At UN, Outgoing Khalilzad Quieter on Congo and Reform, the Price of Being Well-Liked?

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, January 12 -- With Barack Obama set to take control in eight days, it's the time it seems for revisionist assessments of Zalmay Khalilzad, the outgoing Bush administration's U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Khalilzad is certainly better liked within the UN than his predecessor John Bolton. Liberal and moderates even sense that he is one of them. Some of this is due, however, to disinterest. Khalilzad's interests were Afghanistan and Iraq, to some degree the Middle East -- Africa much less so, and UN reform surprisingly little. 

  Maybe accomplishments on the first two issues had to be bought by backing off on reform. Khalilzad rarely mentions the UN's largest peacekeeping mission, and the largest global war since the one resulting in the UN: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One assumes that this prioritization will change under Obama and the Ambassador he has nominated, Susan Rice. 

  In perhaps another sign of disinterest or priorities being elsewhere, there is Somalia, a peacekeeping for which Condoleezza Rice had projected before the end of 2008. While a resolution is slated to be adopted before January 20,as Inner City Press exclusively reported at New Years, it will be a largely UK-drafted proposal, different than which Condi Rice had said. 

  Under Khalilzad unlike Bolton, the US Mission became unwilling to comment other than "on background" about UN reform. 

Zalmay Khalilzad sings swan song, UN reforms and Congo not shown

There are claims of accomplishing a UN-wide Ethics Program and Whistleblower Protection, as well as public access to information and financial disclosure, at UN Fund and Program like the UN Development Program, but Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon accepted outgoing UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis' assertion that the UN Ethics Office had no jurisdiction over UNDP or its firing of a whistleblowing employee. While UNDP's Administrator answers to his own Executive Board, now Ban -- and the U.S., to be realistic -- will be naming Dervis' replacement. Why not make accepting the jurisdiction of the UN Ethics Office a condition for being selected?

  In one comment that Team Khalilzad allowed to be "on the record," Inner City Press asked Khalilzad if American Lynn Pascoe will be staying as the head of the UN Department of Political Affairs. Khalilzad said he has no reason to believe that he will not.

  A senior UN official, asked Monday afternoon by Inner City Press about Khalilzad's general non-mention of the Congo, noted that his wife Cheryl Benard is very interested in the Congo, particularly the issue of sexual violence there. So perhaps there is a divison of labor in the family. They are nice people. Certainly they had their achievements. Why not then be on the record?

  What approach will Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice take? Watch this site.

Rice shows the door to Dervis

Condoleezza Rice, the US Secreteray of State sends a strong message to Kemal Dervis: Change UNDP Now - or go away !!

In a press release from the US State Department, in contrast with UNDP's Management Statements on same report, Condi Rice says that the DPRK Panel found broad management deficiencies in UNDP’s North Korea program, including in payment modalities, staffing practices, and project oversight.

The Secretary of State expressed deep concerns about the breakdowns in UNDP’s management system, and is urged UNDP Management to address its weaknesses and in so doing better realize its intended purpose – to help the world’s poor.

She also said that the United States will continue to closely follow and monitor UNDP management through the United States - UN Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and will focus particular attention on the Panel’s findings and recommendations.

A clear message to both Ad Melkert and Kemal Dervis, who have yet to read, un derstand and act upon the UN Ethics Office Report on DPRK (Read it here).

UNICEF Partners with Terrorist Organization

Yep, I know, its not a surprise to many of you, but for those who still have some UN delusions, here's some facts:

Forget UNICEF, and give to other groups -

[quote] there are plenty of other charitable groups that do wonderful things for children. But this time, UNICEF has really outdone itself.UNICEF has decided that it would be a great idea to partner with the International Islamic Relief Organization based in Saudi Arabia. It seems all well and good until you discover that the Islamic Relief Organization has been designated as a terrorist group by the United States and the United Nations itself!

Here are just a few details. In August 2006, the US Treasury Department designated two branches of the Islamic Relief Organization as terrorist organizations because they provided money and support to groups linked to al Qaeda including Abu Sayyaf (ASG) in the Philippines. A former member of this group in the Philippines testifies that a limited amount of foreign funding for the Islamic Relief Organization goes to legitimate projects and the rest of the money goes to terrorist operations. This group, as well as others, is on the United Nations 1267 Committee's consolidated list of individuals and entities associated with the Taliban, al Qaida and Osama Bin Ladin. [quote]

LOL, UNICEF partners with a terrorist supporter outlawed by the US AND the UN itself!

Must be confusing at the UN, trying to keep all those accounts straight, which ones have money flowing IN from yahoos here in the US who think they are helping little starving kids, while the other accounts are going OUT to the progressive muslim terrorists, er, agrarian reformers.

A bookie's nightmare.

The U.N.'s North Korea Chutzpah

By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
June 12, 2008

Cindy Adams, the New York Post's doyenne of dish, ends her gossip column with a signature sign-off: "Only in New York, kids, only in New York."

I thought of this tag line recently in an unlikely context - a report issued last week by the latest group of investigators charged with reviewing the United Nations Development Program's operations in North Korea. The program was so rife with scandal that the U.N. agency last year took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the country.

Listen to the UNDP and the report is an exoneration of its work in North Korea and an indictment of the U.S., which first went public with charges of gross mismanagement a year and a half ago. Read the report, however, and a different picture emerges. The findings are consistent with the U.S. allegations: large sums of money that vanished after being transferred to Pyongyang; dual-use technology shipped off to the North without the requisite U.S. export licenses; a whistleblower without whose input the abuses would not have been uncovered. It also contradicts much of what UNDP officials said in sworn testimony last year to the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The report was commissioned by the UNDP and undertaken by a panel of investigators selected by the agency. It is the third probe of the UNDP's operations in the North, following reports last year by U.N. auditors and U.S. Senate investigators. Yet even the UNDP's own investigators - who had full access to the players and documents involved - were unable to come up with a complete picture of the agency's operations in North Korea. The UNDP's record-keeping was so poor that the investigator's dictum - follow the money - was impossible to heed.

When a Journal editorial last week cited disbursements of $57.1 million to $72.3 million from 1999 to 2007 based on data in the report - far higher than the $30 million to $40 million claimed by the UNDP at a press conference - the agency first told us our arithmetic was wrong, and then said the panel had made an error that it planned to correct. Whatever. An accurate accounting is apparently beyond the UNDP's capability. The report specifies that the panel "was unable to confirm the total size" of the program because it did not have "full financial transaction information."

Even so, the report details a much larger program than the UNDP had previously represented as well as far higher transfers to the North Korean government than it previously admitted. A minimum of $9.13 million went directly into the coffers of Kim Jong Il's regime, to 11 different agencies. Data in the report suggest the transfers may have been $20 million or more.

That's a far cry from what the UNDP told the U.S. mission to the U.N. and Senate investigators. According to the Senate report, UNDP officials said the "National Coordinating Committee," or NCC, was the "entity the North Korean government designated to receive UNDP funds for use on Development Projects." How much did the NCC receive? The "UNDP informed the Subcommittee that over an eight-year period from 1999 until the program's suspension in 2007, its records showed that it has transferred no more than $380,000 of UNDP project funds to the NCC UNDP bank account."

Senators don't take kindly to being misled by sworn witnesses, and Carl Levin and Norman Coleman, chairman and ranking member respectively, may wish to inquire further. Mr. Levin may also wish to issue an apology to Mark Wallace, the then-U.S. diplomat responsible for blowing the lid off the UNDP's shenanigans. At a hearing last year, the senator hammered Mr. Wallace for saying that he suspected that the UNDP may have transferred $7 million to Pyongyang. It turns out Mr. Wallace's estimates were way too low.

But that's not all. The report also recounts how North Korea used U.N.-affiliated accounts to launder money, such as $2.72 million transferred to a company in Macau. It's unclear just whose money it was - UNDP's or North Korea's - and the report doesn't help much in clearing up that mystery. At the very least, the UNDP let itself be used by unscrupulous North Koreans.

The UNDP also appears to have played loose with the truth on transfers of dual-use technology. The panel found that the UNDP shipped 95 items that were "controlled by the U.S. for national security and anti-terrorism reasons." It did not obtain the export licenses required by U.S. law.

A year ago, the UNDP was dismissing allegations that it transferred dual-use technology: "[T]here have been some rice husk removers transferred and a plotter to help the [North Korean] authorities more accurately produce maps for environmental monitoring," a spokesman explained on April 26, 2007. A few weeks later he said, "The kind of equipment provided is by no means state of the art." In a letter dated June 7, 2007, the U.S. asked the UNDP to provide information about equipment with potential dual-use applications that it had obtained for North Korea. It received no response.

Finally, the UNDP is claiming exoneration for its treatment of the former UNDP staffer in Pyongyang who blew the whistle on the slipshod operations there. Again, the UNDP is being slippery with the truth. The report found no merit in Artjon Shkurtaj's claim that the UNDP retaliated against him for reporting the irregularities he saw in Pyongyang. But it also determined that without him the UNDP's misdeeds would never have come to light. Mr. Shkurtaj is still without a job.

The U.S. gives about $250 million a year to the UNDP in voluntary contributions, and it would be nice to think that in light of these latest revelations that it would take the occasion to rethink that. Sen. Coleman's office tells me he has drafted a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking for cuts. Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., declined to comment on the report.

The UNDP's executive board has a responsibility to make sure the agency provides better oversight of its programs - especially in countries where UNDP money might be used to help prop up dictators. At its meeting next week in Geneva, it could start by adopting a resolution requiring the agency to adhere to U.S. export-control laws. And it could require the UNDP to hire outside auditors to track UNDP disbursements. Allowing member states to see now-secret internal audits would help too.

Meanwhile, the spinmeisters at the UNDP keep declaring victory. Talk about chutzpah. Even New Yorkers aren't in their league. Only at the U.N., kids, only at the U.N.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.

UNDP Chief in China denies access to rural areas for Grameen Phone and waives competitive biding for a multi-billion market cut to Ericsson

Mr. Khalid Malik is the Ban Ki-moon's man in Beijing and also the number one official of UNDP for these 1.3 billion people country.

While everyone knows by now that China appeals to almost every company in the world, is also known that only the coastal areas of china has been developed so far. Rural areas and intra-land is totally to be developed, where also most of the population leaves under the level of poverty in rural areas.

While one of the most successful initiatives in Southern Asia was Grameen Phone and Grameen Bank initiated by a former UNDP professor Mr. Yunus, who introduced a decade ago solutions for the poor and rural areas in Bangladesh, it seems that for Khalid Malik, a Pakistani, this Bangladeshi best-practice which is being embraced around the world, "could not work in main-land-china".

In order to give "access" to almost 850 million rural population of China, and camouflaged the initiative as "fostering growth and bridge the digital divide, using business-led solutions that accelerate and sustain access to services and livelihood opportunities in rural areas", this Pakistani RC in China chose the same way of WAIVER OF COMPETITIVE BID for partnership in China.

Through this memorandum of understanding Ericsson and UNDP will identify "promising ways to use mobile technology to achieve social aims and develop pilot projects".

But now the controversy is becoming a political problem. Bangladesh is asking why Ericsson ? While other countries like Norway are asking why not Telenor ? Rumors are that other telecoms giants are mad that such initiatives from UNDP always remain private and are never publicly announced.

Will see how far they will go.

Eveline Herfkens - You belong to Jail !!

Yesterday the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, based on three written testimonies from Kemal Dervis, Ad Melkert and Amb. Frank Majoor of Nederland to the UN, reached the conclusion that Ms. Eveline Herfkens was wrong in receiving the money, but she don't need to return them since she unknowingly accepted the quarter of a million dollars in rental subsidy.

It seems that now it wasn't the fault at all of poor Eveline Herfkens, she would have never accepted the 250,000 USD, it was the Dutch Government who sent that money into her accounts.

But wait,we all remember Ms. Susan Madakor of Brooklyn-New York, a single mother and a receptionist at a Manhattan textile firm, eking out a living and wading through credit card debt, until a bizarre windfall in 1998 led her to make grand plans.

Like Eveline Herfkens is claiming today, she walk a cold winter morning to her Chase Bank to negotiate once more on how to pay all her credit cards debts, when the cashier congratulated her on the 700,000 USD she'd received over night.

Claiming that she believed she had won an international lottery that deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars directly into her account, Ms. Madakor bought a laundry business for $100,000, set up a college fund for her 10-year-old son, paid off $30,000 in credit card debt, furnished a new apartment, leased a minivan and began negotiating to buy a liquor store.

Unlike Eveline Herfkens, the only problem was that Ms. Susan Madakor was BLACK with dark eyes, a single mom from the Brooklyn and no friends in Washington or at the United States Mission to the UN.

Immediately the United Nations said that it would take all necessary legal action to recover the money, and certainly did so by contacting the US Authorities and State Supreme Court in Manhattan. At the time Justice Cozier said the case represented "unjust enrichment" and that Ms. Madakor had evidence that she was not the legitimate owner of the funds.

Well poor Susan Madakor, now in jail, with her only son who had to grow without his mother, because someone else made the mistake to send them the money to their account, paid dearly for that.

Not so for Eveline Herfkens, her American dream is working perfectly. She had a 250,000 USD part-time job as Assistant Secretary General for helping the poor, and on top of that she was receiving an extra 250,000 USD in subsidies from her own country. Well while she still claims she never knew, than why she shouldn't go to jail for "unjust enrichment".

Wait we know the answer. The top Democrat at the United States Mission to the UN, Mr. Khalilzad will never allow that a fellow social-democrat, and an quasi-illegal immigrant in the US return illegal money to Netherland, she's a green card holder now.

Ms. Eveline Herfkens, was receiving the subsidy for being Dutch, while she secretly filed for US Citizenship and GreenCard.

But all the above doesn't count. This white, blonde and blue eyes Ducth cannot go to jail. She is highly connected in Washignton, and back home.

While a poor, working afro-american woman goes to jail for same mistake, Herfkens have to enjoy her millions because she unwillingly enriched herself.

SHAME SHAME SHAME ON NEDERLAND POLITICIANS !!!
SHAME SHAME SHAME ON USUN and MR. KHALILZAD for double standards !!!
SHAME SHAME SHAME ON UNITED NATIONS AND BAN KI MOON !!!