At the same time the Syrian regime of Bashir Al-Assad began the brutal repression that would quickly spin the country into civil war—and culminate with the use of chemical weapons against its own citizens-- Syrian officials were officially registering a deal with the United Nations agency sponsoring the world's largest carbon-trading scheme for an industrial complex known for years as a “dual-use” facility in the government's production of the same weapons of mass destruction.
Click here to read this story in full @ Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/09/23/un-emissions-trading-project-has-links-to-syria-chemical-weapons-arsenal/
Showing posts with label syria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label syria. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
Syria: How Many People Have Been Killed? The Procurement of “UN Figures”
UNITED NATIONS, January 2 — How many people have
been killed in Syria? The day after New Years the UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights said the figure has reached 60,000.
A major UK newspaper — The Independent — said these were “UN figures.”
Then at the US State Department’s briefing,
spokesperson Victoria Nuland said, “we’ve seen this report by UN Rights
Commissioner Navi Pillay.”
Click here for this story in full at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-how-many-people-have-been-killed-the-procurement-of-un-figures/5317891
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.
-----------
You remember this Fox News story on UNDP and its special relations with the Syrian Lady in Louboutin heels?
UNDP's special relations with dictators and terror is well documented. Yet, they continue to operate covered by UN Immunity. Click here for Fox News story.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
UNOCHA
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" !
Fox News EXCLUSIVE: UN-sponsored group in Syria included Assad kin cited as corrupt by US, documents show
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.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Monday, September 24, 2012
Helen Clarks brags about "Rule of Law" and how UNDP does it in 100 countries - forget to mention Syria and its past/current partnership with al-Assad regime
Read this in full here: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=42973&Cr=rule+of+law&Cr1=#.UGC3uBjy_6s
The Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Helen Clark, whose organization works on rule of law related programmes in over 100 countries by helping to train judges and lawyers and to strengthen national police forces, stressed the fundamental role the issue plays in national development by protecting women from discrimination and righting the wrongs inflicted on the poor and the marginalized.
“Thus rule of law is at the very heart of what is needed for development efforts to be effective,” she said. “Conversely, shortcomings in the rule of law underlie the exclusion, suffering, and poverty of many people.”
The Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Helen Clark, whose organization works on rule of law related programmes in over 100 countries by helping to train judges and lawyers and to strengthen national police forces, stressed the fundamental role the issue plays in national development by protecting women from discrimination and righting the wrongs inflicted on the poor and the marginalized.
“Thus rule of law is at the very heart of what is needed for development efforts to be effective,” she said. “Conversely, shortcomings in the rule of law underlie the exclusion, suffering, and poverty of many people.”
FoxNews: Before Assad unleashed violence, UN showcased wife Asma as a 'champion' of reform
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.”
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.”
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Foreign Policy: Ban Ki-moon didn't choose Kofi Annan
Posted By Colum Lynch @Foreign Policy - Turtle Bay (Click here to read if on Turtle Bay)
On March 6, one week after Kofi Annan was appointed U.N.-Arab League special envoy for Syria, columnist Benny Avni wrote an item in the New York Sun suggesting that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had been forced to "swallow" his predecessor's appointment.
The assertion seemed plausible enough. And the buzz around U.N. diplomatic circles was that Ban had been instructed to hire Annan.
Ban had long lived in the shadow of his predecessor, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had traditionally received much better press than Ban. In fact, Ban often seemed reluctant to tap the services of top officials closely identified with Annan, including the man who is now one of Annan's top Syria deputies, Jean-Marie Guehenno, who was passed over for the top peacekeeping job in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But Ban's top aides categorically and energetically denied the story, insisting that it was Ban himself who had decided to choose Annan. "Benny got it wrong!" one top Ban aide told me.
Challenged by the U.N. brass, Avni agreed to add a sentence reflecting the U.N.'s claim that appointment was Ban's idea, and a clarification: "This article was corrected from an earlier edition to more accurately describe the origin of Mr. Annan's mission."
Perhaps Avni was being a bit too accommodating.
This is what Annan himself had to say about his selection in his upcoming memoir, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace.
"In February 2012, while I was reviewing the final drafts of this book at home in Geneva, I received a call from my successor Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. He wanted to know if I would accept a request, conveyed to him by a group of foreign ministers, to take on the role of the international community's envoy for the crisis in Syria."
Sounds like Benny may not have got it so wrong after all.
(Click here to read if on Turtle Bay)
Follow me on Twitter @columlynch
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
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, February 24, 2012
InnerCityPress: On Syria, of Kofi & "Mission Impossible," Double Pensions & Boutros, Baker
By Matthew Russell Lee
Click here for this on @InnerCityPress
UNITED NATIONS, February 24 -- Around the UN in New York the day after former Secretary General Kofi Annan was appointed joint Arab League - UN special envoy to Syria, diplomats and staff were abuzz about other candidates considered, and what the naming of "Kofi" meant.
Sources told Inner City Press that the other candidates considered included not only Finland's Martti Ahtisaari, who garnered Russian opposition for his Ahtisaari plan for Kosovo independence from Serbia, but another former UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, vetoed by the US for a second time.
An American, James Baker, was in the mix, as was Algerian former prime minister Mawloud Hamrouch and Kuwaiti former foreign minister Mohammad Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah.
Annan was selected. Inner City Press asked his former chief of communications Edward Mortimer, who replied, "I salute Kofi for his courage in undertaking what looks like the ultimate 'mission impossible.'"
Another long time UN source told Inner City Press that this work might be a way of "making Kofi pay for his two pensions," referring to his double dipping of pensions as former UN staffer and then Secretary General. Inner City Press has asked Ban Ki-moon's top two spokesmen about this, and how Annan's mission will be funded, after for an answer before noon. Watch this site.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
UNDP in Syria hides the war from public - its website shows only great development
Anne-Marie Slaughter Most impt #Syria news this weekend is that serious protests are spreading to Damascus (not just suburbs)nytimes.com/2012/02/20/wor…
undpwatch 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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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.
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.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."
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
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 ?
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