UN calls for probe into origin of Haiti cholera

The Washington Post

By JONATHAN M. KATZ

The Associated Press
Wednesday, December 15, 2010; 8:49 PM

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The United Nations secretary-general plans to call for an independent commission to study whether U.N. peacekeepers caused a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 2,400 people in Haiti, an official said Wednesday.

U.N. officials initially dismissed speculation about the involvement of peacekeepers. The announcement indicates that concern about the epidemic's origin has now reached the highest levels of the global organization.

"We are urging and we are calling for what we could call an international panel," U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy said at a news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York. "We are in discussions with (the U.N. World Health Organization) to find the best experts to be in a panel to be completely independent."

Le Roy said details about the commission would be announced Friday by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He said cholera experts and other scientists will have full access to U.N. data and the suspected military base.

"They will make their report to make sure the truth will be known," Le Roy said.

Soon after the cholera outbreak became evident in October, Haitians began questioning whether it started at a U.N. base in Meille, outside the central plateau town of Mirebalais and upriver from where hundreds were falling ill. Speculation pointed to recently arrived peacekeepers from Nepal, a South Asia nation where cholera is endemic.

U.N. officials rejected any idea the base was involved, saying its sanitation was air-tight.

WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at the time that it was unlikely the origin would ever be known, and that pinning it down was not a priority.

Then the Associated Press found not only sanitation problems at the base, but that the U.N. mission was quietly taking samples from behind the post to test for cholera.

When the CDC determined the strain in Haiti matched one in South Asia, cholera and global health experts said there was now enough circumstantial evidence implicating the likely unwitting Nepalese soldiers to warrant an aggressive investigation.

The experts have also said there are important scientific reasons to trace the origin of the outbreak, including learning how the disease spreads, how it can best be combated and what danger countries around Haiti could face in the coming months and years.

Many think the U.N. mission's reticence to seriously address the allegations in public helped fuel anti-peacekeeper riots that broke out across the country last month.

This outbreak, which experts estimate could affect more than 600,000 people in impoverished Haiti, involves the first confirmed cases of cholera in Haiti since WHO records began in the mid-20th century. Suspected outbreaks of a different strain of cholera might have occured in Haiti more than a century ago.

The current outbreak has spread to the neighboring Dominican Republic and isolated cases have been found in the United States.

French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux argues that "no other hypothesis" from the Nepalese being the origin could explain his findings that cases of the diarrheal disease first appeared near the U.N. base in Haiti's rural center, far from shipping ports and the area affected by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

But his findings were laid out in an unpublished, somewhat informal paper and are not universally accepted by scientists. Alternate hypotheses include that the disease was introduced by environmental factors, or had been dormant in Haiti's soil.

Dr. David Sack, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, has said that weather patterns and cholera bacteria present in the Gulf of Mexico could also have caused the outbreak.

However, a team led by researchers from Harvard Medical School said this month in the New England Journal of Medicine that the disease was likely carried to Haiti by human activity and that it was indeed a South Asian strain which does not match cholera found elsewhere in Latin America.

At the Wednesday news conference, Le Roy said its investigations have not found the presence of cholera in its soldiers or at the base. But most people infected with cholera don't show symptoms. The AP also found last month that the environmental testing was done at a Santo Domingo hospital with ties to the U.N. mission that likely lacked the special expertise epidemiologists said testing for cholera requires.

The proposed panel is promised to be much more comprehensive. The head of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti told AP last month that a definitive finding on the origin of cholera would impact peacekeeping missions around the world.

A separate U.N. team of water, sanitation and hygiene experts was already sent to Haiti in recent weeks to review all sanitation systems in place at the mission's military, police and civilian installations, sources familiar with the review said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it with journalists.

Le Roy said the peacekeepers will "redouble our efforts" to ensure its bases worldwide have the best santiation and health standards possible.

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Associated Press writer Anita Snow at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Food for Naught

click here to read this on newsweek.com

The World Food Programme's Somalia problem is only the latest in a string of scandals.

The foreign-aid industry has had a bad news cycle. First, British newspapers were consumed with a spat between the British Broadcasting Corp. and Live Aid founder Bob Geldof over a BBC report that tens of millions of dollars of aid to Ethiopia during the 1984–1985 famine were used for arms. Now a more current and equally egregious scandal involving the world's largest humanitarian agency has spun out of Ethiopia's neighbor Somalia. A U.N. report released last week paints a damning portrait of the World Food Programme's operations there: an estimated 50 percent of food delivered by the U.N. agency is essentially being stolen—not only by the WFP's own personnel and contractors, but also Somalia's armed militias, some of whom are radical Islamists.

Somalia is not the first crisis for the agency. These new allegations join a series of recent missteps there that have brought its contracting and operations under scrutiny for its role in aid missions around the world, from North Korea to the Horn of Africa. And the report sent the U.N. backpedaling in its war of words with Washington over the Obama administration's decision to cut aid to Somali operations last year. What is going on at the WFP?

The ugliest revelations are in the report's details. Three Somali businessmen won about 80 percent of the agency's $200 million in transport contracts last year, in what is described as a 12-year-old "de facto cartel." One of them, Abdulqadir Nur "Enow," apparently staged a hijacking of his own trucks in order to sell the food. In another case, the report cites witnesses saying Enow's company sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of food aid in local markets, an outcome made possible by the fact that WFP depended on a local agency run by Enow's wife to verify his deliveries. Meanwhile, a second WFP trucking contractor, Abukar Omar Adaani, used his wealth to finance a rebel militia that launched an offensive in Mogadishu last year against Somalia's U.N.-backed transitional government and African Union peacekeepers. Adaani also persuaded the WFP to fund a road officials said was designed to give Islamist insurgents access to an airstrip, according to the report.

In response, the WFP has suspended contracts with the three businessmen and accused U.N. investigators of overstating the amounts of its trucking payments. (In January it suspended operations in some areas controlled by Islamist rebels.) The agency didn't respond to a question from NEWSWEEK about its knowledge of Somali trucking magnate Adaani's links to Somali insurgents, and it said that the Adaani-built road it had funded was meant for the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Except these aren't isolated problems. Next door, in Ethiopia (one of the largest recipients of food aid in the world), the WFP has spent millions on contracts with transport companies controlled by the country's increasingly authoritarian ruling party, NEWSWEEK has learned. In the country's eastern, Somali-speaking region, where nearly 2 million people receive food aid overseen by the WFP (along with other aid agencies) and where insurgents have long claimed the Ethiopian government uses food as a weapon, a mere 12 percent of food reached the people for which it was intended in 2008, according to figures from the U.S. State Department.

Meanwhile, for its $1.2 billion, three-year food-relief program in Afghanistan, the WFP's trucking and shipping costs for food were two to three times above commercial rates, according to an analysis by Fox News's George Russell published last month, which noted that less than 40 percent of the mission's budget was actually for food. Likewise an investigation by Russell last year also found WFP's planned shipping costs to send more than a half billion dollars of food aid to North Korea were inflated—prompting the agency to admit that some of its shipping budget went to companies owned by dictator Kim Jong Il's government.

As for the WFP, it says it doesn't know how the United States arrived at its calculations about aid deliveries in Ethiopia. In Afghanistan, it said the need to construct warehouses and replace trucks helped account for its high transit costs, and it notes that donor governments and agencies have funded less than a fifth of its North Korea operations. North Korea's remote location and lack of competition in shipping routes to the country also account for the high costs, Ramiro Lopes da Silva, a WFP spokesman said in an e-mail.

Admittedly, places like Afghanistan and Somalia are some of the most difficult countries in the world for aid agencies to work. Some leakage of aid is inevitable. But the U.N.'s agencies are notorious for their high administrative costs and the opacity of their spending. A 2008 Brookings paper coauthored by William Easterly, a well-known aid researcher, ranked 39 large aid donors on criteria including transparency, overhead costs, and selectivity of aid spending. The WFP, which received $4 billion in donations last year—including $1.8 billion from the United States—tied for last place (though the study noted that data from some agencies was unavailable).

The problem in part may be that U.N. aid agencies see themselves as accountable to the world's governments, which provide 92 percent of the WFP's funding, rather than to the public. Asked for data on its contracts with ruling-party trucking companies in Ethiopia—including one owned by a conglomerate whose No. 2 official is the Ethiopian prime minister's wife—the WFP said disclosing such information to the public would jeopardize "its ability to negotiate the best possible rates and delivery conditions." A spokesman did not respond to a request for how much it pays Kim Jong Il's government to ship food to North Korea.

Indeed, what's so unusual about the report on Somalia aid isn't just its conclusions, it's the mere fact that an independent body conducted a thorough probe into U.N. contracting and published its findings. As the Brookings paper notes, "it is a sad reflection on the aid establishment that knowing where the money goes is still so difficult and that the picture available from partial knowledge remains so disturbing."

UN develops guide on appropriate crops for African farmers

http://www.ghananewsagency.org/s_science/r_22486/

Accra, Nov. 12, GNA - Farmers in 43 African countries can now consult a "quick reference calendar" developed by the United Nations Agriculture Agency for advice on the most appropriate crops to plant, based on climatic conditions and soil types in the areas where they live and other factors.

The web-based tool, developed by experts in the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), covers more than 130 crops from beans to beetroot, to wheat and watermelon.

A statement issued in Accra on Friday by the United Nations Information Centre said donors, aid agencies, government workers and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working with African farmers would also be able to use the tool to enable them to provide suitable advise.

The FAO crop calendar is especially useful in case of an emergency such as drought or floods or for rehabilitation efforts following natural or man-made disasters.

As well as crops, it advises on tried and tested seed varieties that are adapted to the soil and climate conditions of each area.

"Seeds are critical for addressing the dual challenges of food insecurity and climate change," said Shivaji Pandey, Director of FAO's Plant Production and Protection Division.

"The right choice of crops and seeds is crucial both for improving the livelihoods of the rural poor and hungry and for dealing with climate change," he said in the statement.

There are 283 agro-ecological zones covered in the calendar, representing the vast richness and variety of the African ecology as well as challenges of land degradation, sand encroachment and floods.

An estimated 50 per cent of the global increase in yields over the past decade came from improving the quality of seeds.

The other 50 per cent was the result of better water management and irrigation practices, according to FAO.

Conservation of Africa’s forest offers great benefits

http://accra-mail.com/

Preserving Africa's surviving tropical forests and planting new trees to replace those lost to deforestation could help reduce the severity of climate change by absorbing more carbon from the air, and ease the local impact of climate change by regulating local weather conditions, scientists have said.

They

also cite the forests' roles as watersheds, defences against soil erosion and conservation pools for biodiversity.

According to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), indigenous forests in Africa are being cut down at an 'alarming' rate of about 3.4 million hectares per year, making the continent the region with the second highest net annual loss of forests in 2000-2010.

But reforestation and education on the benefits of conservation are critical to stemming and reclaiming Africa's lost forest and biodiversity, says Dr. John Peacock, who is manager of the IITA - Leventis Foundation Project, during the 2010 Open Day held on November 6.

The 2010 Open Day was marked with the planting of indigenous trees by IITA staff in Ibadan to help mitigate the effects of climate change and losses in biodiversity.

The planting of trees comes at a time when deforestation rate in Nigeria—Africa��s most populous black nation— has reached an alarming rate of 3.5% per year, translating to a loss of 350,000–400,000 hectares of forest per year. In 1976, Nigeria had 23 million ha of forest; today only 9.6 million ha remain—less than 10% of Nigeria's total land area.

Peacock says the planting of trees is part of a new initiative to restore rainforests in Nigeria. IITA is also contributing to the important UN-REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) initiative in Nigeria.

Through the IITA-Leventis Project, the team, particularly Olukunle Olasupo and Deni Bown, have raised over 15,000 seedlings of 33 different species since February 2010 in preparation for planting next year, with at least as many again hoped for during the coming dry season when most tree species produce seeds.

“We would like every family, represented by staff members in IITA, to plant an indigenous tree next year as part of IITA's activities to increase the forest area,” Peacock adds.

Earlier this year, IITA and partners made efforts to raise awareness of the need to preserve biodiversity—a term that describes the variety of living organisms—especially in forests that are increasingly becoming lost or threatened. For example, statistics indicate that Nigeria's Milicia excelsa (iroko) has become endangered, with about $100 million worth of iroko timber illegally poached from remaining forests last year. “The unfortunate thing is that these very valuable trees are not being replaced,” Peacock notes.

Over the years IITA has championed efforts not only to increase crop productivity but also the conservation of biodiversity and natural resources including water and forest. Today, the 1000 ha at IITA Ibadan campus is taken up by research, administration, and residential buildings, lakes and experimental plots, and a further 350 ha comprises valuable secondary forest. This forest can be compared to an oasis in the desert and is dominated by a canopy that includes fine specimens of Milicia excelsa (iroko), Ceiba pentandra (silk cotton tree), Celtis zenkeri (ita-gidi), Terminalia (afara), and Antiaris toxicaria var. africana (akiro).

In 1979, an arboretum was established comprising 152 different tree species, 81 of which are indigenous. Peacock says the IITA-Leventis Project plans to increase the forest area and the IITA arboretum with the planting of more indigenous trees.

Another area of importance to the project is education, particularly of school children, says Deni Bown, project coordinator and medicinal plant expert with the IITA-Leventis Project. “In this regard we are educating the young on the importance of afforestation and conservation,” she says.

Peacock and his team are hopeful that through reforestation and education, the rate of deforestation in Nigeria in particular and Africa in general will be significantly reduced.

Major blow for WFP Executive Director - Executive Board rejects her proposal for Audit Disclosure to Donors

in huge blow to Josette Sheeran's career and in preparation to an incoming Republican House US House, the Executive Board of WFP unanimously rejected WFP's latest "policy for disclosure of internal audit reports to member states" as inconclusive and requested Josette to prepare a comprehensive oversight policy to be presented in the upcoming meeting of the Board.

Here the text of the decision:

POLICY ISSUES 2010/EB.2/3

Policy for Disclosure of Internal Audit Reports to Member States

The Board approved the revised “Policy for Disclosure of Internal Audit Reports to Member States” (WFP/EB.2/2010/4-B/1/Rev.1).

It requested the Secretariat to develop a comprehensive oversight policy, including budget implications, in line with best practices of the United Nations, that includes inter alia provisions and procedures for sharing all internal reports with Member States. The oversight policy should be presented for approval, at the latest, at the Annual Session of 2011.

The Board also took note of the comments of the ACABQ (WFP/EB.2/2010/5(A,B,C,D,E)/2 and WFP/EB.2/2010/4(B,C)/2) and the FAO Finance Committee (WFP/EB.2/2010/5(A,B,C,D,E)/3 and WFP/EB.2/2010/4(B,C)/3).

11 November 2010

Former Chief UN Investigator says more over the leaked UN Report on Rwanda-led Genocide in Congo

by Chief Editor

Leaked UN Report on Congo “Was Very Closely Guarded”

Jason Stearns – Former Chief UN Investigator

Former Chief UN Investigator on the Congo, now an independent analyst, Jason Stearns provides expert insight into the draft UN report that raises concerns of genocide in Congo and reveals details on the draft’s UN internal circulation in the run-up to its leak.

in his interview with Voices on Genocide Prevention, see transcript below, Jason stresses that, because many of the perpetrators of these massacres are in government positions in the countries in the region including in the Congo, the key recommendation should be to create a tribunal to try the people who committed these massacres.

In his answer to probable changes to the final version of the report, Jason also reveals that, according to members of the UN Human Rights High Commission, speaking on condition of anonymity, there won’t be changes. It will be difficult to subsquently change the report after its final draft has been leaked.

On the question of why the report was leaked, the former chief investigator emphasizes that the report had been finished for over one year, was submitted over one year ago by this team that had carried out the investigation, submitted to the High Commission in Geneva and then it was circulated amongst a very small group of people.

“This was a very closely guarded report. So the leak was not- could not have been a gratuitous leak. There most likely was a very good reason for somebody to leak the report, and that would have been because the report was about to be changed” says Jason.

Click the link to download and listen to Jason Stearns on Voices on Genocide Prevention from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“The novelty of this report was that it was done by the United Nations with rigorous standards and in a very comprehensive fashion so it comes with much more authority and gravitas than many of the reports that have come previously.” Former Chief UN Investigator on the Congo.

TRANSCRIPT:

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this month’s episode of Voices on Genocide Prevention. This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. With me today is Jason Stearns, who is the former Chief U.N. Investigator on the Congo and now an independent analyst. Jason, thank you for speaking with me today.

JASON STEARNS: Thanks for inviting me.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So we have you on today to discuss a report that was produced by the Office of High Commissioner on Human Rights at the United Nations on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s a mapping exercise covering the years 1993 to 2003. Jason, what does this report attempt to do?

JASON STEARNS: The report was commissioned to chart out the main human rights abuses, the war crimes, and crimes against humanity between 1993 and 2003. What had happened was that there had been really no accountability for any of the many, many crimes that happened during this period, and the U.N. Secretary General at the time, Kofi Annan, decided that we needed some sort of report to jumpstart the process of transitional justice so he commissioned this report several years ago and then it finally came to fruition. Investigators were sent to the field and they then — the reason it’s called a “mapping report” is because they didn’t do — it’s not an international tribunal standard of investigation. It’s a rigorous investigation but it’s supposed to map out and not dig in depth into each individual atrocity.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And the report is broken up into several time periods. Can you talk about the various phases of the conflict that the report attempts to map?

JASON STEARNS: Sure, the first phase I would call sort of prewar phase. This was the dying days of the dictator Mobutu’s regime. The reason that it starts in 1993, in March 1993 specifically, was because that was the date there was a large massacre in the eastern Congo. And really this massacre as well as other massacres under Mobutu had sort of came about because in his dying days he was trying to cling on to power and he used divide-and-rule sort of politics pitting different ethnic communities against each other leading to quite a bit of bloodshed between 1993 and when he finally left power in 1997.

The second phase of the report is then the first war, the war that was called the War of Liberation or the War of Aggression depending on which point of view you come from. But it was the war to topple Mobutu that began in 1996 and lasted for roughly six or seven months. He was deposed in 1997. That period I guess the most — the biggest massacres covered in that period were the massacres perpetrated by the alliance that had formed to topple Mobutu led by the Rwandan government. In particular massacres against Rwandan refugees that were in the Congo at the time as well as many other massacres during that period. There were various different massacres, local level feuds, that turned into violent conflict.

Then the third phase of the war is really 1998 until 2003, which is the end of the mandate of the report, which is the second Congo war during which the Congo was carved up into a bunch of different zones ruled by different armed groups, and with a startling amount of complexity because each of these armed groups had a foreign backer. There was different bouts of violence in that period, as well. So those were the basic three phases that the report covers.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And the report has subsequent sections on particular abuses against women and children, as well as the role of minerals and resource exploitation. But the most controversial part of the report, as it currently stands comes from that period in 1996 when the Rwandans invaded Congo and initially claiming that they wanted to get rid of remnants of the genocidal regime that had reformed in eastern Zaire at the time. What does the report document though from that time period that has proven to be so controversial?

JASON STEARNS: Well, what happened was that the refugee camps that you spoke about were really the reason for the invasion in the first place. What happened in 1994 after the genocide in Rwanda, a million people roughly fled into the eastern Congo and were based in refugee camps there. This included most of the people who had carried out Rwandan genocide, an estimated hundred to two hundred thousand people were involved in Rwandan genocide, including security forces, police, army, presidential guard, but also many civilians.

But on top of those there were hundreds of thousands of civilians who had little or nothing at all to do with the genocide who fled because they were afraid that the people who took power in Rwanda after this, the Tutsi-led RFP party that had been engaged in the civil war in Rwanda since 1990, that they would then take revenge against the Hutu population that they saw as having perpetrated the genocide. So you had refugee camps in eastern Congo that housed around a million refugees. Also and they also housed the forced that perpetrated the genocide. This was an untenable situation for the Rwandan government of Paul Kagame, who was Vice President at the time. It was basically you had the same forces that perpetrated the genocide lurking across the border running a radio station and rearming.

There were cross-border raids in both directions. The refugee camps as well as into as well as into Rwanda, but I mean it was a completely untenable situation. These people were being kept alive by the United Nations and aid groups in these huge, huge refugee camps in eastern Congo. Something had to happen. Kagame, Vice President Kagame went on numerous occasions to the international community to the United States and said “Take action.” Or “If you don’t take action, I will take action.”

And then finally in September and October 1996, the Rwandan government took action although at the beginning people spoke of Congolese rebels. What really happened was the Rwandan government, as well as other governments in the region had come together in an alliance led by the Rwandans and used a Congolese rebel coalition sort of as a fig leaf to make people believe this wasn’t a foreign invasion, but it really was a foreign invasion. They came in to break up the refugee camps. It was in the process of breaking up these refugee camps that these massacres occurred and the most controversial part was that not only did the Rwandan government come in and kill some of the perpetrators of the genocide, but they committed systematic, generalized massacres against the civilian refugee population including infants, young children, babies, pregnant women, old women and men, who had not taken part in the genocide, and the massacres were so widespread and systematic that the U.N. mapping teams investigators concluded that there may have- this may have constituted acts of genocide. So that’s what the biggest controversy comes from.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And in the various massacres and abuses that the report documents, can you give us a rough sense of how many Hutu the report claims that the RPF killed?

JASON STEARNS: Well, I went back and actually sort of added together on a calculator how many Hutu refugees could have been using the smallest number because often what happens is because it’s not a- you know it’s difficult to find out exactly how many people died because you know people fled. Huge massacres and mass graves and to get a precise figure it was difficult, but if you use the smallest number possible, you probably arrive at a figure around 8,000.

Now it is not clear whether some of these civilians may actually have been militiamen and soldiers. It’s possible but in many, many cases the U.N. documented cases where these were people who had been disarmed or were identified at road blocks, or in many cases, for example, stragglers, who the Rwandan troops were chasing these people down across the Congo over 1,000 miles through the jungles in the Congo. And the people they caught up first with were the sick and elderly and people who couldn’t make it. These were not young, fit, strong Hutu militias and soldiers. These were often people too weak to have made it. So these were the people that were often killed first. So it was those people who were killed. Those amounted to about eight to ten thousand, but the report suggests it could have been many, many more.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: While the report is perhaps the most comprehensive in looking at the wars in Congo over this long ten-year period, there have been reports of abuses throughout. What in your opinion is really new about the information or about the structure of the report?

JASON STEARNS: Well, I mean this is the first time, you’re right. There are many of the massacres in the report. I want to emphasize this is not just a report about the Rwandan government’s abuses, although they do come off very poorly in the report. Many of the massacres have been documented and investigated before, but never so rigorously. Never by a United Nations team and never as comprehensively. So we had news maybe on you know 20 or 30 percent of these massacres were known but nobody had ever gone back and rigorously documented what exactly happened. For example, some of the worst massacres committed by Rwandan army and the proxy against the Congolese civilians in 1998 and 1999, for example, there were several famous massacres that happened in eastern Congo.

So the really the novelty of this report was that it was done by the United Nations with rigorous standards and in a very comprehensive fashion so it comes with much more authority and gravitas than many of the reports that have come previously. And the documents massacres that nobody even knew about. I mean even I who had been working on the Congo for a decade now, you know, I hadn’t heard of many of these abuses before so I think in terms of a historical document this is an incredibly important document.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What were the key recommendations of the report or the draft report I guess we should say?

JASON STEARNS: We should say the draft report because report is now supposed to be released at the beginning of October, although I gather it’s going to be very similar to the one that’s been leaked. The key recommendations are really to try some sort of process of getting accountability to the Congo. The Congo is an anomaly compared to many post conflict countries around the world. Usually there’s at least some efforts for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a tribunal, vetting out officers out of the army who are known to have committed abuses, something. And in the Congo we’ve had absolutely nothing. We had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was a bit of a sham that never worked, that never published its work so that doesn’t even really count. So we’ve had nothing.

And many of the perpetrators of these massacres are in government in the countries in the region including in the Congo so the key recommendation is to create some sort of tribunal to try the people who committed this. They offer two basic proposals. One is to have a tribunal separate from the Congolese justice system that would include Congolese and foreign judges. That would sit in the Congo probably, but would be an independent institution, funded independently and not dependent on the Congolese justice system. The second proposal would be to create a specialized court within the Congolese justice system also mixed foreign and domestic judges but dependent on the Congolese justice system.

And the last thing is that they propose some sort of means of reparations for the losses of the local population and all of these things of course are going to have to be discussed by Congolese government first and foremost but also its foreign partners.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And the Rwandans have specifically threatened to pull their forces out of the peace-keeping, the joint African union, United Nations peace-keeping force in the Darfur region of Sudan. Have you heard any fears, concerns or grounded suspicions that there would be any retaliation in Congo or along the border?

JASON STEARNS: Well I think the- it’s a complicated situation. The Rwandan government indeed has threatened, says the report is not rigorously documented. It’s a shoddy job, a “hatchet job” I think they called it. And they threatened to withdraw troops from Darfur. That doesn’t seem to be a very productive stance given the fact that their troops are supposed to be preventing genocide in Darfur and the reason they’re withdrawing them is that they’re accused of genocide. It doesn’t make a lot of sense in my mind but they have indeed threatened to do so. They have not threatened to do anything similar in the Congo.

Actually since the release of the report President Kagame has been inaugurated again for another term in office in Kigali just a couple days ago and the guest of honor so to say of that ceremony was President Joseph Kabila of the Congo. So one could say the relations between those two countries are closer now than ever before and that the fact the spotlight has been shown on Rwanda now through this report may make them more hesitant to try to meddle in the business of its neighbor at least for now. So I don’t- I haven’t seen any concrete threats against the Congolese but I’m sure if there were investigations then many of the witnesses provided information for this report who, of course, are anonymous would probably be fearful for their lives.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: The report is dated June 2010 but it was leaked the third week of August, and now this draft report, various countries that have a stake in it are being given until October first, basically to review it. Are you expecting many changes in that report or do you think they will be successful in changing any of the key language?

JASON STEARNS: I’m not privy, I don’t think many people are privy, to the internal wrangling within the U.N. between the U.N. and these different countries. What I’ve been told by the members of the High Commission for Human Rights, which is in charge of the report, is that no, there won’t be a lot that’s changed, and indeed I would imagine it would be difficult to change, substantively change the report after a version has been leaked. Imagine they take out the word “genocide” now and the report is already out there. It would be very easy to compare those two versions and to see that. So it would be very difficult I think at this stage to go back and change the report substantially.

I think this is primarily an effort to give diplomats more time to cool tempers, to prevent the Rwandans from withdrawing troops from Darfur and to give diplomacy a little bit more time. I think it’s true the Rwandans wanted more time to react to this report. But it’s, you know, the Congolese government, for example, had two months, had seen the report two months before it was leaked. It’s not clear that by having more time to react to the report it’s necessarily going to help their case much further. They’ve already rubbished the report in the press. It’s not clear to me what exactly they’re going to do to strengthen their case over this next month but we’ll see I guess come October 1st.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Do you know why the report was leaked?

JASON STEARNS: This is a good question. I mean certainly the- well most people believe it was leaked because some changes were about to be made to the report and people on the inside who had access to the report did not want those changes to be made so they leaked the report. That’s one theory. I should emphasize that the report has been finished for over one year. Was submitted over one year ago by this team that had carried out the investigation, submitted to the High Commission in Geneva and then it was circulated amongst a very small group of people.

You know, having worked with the U.N. for or worked with and worked alongside the U.N. for many years, it’s usually fairly easy to get reports leaked to you. Not with this report. It was very different. Nobody would give me a copy of this report. I saw a page of the report on a computer screen somebody dared to show me. But even that was a little bit audacious on their part, so this was a very closely guarded report. So the leak was not- could not have been a gratuitous leak, I think. I don’t think somebody who just said “Ah, I’m just going to leak it for fun.” There must- there most likely was a very good reason for somebody to leak the report, and that would have been because the report was about to be changed.

Now, since then numerous U.N. officials, anonymously and on the record have said that no, the report was not going to be changed. Those were all just rumors and slander. So some people disagree with that. But if that’s true, if the report wasn’t going to be changed, then I don’t see why release- why leak the report three or four days before the official version was supposed to be made public. It doesn’t make much sense, but I think the answer to that, we’re probably only going to know months or even years from now.

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Okay, Jason, thank you very much for your time.

JASON STEARNS: Sure.

NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about responding to and preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/genocide.

[The ProxyLake]

Flawed and Dangerous Mapping Report Threatens Regional Stability: Rwanda

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS STORY ON RWANDA FACT CHECK

Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 12:40PM in Official Statements

PRESS STATEMENT

Kigali, 30 September 2010

At noon today (Thursday), the Government of Rwanda provided the United Nations with comments on the draft report of the Mapping Exercise in the DRC.

“Despite the media’s focus on sensational aspects of the leaked draft, Rwanda categorically states that the document is flawed and dangerous from start to finish,” Rwandan Foreign Minister and Government Spokesperson, Hon Louise Mushikiwabo said today.

“Our comments to the UN today center around seven specific areas of objection that clearly demonstrate how the Mapping Exercise has been a moral and intellectual failure – as well as an insult to history,” Ms Mushikiwabo said.

The seven areas of objection are:

1. The manipulation of UN processes by organizations and individuals—both inside and outside the UN—for purposes of rewriting history, improperly apportioning blame for the genocide that occurred in Rwanda, and reigniting conflict in Rwanda and the region.

2. The omission of the historical context, especially the immediate and serious threat posed by armed and ideologically charged refugees positioned right at the border of Rwanda and Zaire, as well as the nature of the conflict within Zaire at the time. This is despite the UN’s knowledge of the situation and its blatant inaction.

3. The contradiction between the report and contemporaneous accounts of the situation from the UN Security Council, NGOs and many other eyewitnesses in the region who confirmed that genocidal forces, often posing as civilian refugees, were operating under the cover of UN refugee camps.

4. The flawed methodology and application of the lowest imaginable evidentiary standard.

5. The overreliance on the use of anonymous sources, hearsay assertions, unnamed, un-vetted and unidentified investigators and witnesses, who lack credibility; and allegation of the existence of victims with uncertain identity.

6. Failure to address the glaring inconsistency that claims of genocide are directly contradicted by Rwanda’s extensive and coordinated efforts to repatriate, resettle and reintegrate 3.2 million Hutu refugees; efforts that were supported by the UN.

7. The dangerous and irresponsible attempt by the Report to undermine the peace and stability attained in the Great Lakes region, which directly contradicts the very mission of the United Nations.

“Given these objections, it seems clear that no amount of tinkering can resuscitate the credibility of this fundamentally misguided process,” Ms. Mushikiwabo said.

See the full comments here (PDF)

World Food Program's 'Sunshine Policy' Falls Short, U.N. Oversight Panel Says

By George Russell

Published November 11, 2010 | click here to view story on FoxNews.com

As the World Food Program grudgingly prepares to vote on opening its sensitive internal audit system to inspection by the nations that pay its bills, a key United Nations oversight committee has protested that the proposed sunshine policy doesn’t go far enough.

It also suggests that the agency should go back to the drawing board and try again.

Whether the world’s largest food aid agency will do that remains to be seen. Its 36-nation supervisory Executive Board is supposed to vote on the original, more restrictive proposal from WFP management at the end of its regular three-day session on November 11.

The issue of U.N. agencies exposing their internal audits to the nations that support them—even the ones on their executive boards—has been an explosive one for years, with North Korea as a trigger.

In 2007, a scandal involving the United Nations Development Program’s North Korean operations boiled over after confidential internal UNDP audits disclosed that the agency had funneled tens of millions in hard currency to the brutal dictatorship of Kim Jong Il, hired North Korean government employees in sensitive financial positions, and other transgressions. (The existence of the audits were revealed by U.S. diplomats during the Bush Administration.)

UNDP ended up closing its offices in North Korea from 2007 to 2009—and handing over its functions as lead U.N. agency in the country to WFP.

Two months ago, Fox News revealed that a summary of WFP audits in late 2009 had discovered “lapses,” “anomalies,” and unexplained variations in the way the relief agency reported its financial and commodity management in the same country.

Click here to read that story.

WFP refused to show the audit to Fox News, and disclosed that under its longstanding policy, even members of the Executive Board—including the U.S.-- did not receive the audits, which were deemed “management tools.” At the same time, it claimed there were only “a small number of inconsistencies in commodity accounting” involved, even though the document obtained by Fox News suggested otherwise.

That no-show policy is what is supposed to change this week—but as proposed by WFP management, it will only disclose audits in response to precise questions about the ones involved, and only to nations that sign a confidentiality pledge. Curious nations must also supply their reasons for wanting to look, and promise to keep anything they read confidential.

Just to be sure, they won’t get a copy to keep. They will instead be allowed to read one only in the office of WFP’s inspector general. No copying or note-taking is allowed during what the rules call a “consultation.”

Click here for more on this story.

The complaint about the overly-narrow policy of show-and-tell comes from a United Nations General Assembly oversight body called the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, or ACABQ—a standing oversight group composed of all U.N. members and currently headed by a U.S. diplomat, Susan McLurg. The ACABQ vets all financial proposals for the New York based U.N. Secretariat, and has the same function for WFP. Its recommendations are usually, but not always, accepted, as they carry the weight of the whole membership behind them.

In a terse, one-paragraph assessment dated October 29—WFP’s own proposal is dated September 24—the Advisory Committee calls the proposals “quite restrictive,” and “finds that the procedures lack clarity on the criteria that would be used for approval or denial of requests from Member States for access to internal audit reports.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE ACABQ REPORT

In muted fashion, it then suggests that “WFP may wish to explore ways to achieve greater transparency.” It does not specify what those ways might be.

The ACABQ document, which also deals with a number of other WFP items, was listed on the WFP website as “not available” until just before the current Executive Board session.

The ACABQ claims that its urge for greater openness is in line with a United Nations General Assembly resolution passed in 2005 about the reports of the U.N. Secretariat’s own internal auditing watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). That resolution made OIOS audit reports available to any inquiring U.N. member state. They could be withheld by the head of OIOS—but not the U.N.’s top management-- for confidentiality reasons, or if it harmed “the due process rights” of individuals under investigation for wrongdoing.

CLICK HERE FOR THE U.N. RESOLUTION

WFP’s position is apparently that, as a separate U.N. program, it isn’t bound by Secretariat rules, and has a policy more like that of the other controversial actor in the North Korean drama—UNDP.

Whether the nations that supervise WFP find that argument compelling will be better known after November 11.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News.