other questions about the “guidance” — was it genuine; what was taken out of context; was it authorized by Ban’s office; what is Ban’s view now; etc. His response was: “I don’t have anything to add.”