Showing posts with label bashar al-assad. Show all posts

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Is UNDP Syria training Bashar al-Assad how to use Instagram?

Editorial: Bashar al-Assad joins Instagram

BY GARY DICKSON
IN MID-EAST & AFRICA · SYRIA
— 4 AUG, 2013

Monday, November 26, 2012

UNDP's champion of reform in Syria: Asma al-Assad is.... PREGNANT..... and she is looking for new Christian Louboutin heels to celebrate !

Known as the power behind the throne, Asma al Assad, wife of the Syrian President, Bashar, is a force to be reckoned with. The glamorous and much maligned First Lady has been keeping a low profile of late. Her last public appearance in Syria was in January when she appeared with her husband and children at a pro-regime march in Damascus.

Since then, Syria has descended into civil war and concrete evidence of the torture measures that her husband's regime routinely used on his people has emerged. In the present day, Bashar al Assad's forces continue to use cluster bombs and TNT on Syrian civilians and rebel troops alike.

But for Asma, the world is a much softer place of family gatherings and shopping trips to London for the latest pair of Louboutin heels. This week news emerged that amidst the death and destruction in their country, the Assads have found time to plan some new life of their own.

According to online newspaper, 'Akhbar Shabab Soriya' (Syria Youth News), Asma al Assad is five months pregnant with her fourth child. The 37-year-old British born and educated First Wife will be looking forward to some more time on London's high streets, dressing up the latest addition to the controversial Syrian family no doubt.

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You remember this Fox News story on UNDP and its special relations with the Syrian Lady in Louboutin heels?

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Should Jens Wandel resign over Rami Makhlouf scandal in Syria?

Resign ? Why?

Yesterday Fox News published a story supported by documents showing that in 2011 the UNDP Syria was dealing with Rami Makhlouf, who is blacklisted by U.S. Treasury since 2008.

This morning finger-pointing began with the Office of Administrator Helen Clark dodgin responsibility to Legal Office and Bureau of Management, who are both under Jens Wandel's domain.

But is it fair to target Jens Wandel (who is a new ASG/BoM ) for deals his predecessor (Akiko Yuge) made in 2011?

Instead of transferring the responsibility, why not ask the questions of:

1. Who approved SyriaTel as vendor ?

2. Who approved Syrian Computer Society as vendor and granted them a non-bid contract to supply local UN/UNDP offices in Damascus with Internet access?

3. Did the Legal Office of UNDP do due diligence and ask from UN/OLA and Host Country Committee and EU Brussels clearance on Syrian vendors ?

4. Who approved the decision NOT TO INCLUDE the UN Offices in Syria under VSat (Satellite) services, but rather rely on Bashar Al-Assad infrastructure (i.e. Syrian Computer Society and SyriaTel)?

5. Who approved the programme outline for Syria that called for partnership with SyriaTel, knowing far well that SyriaTel was blacklisted by US Treasury and European Union since 2008 ?

6. Was this a deliberate action from UNDP to undermine US/EU sanctions against al-Assad Regime?

Monday, October 8, 2012

Is UNDP a criminal organization? "Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are" !

Click here for Rami Makhlouf Wikipedia page

Fox News EXCLUSIVE: UN-sponsored group in Syria included Assad kin cited as corrupt by US, documents show

By George Russell

on Twitter @GeorgeRussell

In May 2011, as Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad was moving to crush a growing tide of anti-government demonstrators, the United Nations was extolling a group of Syrian companies, including one owned by Assad’s cousin, for their admirable adherence to ethical principles.
According to documents from the U.N.’s private sector partnership, known as the Global Compact, one of the Syrian companies that met its high standards of social and ethical responsibility was Syriatel, a mobile phone company whose owner, Rami Makhluf, is an international poster child for the opposite of those avowed U.N. principles.

Makhluf was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury since February 2008 -- and still is -- because he “improperly benefits from and aids the public corruption of Syrian regime officials.” The sanctions mean that any assets from Makhluf’s sprawling business empire discovered in the U.S. would be frozen, and Americans forbidden to do any kind of business with him.

Syriatel was explicitly added to a Treasury list of blocked Makhluf properties in July 2008, though the prohibitions already applied de facto.

Makhluf is, by general agreement, the most powerful businessman in Syria, and according to a European Union sanctions website, “no foreign companies can do business in Syria without his consent. “

His brother, Hafiz, one of the most feared military intelligence officials of the brutal Syrian regime, has been under similar U.S. sanctions since August 2007 for “acting on Syria’s behalf to undermine the sovereignty of Lebanon.” (In July 2012 Hafiz was one of four top officials of Assad’s regime who were either killed or seriously injured in a massive Damascus bomb blast set off by forces resisting the regime’s brutal repression.)

In August 2011, Syriatel came under further, explicit U.S. sanctions as a Makhluf property; it also allegedly has helped security forces locate and eavesdrop on dissidents opposed to the feared regime.
None of those activities are in synch with the lofty aims of the U.N. Global Compact, whose members swear they will “support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights,” as well as “make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses”—and will work against “corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery.”

The Compact is intended to create a privileged relationship between the U.N. and the businesses that sign up for it -- and, on the other hand, give an impressive U.N.-approved gloss to the corporate image of those companies. For the U.N., it is also an opportunity to enlist the business sector, with its money and expertise, in a variety of U.N.-endorsed projects, including support for the world organization’s widely-touted Millennium Development Goals, an anti-poverty effort whose finish line is 2015.

For its part, the U.N.’s Global Compact offices in New York flatly denied, in response to queries from Fox News, that Syriatel had ever participated in the organization. There is no mention of Syriatel in the current Syrian membership list on the Global Compact’s website.

The flat-out denial, however, is hard to square with the Syrian Global Compact documents in Fox News’ possession.

These include a Global Compact recruitment brochure that hails, among other things, the arrival on May 18, 2011, of a delegation from the 36-nation Executive Board of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.N.’s anti-poverty flagship that was instrumental in creating the Syrian Compact network.

The Executive Board delegation’s arrival is noted on page 18 of the brochure; Syriatel’s membership in the local Global Compact is included on page 16, in a graphic entitled “Syria Network Membership Update: May 2011.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE BROCHURE

Syriatel’s Global Compact membership also is noted on page 7 of a PowerPoint presentation created by a UNDP local staffer in Syria, as part of a Global Compact “private sector focal points meeting,” held in Paris from April 11-13, 2011.

The meeting’s title: “Transforming Partnerships: Moving to the next stage of U.N.-business collaboration”

Overall, the presentation extols a “win-win situation” in Syria in which UNDP and the Global Compact play the role of “broker” between the regime and its private sector to create “public-private partnerships” for “achieving inclusive growth, enhancing civic engagement and corporate citizenship.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE PRESENTATION

The presentation was noted in the New York-based Global Compact’s annual report for local chapter networks for 2011, which said the Syria chapter was singled out as “a case study on partnering with the private sector” at the Paris session.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ANNUAL REPORT CITATION

Even without Syriatel, the local Global Compact chapter has some questionable members. One of them is the Syrian Trust for Development, founded and headed by Asma Al-Assad, glamorous wife of the country’s dictator. She has been under European Union sanctions since March of this year as a beneficiary and financial supporter of the regime.

The Syrian Trust is not only a local Global Compact in Syria, but has been an important participant in UNDP’s local social development programming, where it was used to help create an elaborate structure of reform initiatives to demonstrate that Assad was moving toward a more modern, liberalized regime. That effort fell apart as Syria’s bloody toll of repression rose higher.
Assad’s Syrian Trust is currently listed on the Global Compact headquarters website as “non-communicating,” meaning that it has not forwarded a scheduled statement on its progress toward meeting the Compact’s ethical and developmental goals.

As for UNDP’s programs in Syria, including those involving the Trust, they were described weeks ago as “stalled” by a UNDP spokesman in response to questions from Fox News. Last month ,UNDP’s executive board approved a renewal of the organization’s Syrian program and operations “to support humanitarian assistance, livelihoods and coordination activities.”

According to a UNDP spokesman, only programs related to refugee relief, repairs of water systems and medical facilities, emergency food assistance and “psychosocial support” for victims of the current violence are going forward. The previous UNDP program of activities will formally expire in December.

Syriatel’s presence in the Global Compact — denied or not — as well as the inclusion of Mrs. Assad’s private foundation, highlight some troubling issues for the Global Compact, which is one of the fastest-growing U.N. initiatives in a world of shrinking government foreign aid resources—as well as for UNDP, which is the world organization’s spearhead in most of the 169 countries in which it operates.

The Global Compact describes itself as an initiative that “seeks to combine the best properties of the U.N., such as moral authority and convening power, with the private sector’s solution-finding strengths, and the expertise and capacities of a range of key stakeholders. The Global Compact is global and local; private and public; voluntary yet accountable.”

One question is whether UNDP’s unique relationship with the governments it serves — often undemocratic and/or corrupt -- also gives it unique opportunities to favor and cooperate with companies and individuals, like Makhluf, that are influential precisely because of their insider connections, and can wrap themselves in the U.N.’s high-minded principles while continuing more unsavory business as usual.

In Syria, at least, the local private-sector network is very much a creation of UNDP, in close collaboration with the Syrian regime.

A project document signed in February 2008 between UNDP and Syria’s State Planning Commission makes UNDP responsible for the creation of the local Global Compact network while declaring that the regime “attached a great importance to the role of the private sector in the socio-economic development process as strong partners.”

“UNDP’s practical role in launching the Global Compact is catalytic to the process and involves initiating the building of a viable, self-sustaining local network that is business-led,” the document says. “UNDP strategy will be to fulfill different roles that will change over time as the process gets under way and specific, depending on the local context.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE PROJECT DOCUMENT

A management chart on page 14 of the densely worded document shows that UNDP is a joint partner with the planning council, some Syrian ministries, and the local chambers of commerce and industry in oversight of the creation of the Compact network. A UNDP project officer is specifically charged with hiring the staff to make the project work, under UNDP rules and regulations.

Among other things, the document notes, “Anti-corruption will also be a major concern considering the sensitivity of the topic and the malpractices that are presently exercised on the part of the public and private sector.”

Then it adds: “While the project might not be able to reach to tangible results, however raising awareness on this topic using media, academia and NGOs [non-government organizations] would help in bringing this important issue to the attention of the public.”

Whether the Syrian public needed that kind of ineffectual assistance is, at a minimum, debatable. Syria ranked No. 147 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index in 2008.

UNDP’s continuing role in the Compact Project is underlined in the 2011 recruiting brochure obtained by Fox News, which continues to call it “a partnership between the Syrian Government represented by the State Planning Commission and the UNDP.”

The brochure cites such accomplishments as an agreement to fund the country’s first cancer research center, a venture with a local bank to support child cancer treatment, and a project to rehabilitate a provincial marketplace. It also offers support to the U.N.’s anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals.

It also cites “global and local opportunities” for Syrian companies to leverage “the UN’s global reach with governments, business, civil society and other stakeholders.”

“The Global Compact is doing well in Syria because it is a societal norm to give to others,” the brochure quotes Muhammad Agha, the local project director, as saying, “We have a giving private sector. The Global Compact gives a framework to that.”

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell
Click for more stories by George Russell.

Friday, September 21, 2012

UNHCR gives $6 Million to Syria's Minister of Local Administration (UN continues to cooperate with the al-Assad Regime)

DAMASCUS, (SANA)-Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Local Administration, Omar Ghalawanji discussed with chairman of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Damascus Tarke Kurdi cooperation between the two sides, particularly the procedures taken to prepare a partnership agreement to meet the humanitarian aid at the emergency cases.
"Executive subcommittees in the Syrian provinces have been formed to supervise operations of distributing the humanitarian assistances and guaranteeing justice," Ghalawanji said, appreciating the role of the Red Crescent Organization and the NGOs in helping the citizens during the crisis.

He added that the Local Administration Ministry is doing its best to help the affected people, estimate their needs, affirming that it formed a central emergency committee to monitor the process of distributing the subsidies and humanitarian assistances.

"There will be an agreement between the local administration Ministry and the UNHCR to cooperate in the acts of rehabilitation, preparing centers of shelter receive more citizens and offering monthly cash money for the affected people," Ghalawanji said....

Read full story here: http://sana.sy/eng/21/2012/09/19/442506.htm

FoxNews uncovers the special relations between Asma al-Assad and Helen Clark. UNDP called her "a champion of reform".

Before Assad unleashed violence, UN showcased wife Asma as a 'champion' of reform

By George Russell

Published September 20, 2012

| FoxNews.com

Read this on Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/09/20/before-assad-unleashed-violence-un-showcased-wife-asma-as-champion-reform/

Before Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a wave of violence against his own people last year, the United Nations Development Program, or UNDP spent $18 million to create an elaborate structure of reform initiatives to demonstrate that Assad was moving toward a more modern, liberalized regime, according to documents obtained by Fox News.

One major element: creating a high-profile role for Asma al-Assad, the glamorous wife of the Syrian dictator, as a champion of greater citizen participation in the dictatorship’s anti-poverty and social programs.

The process quickly proved to be a façade. As soon as demonstrators took to the streets in March, 2011, demanding a larger say in how Syria was ruled, the UNDP-sponsored reform movement crumbled as President Assad responded with a campaign of arrest, torture and bombardment.
The multi-million dollar U.N. program, followed by a failed peace effort led by former Secretary General Kofi Annan, demonstrates how the U.N.’s densely written successes on paper can turn to dismal failure once an authoritarian government casts aside everything in favor of keeping a grip on power.

For its part, UNDP insists through a spokesman that its elaborate development plans in Syria are merely “stalled.”

Before the “stall,” the UNDP program in Syria was budgeted for extension beyond its five-year life-span between 2007 and 2011 into 2012-- months after the Assad regime began its long campaign of harsh domestic repression.

The Syrian fiasco also shows the limits of UNDP’s preferred method of “national execution” of development projects, meaning that it leaves most of the real work to the governments of most of the 169 countries where it operates, with UNDP offering financial and technical assistance and the veneer of U.N. prestige, while encouraging the international community to provide money.

In the case of Syria, according to documents obtained by Fox News, UNDP played a key role in creating a reformer’s aura around Asma al-Assad, the country’s fashionable First Lady, who was also the founder and chairman of an organization known as the Syria Trust for Development.

Starting in 2007, Mrs. Assad became a special partner of UNDP in a five-year program known as the National Platform for NGOs [non-governmental organizations] aimed at creating in Syria “an empowered civil society involved in local community development and implementation of public policies, planning and programs.” The Syria Trust, which she created in 2002 as a personal charity vehicle, was reorganized that year into a foundation that incorporated a number of additional social programs.

The Syria Trust-UNDP partnership was intended, among other things, to forge a “National Platform for Syrian NGOs,” which would “enhance civil society and the private sector in the socio-economic development in place.” Along with providing technical support to the project, UNDP helped provide financing, which totaled more than $570,000 by 2010.

Mrs. Assad is described in the Syrian Trust’s 2009-2010 annual report—the only one publicly available—as an “active champion and sponsor of civil society activities in Syria.” (The Trust also served as an “incubator” of additional NGOs, which presumably would have access to the National Platform.) The financial report shows that her efforts at the Trust were supported by a variety of principally Western European governments, a welter of Syrian state and local governments, and a few U.N. agencies, including UNDP.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ANNUAL REPORT

In the end, however, the “civil society” program provided little more than cover for the regime’s brutal methods of control—even after the Assad government began to escalate its violent onslaught against its own people.

The other partners in Mrs. Assad’s UNDP-organized “National Platform” effort included the Syrian State Planning Commission, the country’s Interior Ministry, and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, according in the annex to a “Country Program Action Plan,” or CPAP, signed between Syria and UNDP in June 2008.

CLICK HERE FOR THE CPAP

The CPAP also includes a collaboration between UNDP and the Syrian Computer Society, an organization once run by President Assad himself, before he took political office.
According to the UNDP-Syrian document, the computer society was a partner of UNDP in an effort to build a “National Knowledge Society,” through “dissemination of community-based IT tools and facilities with special attention to vulnerable groups (disabled people).”

CLICK HERE FOR THE SYRIA TRUST AND COMPUTER SOCIETY REFERENCES IN THE CPAP

The Syrian Computer Society has been accused by non-Syrian NGOs of monitoring their activities and “keeping tabs” on their personnel. It also hosts UNDP’s websites in Syria.

In response to questions from Fox News last month, UNDP declared that it “does not have any shared programs with SCS and never has,” even though the computer society is also listed not only in the CPAP but also in another UNDP “country program document” for Syria as a partner in two additional UNDP programs, involving trade and youth employment.

The computer society is also deeply involved with Mrs. Assad’s Syrian Trust. A five-year Syrian Trust Strategic Plan, dated December 2010, says that the computer society is the sole donor of technology funds for the Trust’s “Communications and Knowledge Management Division (CMK).”
According to the strategic plan, the CMK’s role is to “help the Trust create and promote its identity and brand, define its desired image, reconcile its reputation with its image, articulate and communicate its mission and objectives, set guidelines for fundraising and partnering, set standards to bring consistency across publications and services, and maintain the technical infrastructure to support automation and knowledge sharing.”

In other words, the Knowledge Management Division, with SCS technical help, is largely the Trust’s propaganda arm.

A March 2011 evaluation commissioned by UNDP itself to examine the initiative centered on the glamorous Mrs. Assad declared the program a qualified success—even while it also noted that nothing really had changed.

The report observed that the regime had made “no significant legal changes” to empower civilian organizations, despite promises to do so. It also noted that for all the effort, “few mechanisms exist to hold constructive dialogues between government and local communities and consultation is minimal.”

The evaluation also observed that a new government five-year plan made “little mention of strengthening civil society’s capacity and role in contributing to government policies, planning and programs.”

On a more positive note it declared that “while difficulties remain, NGOs are clearly rising to the challenge and pushing for more space to achieve their development objectives.”
By then, in fact, civil protests against the Assad regime were growing rapidly in southern Syria and the government was preparing to send in tanks to begin the butchery that continues today.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Fox News Exclusive: UNDP Still Has Ties That Bind With Bloody Assad Regime

by George Russell

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/09/11/exclusive-un-still-has-ties-that-bind-with-bloody-assad-regime/?test=latestnews#ixzz26CX8isxr

As the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad accelerates its ferocious military campaign against its own people, the United Nations Development Program, the U.N.'s flagship anti-poverty agency, is still intimately linked to institutions that keep the Assad family’s grip on power -- and that conduct surveillance and may be conducting cyber-warfare against those protesting the brutal regime.
One of the UNDP's partners in its elaborate development schemes for the battered nation -- now suspended due to Assad’s onslaught -- is the Syrian Computer Society (SCS), an organization created by Assad’s older brother and run by Assad himself until he assumed the presidency in 2000. In a 2007 U.N. report, the society was hailed as “the main and most widely used private provider of Internet services” in the country -- and a participant in major collaborations involving information and communications technology (ICT) with the Assad government dating back for years.

The computer servers and other (ICT) installed in U.N. offices in Syria, which operate at www.un.org

under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), are hosted at an Internet address owned by SCS.

Sharing the same Society-owned IP address as www.un.org

are a flock of Syrian government departments, clearly identified by their “.gov.sy” listings, many of which have also worked in close partnership with UNDP for years.

CLICK HERE FOR THE IP ADDRESS INFORMATION
Other U.N. organizations, including the U.N. relief agency known as UNHCR -- which is deeply involved in aiding refugees from the Assad reign of terror -- are hosted at another website address also owned by the Society.

According to a UNDP press spokesman, the agency’s relationship to the Syrian Internet provider is purely routine: “We contracted SCS services because it was the only organization with the required infrastructure and technical support able to provide Internet services.” He added that “servers hosted at UNDP’s Country Office in Syria are protected by a firewall system.”

Similar points were made by a spokesman for UNHCR.

In fact, in at least 79 of 166 UNDP country offices around the world, the organization bypasses local Internet services by using private -- and more secure --VSAT satellite transmissions for its Internet communications . The Syria office is not among the 79, though such services are readily available in the Middle East.

According to the UNDP spokesman, UNDP “has moved” to a VSAT system, but according to information on UNDP’s procurement website, the bidding for such a global system for UNDP seems to be ongoing.

CLICK HERE FOR UNDP’S VSAT BIDDING NOTICE

Despite the claims that the relationship with SCS is nothing out of the ordinary, a cloud of puzzles still surround it, starting with the different and directly contradictory answers provided by the same UNHCR spokesman on two consecutive days when asked to explain a financial riddle.
Why, according to U.N. procurement records for 2010 and 2011, did the relief agency uniquely show the “location of the supplier” -- meaning the location of the payment – for “computer services” from SCS not, as other U.N. agencies did, in Syria but in Switzerland?

According to the first answer, the payments were merely made through UNHCR’s Swiss headquarters bank to “save costs and improve efficiencies.” The next day the spokesman added an update: forget that.

“UNHCR pays SCS locally in Syria and not through HQ Bank accounts in Switzerland as UNHCR complies with the necessary restrictions on international banking transactions,” the spokesman said. “There were no payments via Switzerland.”

The fact that two separate annual compilations of U.N. spending for two separate years showed the SCS supplier payments going to Switzerland, in computer-assembled statistical reports that also record numerous UNHCR payments -- in Syria -- for other goods and services used in Syria, is apparently “an error.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE PROCUREMENT RECORDS

Similar mind-bending might be required to consider SCS as no more than an ordinary Internet services provider.

As far back as 2009, the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders, which has called Syria “one of the world’s most repressive countries toward Internet users,” put SCS on a list of “Internet enemies,” and charged that SCS “can intercept emails and therefore monitor dissidents,” something that the regime had been doing for at least two previous years, tracking cyber-protesters through their IP addresses.

Also in 2009, in confidential State Department cables later published by the rogue website Wikileaks, U.S. diplomats relayed concerns from American relief organizations that unauthorized SCS employees were being placed in their offices without permission, in order, the diplomats said, to “keep tabs” on the grassroots aid groups as popular hostility to the Assad regime deepened.
More recently, allegations have surfaced in the human rights blogosphere that members of the so-called Syrian Electronic Army -- pro-regime hackers who have taken down or defaced news websites with cyber-attacks, or used them to spread disinformation about Assad’s opposition -- might have ties to SCS. These ties have never been fully demonstrated, says Paul Rosenzweig, a visiting senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security.

“Plausible. Likely,” he told Fox News. “Can you call it proven? No.”

The main point, though, he notes, is that “everything in Syria is under the government’s thumb.”
For his part, a UNDP spokesman said, in reply to questions from Fox News, that “UNDP has not been officially informed of any complaints by NGOs regarding surveillance activities by SCS. SCS does not have free access to UNDP premises.”

But there are connections between the Syria Computer Society and other Syrian institutions that are accused of more sinister intentions than spying and prying.

Also hosted at the IP address shared with UNDP is the Commercial Bank of Syria (CBS), a state-owned financial institution that has been under U.S. Treasury sanctions since 2006 for terrorist-related money laundering. On its website, www.cbs-bank.sy

, CBS denies the money-laundering charges.

For the past year, however, the bank has also been under U.S. Treasury sanctions for something even more alarming: alleged financial ties to Syrian and North Korean organizations involved in ballistic missile production and creation of “unconventional” weapons of mass destruction, as well as ties to Iranian banks linked to that country’s own nuclear proliferation program.

CLICK HERE FOR THE 2011 U.S. TREASURY ANNOUNCEMENT

Additional sanctions against the bank were levied by the European Union in October 2011, in a bid -- so far unsuccessful -- to stem the “appalling and brutal campaign the Syrian regime is waging against its own people,” according to the European Union’s top foreign affairs official, Catherine Ashton.
Along with electronic ties, there is a human link between the sanctioned bank and the Syrian Computer Society.

According to website information obtained by Fox News, a computer expert named Ghassan Fallouh, who is also a prominent academic at Syria’s International University for Science and Technology, has served on the boards of both institutions since 2010, and on the board of the Syrian Computer Society since 2006.

Fallouh’s university resume says that he also served from 1999 to 2004 as a “consultant to the UNDP for the [Syrian] Central Bank.”

CLICK HERE FOR FALLOUH’S RESUME

Questions to Fallouh about the Syrian Computer Society, sent by Fox News on August 16, had not been answered by the time this article was published.

According to UNDP’s spokesman, “UNDP has no commercial relationship with CBS.”
Whatever the connections between SCS and other organs of the regime, experts argue, the Syrian Computer Society is much more than an Internet host for the U.N., the Assad government and alleged financiers of weapons of mass destruction.

It is an important “tool of the regime,” according to David Schenker, head of the program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a prominent bipartisan think tank, and a former adviser on Syrian affairs to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“When Assad came to power, he was the Internet president,” Schenker says. “He was setting the stage for how enlightened he would be. He made an effort to burnish the modern nature of the new regime,” with SCS as part of the effort.

Now, Schenker says, “we know he had no intention whatsoever of doing this.”

In the now-savage environment of Syria’s expanding civil war, the relationship between the U.N. and its cyber-host raises additional questions about UNDP’s long relationship with Assad, and the organization’s strategy of “national execution” of its programs in dangerous corners of the developing world.

That strategy makes the government itself the chief implementer of social programs created with UNDP technical assistance and supervision, and builds intertwining financial and work relationships between the world body’s representatives on the ground and key ministries and institutions that ultimately help to ensure the regime’s control.

It also apparently made UNDP consider the Syrian Computer Society as a “partner” of UNDP and a formal member of Syrian “civil society” in a planned six-year program to help transform Syria under Assad, from a Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a “people-centered social-market economy,” in UNDP’s phrase.

A version of a so-called “country program document” for Syria covering 2007-2011 (and later extended to 2012), was distributed to UNDP’s 36-country supervisory Executive Board on April 26, 2006, prior to their June meeting . A record of Executive Board decisions posted after the group’s subsequent meeting in September 2006, show that the body “took note” of the report -- U.N.-speak for passed it without making changes.

SCS is listed in an appended “results and resources framework” to that document as a private sector partner in two central UNDP initiatives, to improve “structures and climate for trade, investment and competitiveness,” and likewise improve “employment environment and opportunities for skills enhancement for the under- and unemployed, especially women and youth.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE RESULTS AND RESOURCES FRAMEWORK.

According to the country program itself, the plan had also been approved by the Syrian government in February 2006.

According to UNDP’s spokesman, however, “although it was mentioned in UNDP’s results and resources framework, no agreement was made with SCS. Accordingly, the UNDP Syria country office has never had any development-related agreement with SCS.”

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Saudi Arabian draft resolution on Syria mentions Chemical and biological weapons

Click here to read full draft resolution Exclusively reported by InnercityPress

7. Demands that the Syrian authorities strictly observe their obligations under international law with respect to chemical and biological weapons, including the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, signed at Geneva on 17 June 1925 and further demands that the Syrian authorities refrain from using, transferring, producing, developing or otherwise acquiring any chemical or biological weapons or any related material, and that the Syrian authorities meet their obligation to account for and secure all chemical and biological weapons and any related material;

Click here to read full draft resolution Exclusively reported by InnercityPress

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

The Guardian’s Ian Williams Lobbied for Bashar al-Assad’s Syria to Join UN Security Council

Click here to read this on UN Watch

How is it that the Assad regime, led by father and son, was able to retain the international legitimacy needed to retain power over 42 years, despite perpetrating systematic brutality, such as the killing of an estimated 20,000 citizens of Hama in February 1982, and being listed as a leading state sponsor of terrorism?

A key factor was that the world body mandated to hold such criminal regimes to account — the United Nations — turned a blind eye to Syrian murder, massacre and terror.

Prior to last year’s Arab Spring, during the decades that Mideast dictators were strong, neither the U.N.’s General Assembly or its Human Rights Council ever passed a single resolution on Hama — or on any other barbaric Syrian human rights violation.

Worst of all, in October 2001, the U.N. voted overwhelmingly to elect Syria to the Security Council, no doubt acting, as required by the U.N. Charter, out of due regard specially paid to Syria’s contribution “to the maintenance of international peace and security” and “to the other purposes of the Organization.”

One of the figures on the international stage shilling loudest for Bashar al-Assad’s election to the U.N. Security Council was Ian Williams of The Guardian, a long-time contributor to the Washington Report, a publication known for consistently opposing action for victims of Libya, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East dictatorships.

Writing a few months before the U.N. vote, Williams’s role in the well-circulated Washington report was to bolster Bashar al-Assad’s chances of victory by pressuring U.S. State Department officials to drop any idea of opposing Syria’s bid — which is exactly what American diplomats did last year, successfully, to keep Assad off the Human Rights Council.

Using the same methods as the Assads themselves, Williams reframed the discussion away from Syria’s despicable record by pointing at the Israeli bogeyman. It worked: Syria was elected by a huge majority of 160 out of 177 votes.

The massive vote to the prestigious position empowered the Assad regime. According to the BBC, Syria interpreted its election as a sign of international support. “The wide support for Syria constitutes a referendum and a clear message that these allegations [of Syrian support for terrorism] are void and false,” boasted Damascus. “I’m proud for this great success,” said the Syrian Ambassador to the UN, Mikhail Wehbe. “Syria will pray to preserve the peace and security in the world.”

Now is the time to ask: If the lobbying of Ian Williams — who makes sure to portray himself objectively as the former head of the UN Correspondents Association and not as a pro-Assad contributor to a pro-regime publication, or as a regular on Iran’s Press TV propaganda channel — had been rejected, and if instead the Syrian regime’s brutality had been exposed and Assad stripped of international legitimacy, would he still be in power and murdering his own citizens today?

Friday, July 13, 2012

Forbes: Why United Nations Reform can't wait

Click here to read full article on Forbes

It’s no secret that the United Nations hasn’t lived up to its billing as a champion of human rights and democratic values since its establishment in 1945. All too often, the UN system has aided and abetted some of the world’s most odious regimes—and served as a political weapon for those countries against the West. Yet even by these standards, this summer has seen an unprecedented level of rot in the world’s most powerful international forum.

Iran, under mounting pressure from the international community for its persistent nuclear ambitions, was elected to a top post at the UN Arms Trade Treaty conference in Geneva in early July. To add insult to injury, the news came just days after the Islamic Republic was found to be flouting UN restrictions by shipping arms to the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad—arms that Assad has subsequently used against his own people.

Click here to read full article on Forbes

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Syria: the effectiveness of high diplomacy

Question: Can a country (i.e.: Syria) where United Nations is "successfully implementing development assistance" be referred to International Criminal Court ?

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Today the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Madam Susan E. Rice, rightfully applauded and welcomed the briefing by the UN' High Commissioner for Human Rights on the appalling human rights crisis in Syria.

AmbassadorRice Ambassador Rice

The United States welcomes today's briefing by the #UN High Commissioner for #HumanRights on the appalling human rights crisis in #Syria.

1 hour ago

CLICK HERE FOR FULL AP STORY
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — More than 5,000 people have died in the nine-month-long Syrian uprising, U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said Monday.
Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters Monday that she told Security Council members of the dramatic increase in deaths during an afternoon briefing.
The death toll used by the U.N. in recent weeks has been around 4,000.
Pillay said she recommended that the council refer Syria to the International Criminal Court, the permanent war crimes tribunal, for investigation of possible crimes against humanity.
Pillay said that at least 300 children are among the dead, and there are thousands of people in detention.
She noted that the last time she briefed the council on Syria, in August, the death toll was at about 2,000.
U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said Pillay's briefing "underscores the urgency of the present moment."
"Through condemnations issued by the U.N. General Assembly and Human Rights Council and bold steps taken by the Arab League and the Government of Turkey, international bodies are starting to match their severe disapproval of Syria's bloody crackdown with concrete steps to bring it to an end," Rice said. "It is past time for the U.N. Security Council to do the same."
CLICK HERE FOR FULL AP STORY

While the US Ambassador is pressuring the UN Security Council members for more decisive and effective actions agains the Syrian Regime, it seems that the US Mission to the UN along other Western Countries (Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark and Canada) are silent when it comes to the ongoing development agenda of United Nations in Syria, millions of dollars that are currently being spent by the UN Agencies thru sponsoring the "development plans" of the Bashar al-Assad Regime.

Please click here to view the website of the United Nations in Syria, and how Ban Ki-moon's representatives in Damascus loud their fruitful cooperation with the Regime.

$58 Million

UN Assistance in Syria

http://un.org.sy/index-en.php

How can a UN Human Rights Commissioner demand that al-Assad's Regime be referred to the International Criminal Court - while United Nations own agencies are doing business as usual inside Syria, and not only are lauding their "content for working with this Regime and the qualitative outcomes they are gaining in their daily work inside Syria" but the UN's own website in Syria calls their work inside that country a DEVELOPMENT AGENDA.

Why is not Madam Susan E. Rice of the United States of America, a member of the Executive Board of UNDP and other UN Agencies present in Syria, not demanding immediate withdrawal of all UN aid from that country?

How can United Nations and Ban Ki-moon certify that their aid and tax-payers dollars inside Syria are not diverted from the Regime ?

Friday, October 21, 2011

Another day without UN and UNDP Website and Internet in Syria

Bashar Al-Assad's grip on Internet in Syria continue, UN and UNDP Website are still "not accessible".

Ban Ki-moon remains silent on the matter.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

UNited Nations and UNDP's Websites and Internet services in Syria blocked for 14th day

http://www.undp.org.sy/

Why is Ban Ki Moon not telling the public about this?

Still hoping that Bashar al-Assad would do the right thing?

Friday, August 5, 2011

EXCLUSIVE: As Security Council Demands End to Syria Violence, U.N. Positions Itself for Assad 'Reforms'

By George Russell

Published August 04, 2011 | FoxNews.com (Click here for story on FoxNews)

Even as the United Nations Security Councildemands that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad cease its campaign of killing civilian protesters, the U.N. bureaucracy is extending its assistance to Syria through 2012 in the hope Assad’s vague promises of political reform and “national dialogue” will eventually prove to be real.

According to a document obtained by Fox News, the full spectrum of United Nations assistance programs in Syria have been extended through next year, “in order to ensure that reforms initiated by the government of the Syrian Arab Republic in 2011 are reflected in the new programs of cooperation of the United Nations agencies” that are slated to succeed them.

The revelation is contained in a UNICEF document dated July 22, 2011 -- in the midst of the latest wave of harsh Syrian repression -- and intended for the next meeting of UNICEF’s 36-nation executive board, in mid-September.

The document notifies the board of the extension, not only of UNICEF’s programs in Syria, but of a wide variety of other U.N. programs. It also informs the board that approval of UNICEF’s portion of the extension has already been granted by the agency’s executive director, Anthony Lake.

A copy of the document appeared on the executive board’s public website shortly after Fox News began asking questions about it.

The existence of the document underlines the dual-track tightrope the U.N. continues to walk in Syria, where it continues to engage the Assad regime with the carrots of humanitarian aid and assistance in modernizing its creaking and corrupt social welfare structure, while relying on international condemnation and targeted economic sanctions to restrain Assad’s brutal crackdown against demonstrators who want more fundamental change.

So far, an estimated 1,750 people have been killed by the regime as it tries to quell political protests, and scores more may be dead in an ongoing Syrian tank assault on the center of the insurgent city of Hamas.

A spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told Fox News that he “was not involved” in the deliberations that led to the U.N. program renewals, though he has been deeply embroiled in efforts to make the Syrian regime end the repression and embark on a reform agenda. The spokesman referred other questions about the U.N.’s Syria programs to the agencies involved.

“The Secretary General has repeated called for reforms in Syria,” the spokesman declared. Ban did so again yesterday, following a Security Council statement -- less forceful than a full-scale resolution -- condemning a new wave of regime violence that began to crest last weekend.

He condemned the “brutally shocking” events in Syria and declared that “the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people must be addressed through an inclusive Syrian-led political process that guarantees fundamental freedoms and rights for all.”

Most U.N. programs in Syria are slated to expire at the end of 2011, in line with a government five-year planning cycle, and replaced with a new series of development and humanitarian efforts. As the Assad crackdown has expanded, the U.S. and other Western governments have imposed selective economic sanctions to make the regime end its repressive tactics.

The new document obtained by Fox News specifically mentions the programs of UNICEF, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and a mixed bag of development assistance programs known as the U.N. Development Assistance Framework, or UNDAF, as continuing on an interim basis.

Click here to read the document.

The quiet renewal of the UNDAF programs, at a time when Western nations were tightening economic sanctions on the Assad regime in protest over the repression, was first reported by Fox News last month.

UNFPA’s extension of its Syria program was contained in documents Fox News obtained at that time. UNICEF declined to respond to questions from Fox News about its executive board document.

A UNDP spokesman confirmed the program renewal “to avoid operational vacuum,” while future programming was deferred to ensure that it “best meet the evolving needs of the Syrian people.”

The spokesman took issue with the “presumption” that UNDP’s future programming “was deferred to reflect reforms initiated by the Syrian government,” which he termed “incorrect.”

“UNDP is not examining current reforms with a view to incorporate them in any program,” he said. “Nor are we working with the government on their reform plans.”

Reform in Syria has mainly consisted of little more than vague speech-making by Assad and his top officials, coupled with attacks by security forces that are ongoing. And in the wake of yesterday’s Security Council statement, Assad showed that the game of promised reform and actual repression was still on.

The regime today issued a presidential decree authorizing a multi-party system in the one-party Ba’athist state, and a new elections law ostensibly giving candidates the right to oversee balloting. Both were dismissed as meaningless while the repression continued.

"It is incredible to see UN agencies referring to 'reforms initiated' by the Syrian government in 2011,” commented Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a deputy national security adviser for the region during the Bush administration. “The only actions the Assad regime has actually initiated this year have been aimed at killing unarmed civilians and crushing demands for freedom.”

Abrams has publicly advocated greater U.S. pressure to oust Assad entirely.

“U.S. policy should be that all U.N. activity in Syria cease, except for purely humanitarian programs carried out in entirely non-political terms,” added former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, who is a Fox News contributor. “Continued, visible U.N. cooperation with the Assad regime strengthens Assad and delegitimizes the U.N.”

But waving the reform flag while crushing his opposition has proved effective for Assad. In May, President Obama declared that Assad “has a choice.” He could lead a transition to greater democracy “or get out of the way.”

Yesterday, the Security Council took note of “the announced commitments by the Syrian authorities to reform,” regretted “the lack of progress in implementation,” and called upon the regime to "implement its commitments.”

So far, Assad appears to be doing nothing to make that happen.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell.