by Richard Gowan | Feb 5, 2009 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
The Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat has interviewed Ban Ki-moon, and the English transcript of the Secretary-General’s comments is powerful stuff:
When was the last time you got really angry?
There were a few moments.
Like? I want to get to know you. People don’t know you well—Ban Ki-Moon the Secretary General or Ban Ki-Moon the man.
There were a few moments when I was so angry… First of all when things were not moving as I expected and as I have urged in the situation in Gaza. The humanitarian sufferings, the UN humanitarian assistance were not delivering properly… people were suffering from lack of water, electricity. They were not able to move and I was very angry and I expressed this emotion when I talked to Israeli authorities.
Sometimes I was angry if my reform agenda was not moving as quickly as possible. There was some bureaucracy within– inherently embedded through some resistance in the agencies among the staff. Then, you know, I exploded, myself.
What do you do when you get angry?
Oh, I express my anger.
Do you shout?
Yes, I shout it. (Turning to his spokeswoman Michel Montas) As you have witnessed many times.
On a personal level, have you been angry recently? You know we all get angry with our children, our family, our brothers or sisters…
I don’t have any such occasions when I was angry with my own family members. It’s just, you know, I am disciplined. And my family members are also very disciplined and show respect for all these rules. There are some rules and some relationships you have to keep. With others, I get, of course, angry.
Learning this, the interviewer goes out of his way to piss off the SG… (more…)
by David Steven | Feb 5, 2009 | Off topic
Thanks to Flickr user g-hat
Apartheid – described by Nelson Mandela as an ‘evil system’ – is thought by many to have ended in 1994 when twenty million South Africans voted in the country’s first free and fair elections.
Not so, according to the Institute of Directors – which has just released a report exploring pensions apartheid, a system which sees some British public sector workers get higher retirement benefits than their private sector equivalents. This, the business lobby group believes, is analogous to decades of black African racial segregation, discrimination and abuse.
Some ideas for future IOD publications:
- Shoah – gassing small business with regulation
- Gang Raped by Government – changes to the tax code for non-domiciled high net worth individuals, and
- 9/11 – terrorized by the European Working Time Directive
After all, when surrounded by evil, you have a duty to speak out.
by David Steven | Feb 4, 2009 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
A few hours ago, Daniel Korski suggested on Global Dashboard that the United Nations lied about the shelling of one of its schools – with the UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon, playing a part in disseminating the falsehood in a statement in which he condemned this and two similar attacks as ‘unacceptable’.
Like Daniel, I don’t fully understand what happened, or why – but have been trying to track how the story developed. It appears that re-investigation of the attack was conducted by Patrick Martin, from the Canadian Globe and Mail. His story was headlined “account of the Israeli story doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”
Martin interviewed eyewitnesses who told him that while “a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed.” No shell landed in the schoolyard itself, he writes, but 43 people were killed by three shells in the street outside.
Martin’s report continues:
The teacher who was in the compound at the time of the shelling says he heard three loud blasts, one after the other, then a lot of screaming. “I ran in the direction of the screaming [inside the compound],” he said. “I could see some of the people had been injured, cut. I picked up one girl who was bleeding by her eye, and ran out on the street to get help. But when I got outside, it was crazy hell. There were bodies everywhere, people dead, injured, flesh everywhere.”
The teacher, who refused to give his name because he said UNRWA had told the staff not to talk to the news media, was adamant: “Inside [the compound] there were 12 injured, but there were no dead.”
“Three of my students were killed,” he said. “But they were all outside.”
Hazem Balousha, who runs an auto-body shop across the road from the UNRWA school, was down the street, just out of range of the shrapnel, when the three shells hit. He showed a reporter where they landed: one to the right of his shop, one to the left, and one right in front.
“There were only three,” he said. “They were all out here on the road.”
This account seems broadly consistent with the UN News Centre report that Daniel links to (and which contains Ban’s condemnation). In it John Ging is reported as saying that “some 30 people were killed and 55 others injured, five of them critically, when three artillery shells landed at the perimeter of a school, which usually serves as a girls’ preparatory school, in the Jabaliya refugee camp.”
Martin argues that the United Nations’ description of the attack was ambiguous and that UN agencies failed to correct “widespread news reports of the deaths in the school.” Israeli reports also seem to have been confused, however, with Mark Regev, the Israeli PM’s spokesman telling the media that (i) there was hostile fire from the school; (ii) the explosion that resulted was “out of proportion to the ordnance we used.” (e.g. that the school had been booby trapped).
(more…)
by Daniel Korski | Feb 4, 2009 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
One of the most disturbing stories to emerge during Israel’s recent incursion in Gaza was Israeli shelling of a UN school. This is how Reuters described it:
Israeli shelling killed more than 40 Palestinians on Tuesday at a U.N. school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said.
The BBC reported that
. . .at least 40 people were killed and 55 injured when Israeli artillery shells landed outside a United Nations-run school in Gaza, UN officials have said.
But though the BBC story placed the shell outside the school, UN officials have now set the record straight. As Haaretz reports, Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, clarified that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself.
UNRWA said that the source of the mistaken story had originated “with a separate branch of the United Nations.” Unfortunately, this branch seems to have pretty good access to the UN Secretary-General’s office, because on 6 January 2009 Ban Ki-Moon himself spoke out against Israel’s “totally unacceptable” attacks against what the UN’s own News Centre called “three clearly-marked United Nations schools, where civilians were seeking refuge from the ongoing conflict in Gaza”.
Who knows what actually happened. The fog of war was deliberately made thicker by both the IDF and Hamas. It is clear many people, including civilians, died in Gaza. But the UN school story is beginning to look like the Jenin “massacre” story from 2002. Then the Palestinian news agency Wafa was reporting that Israel had committed the “massacre of the 21st century” in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. “Medical sources” informed Wafa of “hundreds of martyrs.” Reports of the supposed Israeli atrocities in Jenin were spread by Palestinian sources on CNN and elsewhere.
But this turned out to be a lie. There was a battle in Jenin. But the “hundreds” of martyrs were an invention. The death toll was 56 Palestinians, the majority of them combatants, and 23 Israeli soldiers. By then, however, the story had served its purpose, much the same as the UN school story did.
In war, information is a weapon. But not one usually used by the UN.
by Daniel Korski | Feb 4, 2009 | UK
Something odd is happening. Though the Tories are cruising for electoral success, many sympathisers are worried that the party has neither the policies nor personalities to make a success of government.
In the City, many bankers and businessmen are unimpressed by George Osborne. People in the defence establishment think Liam Fox is a lightweight. And foreign policy-watchers like William Hague, but worries that he is only working part-time.
When David Milliband offered a duff analysis of international terrorism in The Guardian and managed to insult the Indian government, there was hardly a peep from the Tory frontbench, through the strategic and electoral reasons to speak up are obvious.
This may not prevent the Tories from wining an election, but it could make their time in government look a lot like Labour’s 1997-2001 term – full of intentions and spin, but short on delivery.
It will take more than an “Implementation Unit” to change this. However, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown may have shown the way out of this predicament. They have all brought outsiders or retired officials back into government. Bush brought back General Pete Schoomaker as Army chief and, famously, made Roberts Gates Defence Secretary. Obama has appointed retired admiral Denis Blair as the U.S spy chief and made the Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu Energy Secretary. Brown, meanwhile, has packed the Lords with outsiders, Peter Mandelson just being the most famous (and powerful).
Forgetting for a moment the constitutional problems presented by having too many peers in government as well as the problems arising from having apolitical ministers (like Shriti “Green Shoots” Vadera) what would a line-up of Tory GOATS look like? Readers will have their own views, but to kick-start the discussion here is my list:
1. Arcadia’s Phillip Green as Business Secretary
2. Olympian Sebastian Coe as Sports and Culture Secretary
3. Environmentalist Zac Goldsmith to head the Climate & Energy Department
4. The Times Foreign Affairs Editor Bronwen Maddox as National Security Adviser
5. Former General Rupert Smith as Chief of Defence
6. Ex-AVIVA boss Richard Harvey as International Development Secretary
7. Joel I Klein as Education Secretary (why not a Yank?)
8. Para-Olympian Chris Holmes as Veteran Affairs Secretary
It may also be wise to appoint a number of junior ministers from outside Westminster (though I confess to believing each department ought to have only one “Deputy Secretary of State”, not scores of Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries). In the Ministry of Defence, for example, I’d make someone like NATO’s Jamie Shea a junior minister or Ronnie Flanagan a Deputy Home Secretary.
What do you think?
