Extra: Guterres Bought Off Overseeing PGA with Oceans Job as Banned Press from Maldives Photo Op - more here, incl on Arabian Peninsula media
More on this UNgutted 11 - and on Arabian Gulf media pressing for censorship in the UN - on X for Subscribers here and below the paywall / Subscribe (support) line here
by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack
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 below
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