Category Archives: United Nations

Obama orders curbs on NSA spying on UN headquarters

Reuters reports: President Barack Obama recently ordered the National Security Agency to curtail eavesdropping on the United Nations headquarters in New York as part of a review of U.S. electronic surveillance, according to a U.S. official familiar with the decision.

Obama’s order is the latest known move by the White House to limit the NSA’s vast intelligence collection, in the wake of protests by allies, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, over U.S. spying on foreign heads of state.

The full extent of U.S. eavesdropping on the United Nations is not publicly known, nor is it clear whether the United States has stopped all monitoring of diplomats assigned to the U.N. in New York or elsewhere around the world.

“The United States is not conducting electronic surveillance targeting the United Nations headquarters in New York,” said a senior Obama administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official did not address past surveillance of the world body. Such programs are highly classified, although some details have been leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. [Continue reading…]

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UN confirms polio outbreak in Syria

The New York Times reports: United Nations officials confirmed an outbreak of polio among children in Syria on Tuesday, lending urgency to plans for vaccination campaigns there and in nearby countries to try to halt the spread of the disease.

Tests confirmed polio in 10 out of 22 children in Deir al-Zour Province in northeastern Syria who became ill this month, Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, said. Results of tests on the other 12 children are expected soon, he added.

“With population movements, it can travel to other areas, so the risk is high of spread across the region,” Mr. Rosenbauer said.

United Nations officials said last week they were launching a campaign to immunize 2.4 million children in Syria against polio and other diseases. With thousands of refugees fleeing daily from Syria’s civil war to neighboring countries, they are also intensifying immunization efforts in six countries, including Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey, which have taken in more than two million Syrian refugees, as well as Egypt and Israel.

Most of the affected children in Syria are under two years old, Mr. Rosenbauer said, underscoring the impact of 31 months of conflict on Syria’s health infrastructure. The United Nations says half a million Syrian children have not been inoculated against polio in a country where, before the conflict, 95 percent of the country’s population was immunized.

Despite the difficulty of delivering vaccines in a country convulsed by war, the United Nations Children’s Fund said it had vaccinated about a million Syrian children this year, including 800,000 who were vaccinated against polio.

After confirming the presence of the disease, attention is turning to identifying the source, Mr. Rosenbauer said. Public health officials have speculated that a possible source may have been jihadists traveling to Syria from Pakistan which, with Afghanistan and Nigeria, are the only countries where the disease is still endemic. [Continue reading…]

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Iran will participate in upcoming Syria talks — if invited

CNN reports: Iran will take part in a conference intended to hash out a solution to the Syrian conflict before the end of the year — if it receives an invitation, an Iranian official said Saturday, according to state-run media.

“Iran will do its best to help solve the issue through dialogue between the Syrian parties,” said Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, according to the Iranian news agency IRNA.

Speaking at a joint news conference with Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy on Syria, Zarif said Tehran would participate in the Geneva talks to help end the war through political means.

Brahimi arrived Saturday in Tehran with a delegation on his second trip to Iran since he was appointed to the U.N. mission, according to state-run Press TV. He is on a Middle East tour aimed at raising support for the planned meeting.

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NSA: Brazil and Germany lead calls for UN resolution on internet privacy

The Guardian reports: Brazil and Germany are spearheading efforts at the United Nations to protect the privacy of electronic communications in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations and allegations of mass US spying.

Diplomats from the two countries, which have both been targeted by America’s National Security Agency, are leading efforts by a coalition of nations to draft a UN general assembly resolution calling for the right to privacy on the internet.

Although non-binding, the resolution would be one of the strongest condemnations of US snooping to date.

“This resolution will probably have enormous support in the GA [general assembly] since no one likes the NSA spying on them,” a western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, has previously cancelled a state visit to Washington over the revelation that the NSA was scooping up large amounts of Brazilian communications data, including from the state-run oil company Petrobras. The drafting of the UN resolution was confirmed by the country’s foreign ministry.

The Associated Press quoted a diplomat who said the language of the resolution would not be “offensive” to any nation, particularly the US.

He added that it would expand the right to privacy guaranteed by the international covenant on civil and political rights, which went into force in 1976. [Continue reading…]

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Prince Bandar distances Saudis from U.S. over policies in Syria, Iran and Egypt

The Wall Street Journal reports: Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief told European diplomats this weekend that he plans to scale back cooperating with the U.S. to arm and train Syrian rebels in protest of Washington’s policy in the region, participants in the meeting said.

Prince Bandar Bin Sultan al-Saud’s move increases tensions in a growing dispute between the U.S. and one of its closest Arab allies over Syria, Iran and Egypt policies. It follows Saudi Arabia’s surprise decision on Friday to renounce a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

The Saudi government, after preparing and campaigning for the seat for a year, cited what it said was the council’s ineffectiveness in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian and Syrian conflicts.

Diplomats here said Prince Bandar, who is leading the kingdom’s efforts to fund, train and arm rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, invited a Western diplomat to the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah over the weekend to voice Riyadh’s frustration with the Obama administration and its regional policies, including the decision not to bomb Syria in response to its alleged use of chemical weapons in August.

“This was a message for the U.S., not the U.N.,” Prince Bandar was quoted by diplomats as specifying of Saudi Arabia’s decision to walk away from the Security Council membership.

Top decisions in Saudi Arabia come from the king, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, and it isn’t known if Prince Bandar’s reported remarks reflected a decision by the monarch, or an effort by Prince Bandar to influence the king. However, the diplomats said, Prince Bandar told them he intends to roll back a partnership with the U.S. in which the Central Intelligence Agency and other nations’ security bodies have covertly helped train Syrian rebels to fight Mr. Assad, Prince Bandar said, according to the diplomats. Saudi Arabia would work with other allies instead in that effort, including Jordan and France, the prince was quoted as saying. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. has killed far more civilians with drones than it admits, says UN report

The Guardian reports: A United Nations investigation has so far identified 33 drone strikes around the world that have resulted in civilian casualties and may have violated international humanitarian law.

The report by the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson QC, calls on the US to declassify information about operations co-ordinated by the CIA and clarify its positon on the legality of unmanned aerial attacks.

Published ahead of a debate on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, at the UN general assembly in New York next Friday, the 22-page document examines incidents in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan and Gaza.

It has been published to coincide with a related report released earlier on Thursday by Professor Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, which warned that the technology was being misused as a form of “global policing”.

Emmerson, who travelled to Islamabad for his investigation, said the Pakistan ministry of foreign affairs has records of as many as 330 drone strikes in the country’s north-western tribal areas since 2004. Up to 2,200 people have been killed – of whom at least 400 were civilians – according to the Pakistan government.

In Yemen, Emmerson’s report says that as many as 58 civilians are thought to have been killed in attacks by UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). “While the fact that civilians have been killed or injured does not necessarily point to a violation of international humanitarian law, it undoubtedly raises issues of accountability and transparency,” the study notes. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia rejects U.N. Security Council seat in protest move

The New York Times reports: Saudi Arabia stunned the United Nations and even some of its own diplomats on Friday by rejecting a highly coveted seat on the Security Council, a decision that underscored the depth of Saudi anger over what the monarchy sees as weak and conciliatory Western stances toward Syria and Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

The Saudi decision, which could have been made only with King Abdullah’s approval, came a day after it had won a Security Council seat for the first time, and it appeared to be unprecedented.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry released a statement rejecting the seat just hours after the kingdom’s own diplomats — both at the United Nations and in Riyadh, the Saudi capital — were celebrating their new seat, the product of two years of work to assemble a crack diplomatic team in New York. Some analysts said the sudden turnabout gave the impression of a self-destructive temper tantrum.

But one Saudi diplomat said the decision came after weeks of high-level debate about the usefulness of a seat on the Security Council, where Russia and China have repeatedly drawn Saudi anger by blocking all attempts to pressure Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Abdullah has voiced rising frustration with the continuing violence in Syria, a fellow Muslim-majority nation where one of his wives was born. He is said to have been deeply disappointed when President Obama decided against airstrikes on Syria’s military in September in favor of a Russian-proposed agreement to secure Syria’s chemical weapons. [Continue reading…]

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The elevation of Jeffrey Feltman

Vijay Prashad writes: A blog visited mainly by UN insiders announces that US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman is up for a very important UN job. Former UN Assistant Secretary General for Public Information Samir Sanbar’s blog, UN Forum, notes that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is set to replace B. Lynn Pascoe with Feltman in the post of UN Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs. The office was created in 1992 to help identify and resolve political conflicts around the world. Pascoe ran at least a dozen missions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, notably in Burundi, Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya. The longest running mission is in Somalia (since 1995) and the most recent is in Libya (since September 2011). With a budget of $250 million and funds for special political missions that amount, this year, to $1 billion, the post allows its leader to intervene in political crises around the world.

When Secretary General Ban began his second term in January, he promised to reshuffle some of his senior staff. Pascoe’s replacement is part of this process.

Of the proposed new appointment Sanbar writes, “Designating someone with varied field experience, though controversial, and from a substantially senior post, may mean that more issues could be referred to the Security Council.” The UN Security Council’s Secretariat is handled by the Department of Political Affairs, which would be able to have some sway on its agenda. The post is central to the UN bureaucracy.

News of Feltman’s resignation from the State Department next week simply confirmed all the rumors. Another rumor suggests that the UN will announce the appointment on Monday, May 28.

Is Jeffrey Feltman the best person to run such an influential office in the UN? Why did Sanbar believe that this appointment is “controversial.”

Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that Feltman is “an accomplished and respected American diplomat.” He has been involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran, Lebanon and Syria, and other hot spots. These bring up “inevitably controversial issues,” Telhami continued. “Feltman would have his share of detractors, including in the Middle East,” he said.

But why would Feltman have these “detractors” and how did he come off on the “controversial issues”?

On one issue Feltman is remarkably consistent. When it comes to the Middle East, Feltman has been outspoken about the threats posed by Iran in the region. Whether in Beirut or Manama, he has publically denounced Iranian “interference” outside its own boundaries. At the same time, Feltman has generously offered US assistance to these same regimes. In other words, US interference is quite acceptable, but Iranian interference is utterly unacceptable. This might be adequate behavior for the diplomat of a country, but it is hardly the temperament for a senior UN official. It raises doubts about Feltman’s ability to be even-handed in his deliberations as a steward of the world’s political dilemmas.

Feltman’s intemperate logic was not of the distant past. It was on display in March 2012 at a Lebanese American Organization’s meeting at the Cannon Office Building in Washington, DC (as Franklin Lamb reported on this site this week). At this meeting, the former US Ambassador to Lebanon, instructed the Lebanese people as to what they must do in their next election, “The Lebanese people must join together to tell Hezbollah and its allies that the Lebanese state will no longer be hijacked for an Iranian-Syrian agenda.” The people must “use the 2013 parliamentary elections to defeat the remnants of the Syrian occupation, the pillar of which is Hezbollah.” [Continue reading…]

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Why has the U.N. been so silent about the U.S. drone program?

Colum Lynch writes: Of the 60 people who have died in 14 reported drone attacks in Pakistan tribal areas since September, the names of all but one of the victims, an alleged leader of the Haqqani terror network named Janbaz Zadran, remain classified.

Since 9/11, the United States has dramatically expanded its covert drone program, killing between several hundred to more than 2,000 people, mostly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, according to human rights groups. Carried out it in near total secrecy (even the existence of the drone program is classified), it’s impossible for outsiders to assess whether U.S. kill operations meet the standards of international law.

The drone program has proven highly controversial in Yemen — where a U.S. strike, prompted by bad intelligence, in May, resulted in the killing of a Yemeni official — and in Pakistan, where it has strained U.S. relations with a key ally in the war on terror. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency temporarily suspended drone operations in Pakistan in an effort to repair the two countries’ relationship. But the U.N. leadership has shown little interest in registering concern about a practice considered highly controversial — even before the United States launched its war on terrorism after 9/11. While some of Washington allies’ are reportedly troubled by the scope of the U.S. killing campaign they have registered little public concern about it at the United Nations, leaving Iran as a relatively lone voice of protest against the program following their capture of an American surveillance drone in December.

Last month, Turtle Bay asked U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at his year-end press conference about his views on the use of drones, and whether he worries about countries like Iran or Russia taking up the practice. “I don’t have much to say about all this, what kind of means the member states use,” Ban answered. “This is something which national governments, military authorities, they may decide.”

Ban said that while he hoped these nations act within the bounds of “international regulations and understandings” he realizes that “with the rapid development of technology, many countries develop their own military means of getting, collecting information. Other than that, I do not have comments on this matter.”

Ban’s reluctance to address the drone policy stands in contrast to his predecessor Kofi Annan’s criticism of other controversial aspects of the U.S. led war on terror, particularly its detention and rendition policies.

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UN says deaths in Syria unrest exceed 5,000

Al Jazeera reports: More than 5,000 people are now believed to have been killed in the Syrian government’s crackdown on protests, the United Nations rights chief has told the UN Security Council.

The UN’s Navi Pillay said on Monday there were reports of increased attacks by opposition groups on President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces but highlighted “alarming” events in the besieged protest city of Homs, according to diplomats in the closed meeting.

More than 14,000 people are estimated to have been detained and at least 300 children are among the dead, Pillay told the 15-nation council, according to diplomats.

She estimated that at least 12,400 have fled into neighbouring countries since the anti-government protests erupted in March.

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UNESCO funding cut by U.S. puts millions of lives at risk — NYT science blogger blames the rest of the world

At his Dot Earth blog in the New York Times, Andrew Revkin points out the devastating consequences which may follow budget cuts at UNESCO, now that U.S. funding has been severed due to the U.N. agency’s acceptance of Palestine as a full member.

Revkin relays a report from Oakley Brooks, author of Tsunami Alert: Beating Asia’s Next Big One, who writes:

There are plenty of things that the multi-tentacled Unesco does, in its slow and bloated way, which the world really needs. One indispensable and thankless Unesco task is organizing tsunami warnings systems and pushing for tsunami education on risky shores around the world.

I have serious reservations about relying on warning systems near fault lines — they tend to make people complacent between events and confused during. But these systems are undeniable saviors for long-distance tsunamis, such as the one that traveled trans-Pacific, from Japan to the U.S. West Coast, last March.

It’s frustrating to think that the ever-widening collateral damage from American Holy Land politics would reach — like its own long-distance tsunami — into the essential work on tsunami science.

Since UNESCO’s loss of funding is due to a law passed by the US Congress back in 1990, before the Oslo Accords and before anyone in Washington professed their support for the creation of a Palestinian state, Oakley correctly attributes the source of the damage to American Holy Land politics.

Revkin, however, wants to locate the problem elsewhere:

To my mind, the 107 nations that voted for Palestine’s membership knew what the financial result would be, and were willing to put the agency’s operations at risk for the sake of making a geopolitical point. That seems unwise. But that’s a personal, not professional view, on my part.

Since the bulk of Revkin’s writing covers environmental issues, whatever views he might have about Israel and Palestine are hard to glean. But he certainly doesn’t lack an interest in politics. In the mid-90s he reported on multiple ways the Bush administration was interfering with science.

Perhaps he sees the UNESCO issue as just another example of politics intruding on the work of scientists. Yet he seems to assign a law passed by Congress with something like the immutable status of a law of physics and think that the political points are only being made at the U.N..

As Ian Williams notes:

The actual legislation [PDF] the state department invokes is a 1990 prohibition on funding “the United Nations or any specialised agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organisation the same standing as a member state”, and another in 1994 banning payments to “any affiliated organisation of the United Nations which grants full membership as a state to any organisation or group that does not have the internationally recognised attributes of statehood”.

Any president, as we have seen, has ways to get around congressional mandates like this. For example, there are questions about which manifestation of Palestine is applying: the PLO or the Palestinian Authority. The congressional legislation was passed before the Oslo accords – and before the US began funding the Palestinians directly, so an executive decision could have declared that events had overtaken the intent of the law, and, what is more, that it was not the PLO but the Palestinian state that had been admitted.

As for the second part, US diplomats will have fun explaining why the US maintains membership of the World Bank and IMF – which have admitted Kosovo, whose disputed territory and statehood, rightly or wrongly, has far less general recognition than Palestine’s.

Are there any other indications that Revkin may be subject to his own non-scientific slant when it comes to issues involving the Middle East?

Back in early February, when the Egyptian revolution was in full swing, Revkin was among those helping promote a fear that a wave of uprisings across the region might cause trouble for the United States if oil supplies were disrupted. At that moment, he and his interlocutor, Gal Luft, saw a beacon of hope being raised in Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu with an initiative aimed at ending global dependence on oil.

Revkin also sought council from leading neoconservative, James Woolsey. The former CIA director saw in Revkin’s inquiry an opportunity to preach about the fount of all peril: Iran.

The point is that this Iranian government will use any tool it can – religious and otherwise – to spread its influence. If we see demonstrations in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States it will be highly likely that more is going on, with an Iranian hand behind it, than just impressionable folks watching television and imitating what they see. It will be about Iran moving to build its ability to call the shots.

Does all of this imply that Revkin has his own Middle East agenda? Kind of, but I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with supporting Israel. It sounds more like a strain of environmentalist populism that wants to harness America’s isolationist and xenophobic trends as a means to break our dependence on oil.

The problem with reinforcing prejudice for the sake of a good cause is that the prejudice may end up being served better than the cause.

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Palestinians may push for U.N. vote they expect to lose

The Guardian reports: The Palestinians are resigned to losing their battle for majority backing within the United Nations security council for their application for full UN membership but may still press for a vote next week in an attempt to discomfort countries who abstain or vote against.

The security council is to meet in New York on Friday to consider a report on the Palestinian bid. However, the Palestinians have failed to muster the required two-thirds majority among its 15 members, thus sparing the US the need to use its veto to prevent the application being approved.

The Palestinians will also officially receive the report on Friday and the leadership will meet to decide future steps, according to a Palestinian official. “There will definitely be no vote [at the security council] tomorrow,” he said.

One of the options for the Palestinians to consider is to demand a vote next week, knowing they will lose. “Let these countries publicly justify why they will not support a Palestinian state,” said the official. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, looked “deeply uncomfortable” in the House of Commons this week when explaining Britain’s decision to abstain in any vote, he added.

Another option is to take their case to the UN general assembly without a security council vote. The Palestinians are expected to win the support of more than two-thirds of the UN’s 193 countries, but the general assembly can only approve upgraded observer status rather than full membership.

However, enhanced “non-member state” status may allow the Palestinians access to international bodies such as the international criminal court.

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Thwarted at the U.N., is Palestinian leader Abbas headed off into the sunset?

Tony Karon writes: President Mahmoud Abbas’ attempt to persuade the U.N. Security Council to admit a state of Palestine as a full member of the international body has, all too predictably, hit a wall. The technical U.N. committee to which the issue was referred , not surprisingly, failed to reach a consensus (because there’s no consensus among Council members). Even if a vote was held despite that disagreement, it’s unlikely that the Palestinians would achieve the nine ayes that would prompt the U.S. to kill the measure with a veto. Abbas’ aides have been forced to concede defeat.

Most of the international community supports the principle of Palestinian statehood on the 1967 lines — even the U.S. government supports it, although Abbas would be ill-advised to hold his breath waiting, as he has done for two decades, for Washington to deliver that outcome. And even many of those countries that continue — at Washington’s insistence — to mouth the mantra that the only way to get there is in talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu don’t believe that Israel will voluntarily yield to the international consensus on terms for a two-state solution. But it’s naive to imagine that governments cast their votes at the U.N. on the basis of moral choices; more often than not, U.N. votes reflect the balance of power. As long as the U.S. was willing to campaign aggressively against them (it was, with Netanyahu marveling that President Obama “deserved a medal” for his speech scolding the Palestinians) and other key players saw no compelling reason to engage in a sustained diplomatic confrontation with Washington on the issue (none did), predicting the outcome didn’t exactly require clairvoyant powers.

France’s position is instructive: President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose mistrust of Netanyahu is now a matter of public record, warned that France would have to abstain at the Security Council, but promised support for a Palestinian move in the General Assembly to upgrade their status to that of observer state. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel who has twice clashed publicly with the Israeli leader over his settlement policy (and voted against the U.S. last February’s Security Council condemnation of ongoing settlements) also made clear from the get-go that it would vote against admitting Palestine as a U.N. member state.

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‘New setback’ for Palestinian hopes on U.N. membership

BBC News reports: A UN diplomat says the UK, France and Colombia have told Security Council members they would abstain in any vote on Palestinian membership.

None of these countries have officially confirmed this yet.

But their decision is a setback for the Palestinians, who have been trying to win support from European states.

A Council committee is considering a Palestinian application to become a UN member state and is expected to present its report next week.

The UN diplomat said Britain, France and Colombia stated their positions in a private meeting of the Security Council committee dealing with the Palestinian application.

The diplomat said Germany also declared it could not support the Palestinian bid, without clarifying whether it would abstain or vote against.

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World history at warp speed

Helena Cobban asks: From Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Pakistan, to Somalia, to Yemen– and now, to Libya… What has the U.S. military brought in its wake?? The collapse of communities, of whole economies, of institutions, and families… Tragedies, wherever you look.

This is not to indict individual members of the military, which as a group of people probably contains as great a proportion of decent, competent people as any group of that size. What has happened has not been the fault of the individual people in the military, but in the fact that it was the military that was used at all in response to all these problems. For each and every one of those “problems”, there were non-military policies that were available and could have been pursued– most likely with, at the end of the day, a lot more success from the American people’s point of view than we ended up winning. But the rush, the urge, the unseemly push to use military force proved overwhelming. Especially to those three presidents– Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama– who had never themselves experienced the horrors of war.

Almost none of this destruction need have happened– if only these men and their advisers had kept fast to the older, more principled visions of America as a country that upholds and strengthen the rule of international law and all the institutions built up around it… If only these men had not been so easily tempted by the ‘flash-bang’ wizardry and testosterone-driven arrogance of war.

But here we are. And at the other end of the Mediterranean this week, there have been two notably different kind of gatherings. At one of them, on Monday, world leaders gave a strong vote to Palestine’s application to become a member of the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural organization (UNESCO). In that vote, 107 nations (including several substantial European allies of Washington) defied vigorous American arm-twisting to support the Palestinian request.

The U.S. State Department announced almost immediately that it would stop providing the funding it has been giving to UNESCO. Far-reaching legislation passed over recent years by the strongly Israeli-controlled U.S. Congress means that the administration may have to extend its funding cut-off to other agencies, too.

How very, very far the United States has come from those idealistic days, 60 years ago, when it was a victorious America, standing unchallenged astride the the whole world, that exercised wisdom and restraint by setting up the United Nations as a set of institutions based on the key principles of human equality, respect for the rule of law, and the need to stress nonviolent, negotiated ways to resolved conflicts whenever possible.

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