BTC Briefing, Like Pipeline, Skirts Troublespots, Azeri Revelations
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee at the U.N
Inner City Press, NY
July 13 2006
UNITED NATIONS, July 13 — An oil pipelines gambit came to interim
fruition on Thursday. The Baku – Tblisi – Ceyhan curving route,
avoiding Armenia, breakaway parts of Georgia and most Kurdish parts
of Turkey, is a testament to its precarious position. At a briefing
at the UN, Inner City Press asked the outgoing Ambassador of Georgia
Revaz Adamia to explain BP’s funding of a 700 person defense force
for the pipeline. "They are not soldier," Amb. Adamia answered.
"They are high tech people."
Inner City Press asked the Ambassador of Azerbaijan Yashar Aliyev about
the avoidance of Armenia. We cannot deal with them until they stop
occupying our territory, he said. "You mean Nagorno – Karabakh?" Not
only that, Amb. Aliyev answered. That’s only four percent. Few people
know this, but Armenia has occupied twenty percent of our territory.
But we digress. The pipeline is more than a tube for oil, the
Ambassadors read from their scripts. A four-minute movie was
shown. Later the full 20-minute film was screened, as waiters served
lamp chops and salmon on a skewer. "Bill Clinton was there at the
birth," a Georgian representative said. "He offered American guarantees
so the work would get done. It avoids this" — he pointed on a map at
Russia — "and here," pointing to Iran and the Middle East. "If only
Turkmenistan agrees to provide its gas," he said wistfully. He added
his view that Armenia gets away with incursions in Azerbaijan due to
U.S. support. It’s an issue rarely touched on at the United Nations.
Georgia
Inner City Press asked outgoing Georgian Ambassador Ademia where
he’s going. "Back to science and business," he answered. "Oil,"
guess-whispered one wag — not this one — in the crowd.
Full disclosure: this reporter consumed, on the pipeline proponents’
tab, several skewers of meat and a glass of Borjomi mineral water,
named for a national park in Georgia which environmentalists say is
put at risk by the BTC pipeline.
At the UN, A Day of Resolutions on Gaza, North Korea and Iran,
Georgia as Side Dish
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee at the U.N.
UNITED NATIONS, July 12 — Just as there are big countries and little
countries, at the UN there are big issues and then other issues,
sometimes called non-issues. On Wednesday at the UN, there were
serial stakeouts by the Ambassadors of France and the United States,
off the cuff comments by the Ambassadors of Russia, China and the UK,
and side speeches by the Palestinian Permanent Observer and the UN’s
head of peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno.
Taking questions from a half-dozen journalists at the noon briefing
— where Inner City Press asked about a UNHCR conflict-of-interest
investment with Ivan Pictet, who’s on the UN Investment Committee,
click here for that article — was the Special Representative of the
Secretary General for Georgia, Heidi Tagliavini, soon to leave her
post and return to Switzerland. Still she was diplomatic, preferring
not to comment on yesterday’s outbursts from Georgia’s parliamentary
speaker and the Russian ambassador, rather referring obliquely to
"mis-information" being a problem in Abkhazia.
Inner City Press asked if she views as mis-information the allegations
of money laundering, including for terrorism, in Abkhazia.
"Thank God my mandate doesn’t include bank regulation," she
replied. She went on to describe Abkhazia as a "dark area" where
certainly money laundering could happen. In response to Inner City
Press’ second question, about South Ossetia, she described the
Abkhazians as more professional, and having a longer independent
history, than is the case in South Ossetia. Asked if Georgia should
be allowed to speak before the Security Council when it is on the
agenda, she respond that she personally thinks that’s right, but it is
of course up to the Security Council. In the hall outside Room 226,
the Georgia ambassador noted that Russia should not be able to block
Georgia’s attendance and speaking, since these are procedural and
not substantive matters. That and a token, a New York wag replied.
At another stakeout, Inner City Press asked the UN’s head of
peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno for more information on the release of
the final five of the peacekeeper in Ituri in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo. Mr. Guehenno replied that the problem in Ituri is "young
men with guns," and that even those are disarmed can’t find a job. He
said, in a sanitized on-camera version, that those negotiated with,
Peter Karim, changed from day to day.
Inner City Press asked if in his briefing to the Council about the
African Union summit in Banjul, the issue of the Secretary-General’s
new deference to a "Mugabe-selected mediator" came up. Mr. Guehenno
replied both that it had not come up, and that he was not sure if
the mediator was Mugabe-selected. Inner City Press asked, "what
is the mediator’s mandate? Between whom is he mediating — Mugabe
and the Blair government in the UK, or Mugabe and the opposition
in Zimbabwe?" Mr. Guehenno said he is not the one to ask, that the
question should be directed to and answered by Department of Political
Affairs. Okay then.
The main action was dueling resolutions: the Qatari resolution on Gaza,
not expanded to cover Lebanon, texts and more texts on North Korea, and
forthcoming text on Iran. In the midst of these, all covered elsewhere,
French ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere let drop that he met with
the Thai candidate for Secretary-General. Inner City Press pursued
at the stakeout the fate of the Gaza electrical power plant, which
UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said Tuesday should be repaired
by Israel. Inner City Press asked U.S. Ambassador John Bolton if he
had any comment on this. He replied, "I don’t have any comment." Dan
Gillerman, the Ambassador of Israel, said that his country has "no
intention to punish" civilians, but that he has "no information on
the plant." Inner City Press asked to be updated, and asked OCHA to
amplify Jan Egeland’s reference to an "American insurance company"
now possibly barred from paying out on the policy due to sanctions
against Hamas. Who paid the premiums?
Especially, after the insurance company became arguably barred from
paying on the policy? Developing….
Feedback: editorial [at] innercitypress.com
UN Office: S-453A, UN, NY 10017 USA Tel: 718-716-3540
UN’s Corporate Partnerships Will Be Reviewed, While New Teaming Up
with Microsoft, and UNDP Continues
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee at the U.N.
UNITED NATIONS, July 13 — The UN under Kofi Annan has increasingly
worked with corporations. Questions have been raised about background
checks and safeguards. A day after Inner City Press reported that the
UN’s Geneva-based refugee agency had not known that Swiss banker Ivan
Pictet is on the UN Investment Committee when the UNHCR Kashmir Relief
Note placed money with the Pictet Funds India Equity fund, the agency’s
spokesman mused, "Isn’t the UN Investment Fund based in New York?"
Inner City Press asked if it would have been helpful to UNHCR if
the UN system had a database of the companies controlled by the
outside business people who serve on bodies like the UN Investment
Committee. A Google search for that committee and Pictet found close
to nothing. It appears that there is no easy way to find who is on
the UN Investment Committee.
UNHCR’s Ron Redmond answered that that it would "have been helpful
to have that type of information… For UNHCR to look it up is labor
intensive, with all the possible company names." He later added
in writing, "Any additional information on prospective corporate
partners is of course always welcome; it would facilitate our
screening processes." Mr. Redmond states that UNHCR was never
required to ask SocGen to cease using the UNHCR visibility logo,
in part because the brochure that it was on was only intended to be
used for a brief period. But records show that individuals high in UN
Headquarters chided UNHCR for the use of such terms as UNHCR "teams
up" with SocGen. Despite this in-house chiding, or perhaps because
the chiders refuse in their defensiveness to comment for the record,
this practice continues in the UN system to this day, literally.
Click here to view the UN’s World Tourism Organization’s July 12,
2006 press release, "UN tourism agency teams up with Microsoft," which
was published on the UN News Center just as UNHCR SocGen-derilab’s
April 5, 2006 press release was. They just keep teaming up.
As the UN increasingly has intercourse with corporations, basic
safeguards are still not in place. Inner City Press has previously
reported on the lack of background checks when corporations are
allowed to join the UN Global Compact, and has twice been rebuffed
in requests to interview or ask questions of corporate CEOs who have
come to meet the Secretary General or on other Global Compact business.
At Thursday’s noon briefing, spokeswoman Marie Okabe was asked if any
of the individuals in the Secretariat who were asked to comment on
the UNHCR – Pictet – Societe Generale transaction had in fact spoken
or provided guidance. We’re still working on it, Ms.
Okabe answered.
Near six p.m., Ms. Okabe called Inner City Press and said she
had spoken about the matter, as requested, with Under Secretary
General Mark Malloch Brown. "They are aware of the issues," Ms. Okabe
said. "This case highlights the complexities of the UN’s partnerships
with the private sector and so current guidelines and practices of
various funds and agencies and programs will be reviewed" to try to
avoid "potential conflicts of interest" and misuses of UN logos.
Great. But what about the continued "teaming up," now with
Microsoft? There’s more work to be done.
[A note on UNHCR’s work about Uzbekistan: the agency managed to
visit in Kazakhstan with Gabdurafikh Temirbaev, the Uzbek dissident
threatened with refoulement back to Tashkent, and has, its spokesman
said, gotten a commitment to be able to review Uzbekistan’s extradition
request.]
Alongside UNHCR’s work, unlike at the UN Development Programme,
at least UNHCR answered the questions and acknowledged that things
could be better. On UNDP and human rights, on UNDP and refusal to
answer press questions, what will happen?
Zimbabweans
On the issues surrounding UNDP, the Office of the Spokesman for the
Secretary-General managed to get some response from UNDP to a question
Inner City Press asked UNDP in writing more than a week ago: why does
UNDP help the government of Uzbekistan to collect taxes, given the
UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ finding that
this government shot and killed its own people in Andijan in May
2005. Here now is UNDP’s response:
"As far as your UNDP/Uzbekistan questions from the other week,
here’s what I can tell you… in Uzbekistan and most of the 140
developing nations where UNDP operates, UNDP works with government
and civil society on a broad range of governance projects, including
economic reforms, of which tax administration and fiscal policy are a
significant component. Other governance projects in Uzbekistan focus on
gender equality, internet access, and public administration reform. It
may be worth noting that UNDP works in a wide range of political
environments, from Costa Rica to North Korea, with the belief that
UNDP’s mandate as a development agency is to work constructively on
behalf of the people of the developing world wherever and whenever
possible."
One wag wondered if UNDP’s programs in Uzbekistan might involve
technical assistance on not putting political dissidents in boiling
water, as the U.K.’s former ambassador in Tashkent has testified takes
place. And see above, that UNHCR has managed to visit in Kazakhstan
with Gabdurafikh Temirbaev, the Uzbek dissident threatened with
refoulement back to Uzbekistan, where he would face torture —
perhaps with tax funds UNDP helped to collect. UNDP has still not
even purported to answer the week-old question about UNDP’s funding
of Robert Mugabe’s purported "Human Rights Council." Now the Zimbabwe
Lawyers for Human Rights has called for a boycott. What was that again,
about UNDP working with civil society? To be continued.
Feedback: editorial [at] innercitypress.com
UN Office: S-453A, UN, NY 10017 USA Tel: 718-716-3540
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
