GENERAL NEWS

The West can keep its ICC

EDITORIAL

Source: The Herald (Harare)

15 June 2015 - FROM time immemorial Africans have been given a raw deal by Westerners from the time of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to colonialism and now neo-colonialism manifest in several duplicitous institutions that serve to perpetuate Western hegemony.

Even as you read this, police in the United States are busy using African Americans for target practice. No week goes by without reports of some racist shooting down of, or beating of unarmed black Americans.

This is the legacy of the racist concept of white justice that looks at the colour of the suspect not the merits of the case. From the United Nations Security Council to the international financial system dominated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, it is the primacy of the white West that is promoted.

And even in Africa, we host many institutions that are African in name only with Westerners holding significant weighted votes, a case in point being the African Development Bank.

Come to the African Union itself, the body created with the lofty vision of fostering a United States of Africa, it does not help matters that 70 percent of the AU budget is met by development partners who end up influencing the continental agenda.

The same goes for the ICC, that at inception propounded lofty ideals of international justice but which has since morphed into an instrument of Western hegemony by targeting African and Eastern European leaders.

The ICC is today a glorified version of the racist lynch mobs that used to hang Africans on the flimsiest of excuses. Since it was set up, the ICC has indicted only developing world leaders while known war criminals like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, who are guilty of killing and maiming millions in Iraq, strut the world as free men.

Looking at those indicted by the ICC, it is clear that the court operates like a spider’s web that traps only fleas and mosquitoes leaving larger vermin like rats to run riot.

It is this shameful history that saw the AU decide to collectively condemn the ICC and call for an African Court of Justice. We urge the AU, to adopt as one of its resolutions, wholesale withdrawal from the ICC so that the envisaged African Court of Justice can become a reality.

The African position was vindicated yesterday when the ICC, through Western-sponsored proxies, sought to compel South Africa to arrest Sudan president Omar al-Bashir for alleged war crimes.

While South Africa is party to the Rome Statute, Mr Bashir was in South Africa on AU business and had been guaranteed the requisite immunity, which he must be afforded without fail.

That, however, did not deter the NGO-types in the so-called Southern African Litigation Centre to seek Mr Al-Bashir’s detention.

We are encouraged by the ANC position that called on the government of South Africa to guarantee Mr Al-Bashir’s safety.

The Westerners can keep their ICC, and we keep our dignity.

Time for Africa to take its UN seat

EDITORIAL

Source: Daily Mail (Zambia)

15 June 2015 - The call for Africa to have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council is getting louder, and justifiably so. The demand must continue until the rest of the world not only gets the message but more importantly also heeds the demand.

It is not an unreasonable demand. If anything, it is long overdue, and as stated recently, it is a gross injustice that Africa is not represented as a permanent member. The African continent has over 50 countries and surely it deserves to be appropriately represented.

To achieve this goal, Africa should be more united now than ever before. As President Lungu has said, the African Union should remain united and speak with one voice to attain the objective of reforming the UN Security Council.

Indeed the continent should be united if the rest of the world is to see and appreciate the demand. If divided, the rest of the world would not take Africa seriously.

Thankfully for Africa, the continent is united on this desire and the call has been getting louder in recent months. Unity on the continent is getting firmer.

But as President Lungu said at the Summit of the Committee of 10 (C10) of the AU in Johannesburg on Saturday, there is need to continue the crusade beyond the continent.

He rightly states that there is need to continue engaging with all interest groups to help with the crusade.

The collective effort of the C10 committee which was established 10 years ago should bear fruit sooner rather than later. After last month’s C10 summit which Zambia hosted, the resolve is clear and the time has come.

As the 70th anniversary of the founding of the UN draws closer, it must be stressed to all other member nations that Africa can no longer be regarded as a continent of insignificant members.

We don’t see why other members of the UN should object to Africa’s demand for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. There is no justifiable reason to insist on Africa being in the back seat.

Some of the world’s major security concerns are in Africa, and so who is better better placed to make decisions on these other than the people on the continent themselves?

Africa must be in the front seat, along with other stakeholders, to make decisions not only for themselves but to also help in resolving security concerns in other parts of the world.

The time has come for Africa to take its deserved seat.

U.N. Tightens Noose on U.N. Rights Official Who Exposed Abuses

NEWS STORY

Source: Foreign Policy (US)

By Colum Lynch

15 June 2015 - U.N. investigators expand investigation into veteran U.N. human rights official who disclosed abuses against children in the Central African Republic.

United Nations investigators have reopened an internal probe into whether a top U.N. official improperly shared confidential information about efforts to promote human rights in Western Sahara with a senior official from Morocco, which has long sought to limit the monitoring of abuses there, senior U.N.-based officials told Foreign Policy.

The move marks an escalation by U.N. watchdogs to establish whether Anders Kompass, a highly-regarded U.N. human rights official from Sweden, has leaked sensitive information to foreign governments on the internal workings of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Kompass is already the target of a separate probe by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) regarding allegations that he wrongfully provided the French government last July with a confidential U.N. report documenting the sexual abuses of children by French soldiers in the Central African Republic.

The case against Kompass has rankled the United States and many other governments, which fear the leak investigation will feed public perception that the United Nations is seeking to silence an official who intended to halt ongoing abuses against children. The United States has urged the United Nations to pursue an independent investigation into the sexual abuse allegations and the organization’s handling of the case.

Meanwhile, OIOS Chief of Investigations Michael Stefanovic has recused himself from the leak inquiry of Kompass, telling governments during a May 13 meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York that the probe by the nominally-independent unit was being directed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s chief of staff, Susana Malcorra. Stefanovic also told diplomats that his own boss, Canadian Undersecretary-General for OIOS Carman Lapointe, had bypassed established procedures for determining whether the case merited an investigation. Stefanovic said he filed a formal complaint to Ban’s office saying the U.N. investigations unit was being turned into an accomplice in an effort by senior management to get rid of Kompass. U.N. officials said Lapointe believes she can launch an investigation under her own authority, and did so in this instance because of the political sensitivity of the case.

The situation first came to light on May 6, when the Guardian reported that the United Nations had suspended Kompass from his post for giving French authorities the confidential report, which included the names of the victims, investigators, and alleged perpetrators. The six-page report, which was obtained by FP with the names of individuals redacted, details multiple examples in which soldiers from France, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea traded military rations and money for sexual favors from children as young as 8 years old. The soldiers were serving under the command of the French military and the African Union, not the United Nations.

Kompass has since been reinstated to his post by a judge in the U.N.’s administrative tribunal, pending the outcome of the investigation. The intergovernmental organization has defended its decision to investigate Kompass, saying that his actions potentially endangered the very children he claims to have been trying to protect.

“The leaked document contains notes of interviews, including, notably, names and other identifying information pertaining to alleged child victims,” Malcorra wrote in a confidential letter to U.N. members obtained by FP. “The disclosure of this document may endanger the safety or security of the children, violate their rights, and invade their privacy.”

In an effort to illustrate the risks, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein of Jordan, told reporters in Geneva last month that the names of the victims had been widely leaked to the media, including a French television crew that tracked down one mother who said that she beat her son so badly after learning that he had engaged in a sex act with a French soldier that “if someone had not stopped me, I would have killed him.” But that woman, who accompanied her son when he initially described the abuses to U.N. investigators, was aware of what happened long before the report had been disclosed to the French.

The handling of the case has generated little support from governments at U.N. headquarters. A group of about 15 countries, including several Latin American and Scandinavian governments, as well as Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, and Tanzania, have pressed Ban to get to the bottom of what happened and to examine the U.N.’s treatment of Kompass.

Officials from those governments say the United Nations seems more committed to disciplining Kompass than taking action to curb violations in the Central African Republic. Skepticism deepened after Paula Donovan — a former U.N. official and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Aids-Free World, who leaked the Central African Republic report to the Guardian — published a string of internal emails and memos documenting the U.N.’s efforts to force Kompass out of his job as the third-highest-ranking official at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Kompass first came under scrutiny in late 2014, when an anonymous source, using the Twitter handle @Chris_Coleman24, tweeted links to a string of alleged emails from the Moroccan ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Omar Hilale, to his foreign minister in Rabat. The emails showed Hilale boasting that he had placed a number of individuals, including Kompass and then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, in his pocket.

Soon afterward, Prince Zeid was appointed high commissioner and asked the Office of Internal Oversight Services to look into allegations against Kompass.

U.N. investigators based in Vienna questioned Kompass, examined all of his official emails and telephone records, and scrubbed the hard drive of his computer, according to a senior U.N.-based official familiar with the investigation. They found no evidence that he wrote any of the purported emails.

In March, Malcorra informed Prince Zeid that the investigation into sensitive information given to the Moroccans “could not substantiate any responsibility for Anders Kompass,” according to an account by Prince Zeid’s deputy, Flavia Pansieri, which was leaked by Donovan’s outfit.

Earlier this month, the OIOS informed Kompass in a letter that the investigation into the possible disclosures of confidential information to Morocco had found no evidence implicating him and that the case had been closed, according to a person familiar with the matter. But the OIOS left open the possibility that the case could be revisited if new evidence surfaced.

The U.N. investigations division also produced a so-called “closure report” declaring the Western Sahara investigation over. But Lapointe refused to sign off on the report on the grounds that crucial witnesses, including the Moroccan ambassador, had never been questioned in the course of the investigation. From Lapointe’s point of view, the case has never been closed.

It remains unclear whether U.N. investigators have obtained new information. But the investigators plan to approach Hilale, who is currently serving as Morocco’s envoy to U.N. headquarters in New York.

Hilale did not respond to a request for comment.

Around the same time Malcorra informed him the Morocco investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, Prince Zeid discovered that Kompass had also admitted to sharing the U.N.’s internal report on violations in the Central African Republic. At that point, Prince Zeid instructed Pansieri to urge Kompass to resign from his post.

Kompass refused and told Pansieri he would fight against stepping down. Stockholm also weighed in: A senior Swedish diplomat in New York warned U.N. ethics officer Joan Dubinsky that “it would not be a good thing if the High Commission for Human Rights forced Mr. Kompass to resign. If that occurred, it would go public and a harmful and ugly debate would occur.” Dubinsky is supposed to represent whistle-blowers at the United Nations.

A week later, Malcorra hosted a meeting in Turin, Italy, with Prince Zeid, Pansieri, and Dubinsky to address the standoff with Kompass. Following the meeting, Pansieri asked Kompass to provide an account of his disclosure of the Central African Republic report to France.

Kompass has denied providing sensitive information to the Moroccans. But he said he decided to furnish France with a report on abuses because he felt the U.N. mission was not prepared to act on its findings, and he was confident that Paris could help bring the abuses to an end. “I acted with the only concern of stopping the violations as soon as possible and in the context of the U.N. [‘s] zero-tolerance policy for exploitation and abuse,” Kompass said in a memo he drafted in his internal account.

Kompass maintains he has never hidden the fact that he provided the report to the French, which he delivered with a U.N. cover letter and his signature. Less than two weeks after he gave the report to French authorities, he informed Pansieri that he had done so and attached a copy of the redacted report, according to his account. Kompass maintains that Pansieri’s special assistant sent him an email on August 8 confirming the receipt of the report, and indicating that the report had also been shared with Ban’s office, more than six months before the United Nations began investigating him. Pansieri, Kompass noted, “had never indicated that my behavior had been mistaken.”

The high commissioner’s office said that while it may have been appropriate to alert the French, it was reckless to release a report that included the names of the abused children and the investigators. U.N. officials maintain that the investigator on the ground was mortified at the leak. “I believe this lack of respect for the confidentially of the sources endangered both the alleged victims and interviewers,” the investigator wrote in a March 19 letter to Prince Zeid.

Diplomats speaking to Foreign Policy said the Turin meeting left the impression that the U.N.’s nominally-independent internal investigators and ethics officer were operating under instructions from the secretary-general’s office.

Diplomats from these governments say the United Nations appears to have devoted a disproportionate amount of effort to pursuing Kompass, while doing little to focus on the abuses underway in the Central African Republic. Facing pressure from the United States and others, Ban on June 3 announced he would launch an “external, independent review” of the allegations and examine the U.N. response. “The secretary-general is deeply disturbed by the allegations of sexual abuse by soldiers in the Central African Republic, as well as allegations of how this was handled by various parts of the U.N. system involved,” according to a statement from Ban’s office.

“This is not good for the reputation of the U.N.,” said one European diplomat, who spoke to FP on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue more candidly. “The key issue certainly for us is that these are grave violations that we have seen in the Central African Republic, but for the outsider it looks like nothing is being done until they finally shoot the messenger. It’s the imbalance in their reaction.”

Fernando Carrera, the U.N. ambassador from Guatemala, said the controversy surrounding the allegations of abuse in the Central African Republic threatens to blight the international reputation of the global diplomatic body as it heads into its 70th birth anniversary.

Guatemala is one of 15 counties — including some from Scandinavia and Latin America, as well as Australia and Japan — that for weeks have been pressing Ban to investigate the U.N.’s handling of the case. Carrera said some members of that group also have conveyed concerns by the United States that the handling of the case against Kompass, who has claimed whistle-blower status, could jeopardize congressional funding to the United Nations. A senior U.S. official has personally appealed to the U.N. secretariat to assign the investigation to an independent panel of experts.

“There is a wide consensus that anyone who comes out denouncing the sexual abuse of children or women by peacekeeping operation or troops is doing the right thing,” the U.S. official said. “People who dare to say things [on behalf of young victims] should be protected — not punished.”

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