Disgraced Former U.N. Official Welcomed at High-Level U.N. Conference

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
By George Russell

On July 31, 2008, Guido Bertucci, the top official in a U.N. department charged with promoting good governance around the world, retired in disgrace.

An internal U.N. investigation found that he committed "gross negligence" in handling a $2.8 million trust fund donated by the Greek government, and suggested that Bertucci might be held "personally accountable and financially liable" for the misspent funds, many of which went for purposes unrelated to the intended project.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon handed the Bertucci case over to a U.N. disciplinary committee just two days before Bertucci's retirement — too late to do anything that would affect his retirement or his pension.

Confronted by FOX News at the time, Bertucci maintained he had done nothing wrong.

Now, it seems, the U.N. apparently doesn't think so either. Bertucci has been welcomed back by the world organization as an invited top-level expert at a high-profile conference in Seoul, South Korea, on "Building Our Humanitarian Planet."

The conference was jointly sponsored by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), which includes the branch of the U.N. bureaucracy where Bertucci used to preside, and whose head was Bertucci's boss.>>>

Activist groups say sexual harrassment at UN is unacceptable

Posted by Tala Dowlatshahi on May 21, 2009

UN JUSTICE, a non-profit independent international committee for the safeguarding of individual rights in the United Nations system and other women’s activist groups issued a statement calling on the United Nations to reexamine is staff policies in regards to sexual harassment and exploitation. The group says a senior human resources official may face criminal prosecution and a civil law suit.
UNJustice says the “disturbing” documented allegations of abuses suffered by an Italian intern at the hands of officials of the UN Secretariat, UN-WFP and World Health Organization were ignored or “bagged” to prevent any public embarrassment. These allegations are contained in a criminal complaint made on 25 March 2008 to the Office of the Attorney-General of Italy against a senior UN-OHRM (Office of Human Resources Management) official.

In particular, UNJustice is seriously worried that the UN-OHRM’s deliberate actions may represent an attempt to cover-up the allegations of specific illicit behavior by UN personnel and to uphold, with all means at its disposal, the written formal request made by a UN-OHRM Director to the intern “to refrain from communicating about this matter with any third party”.

The group and other women activist organizations including Equality Now are deeply concerned that the complaint to the Office of the Attorney-General of Italy also contains evidence of a request made by a UN-WFP official to the intern for a bag as payment for the minutes of a UN-DPI meeting on the Oil for Food Programme scandal, “material of a masochistic and degrading sexual nature, reference to false allegations of harassment by a WHO official and to other irregularities by the UN-Department of Safety and Security.”

The UN Legal Counsel, in a 18 June 2008 memorandum >>>

UN Says Porno Is Behind It, Dodges on No Bid Lockheed Contract, Valium

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

JFK Airport, May 21 – The range of questionable management practices at the UN were on display Thursday, as Department of Management chief Angela Kane belated came to field questions from the Press. Inner City Press asked her around millions of dollars the UN mis-payed to military contractor Lockheed Martin in Darfur, about a pornography scandal that continues to reverberate in the UN, and about her Department's retaliation against staff member they quick provided information about unlicensed distribution of Valium and controlled substances by the UN Medical Service.

On the pornography scandal, she claimed that all of those implicated have been disciplined, noting that five views are different than five hundred. This was just after she was asked about the Wall Street Journal's expose of the UN's mishandling of sexual harassment cases.

Two of these three questions, Ms. Kane referred to others. On the report that the UN paid $4.3 to Lockheed's PA&E subsidiary for construction services, at a time no construction took place, she said to “ask Susana Malcorra,” the head of the Department of Field Services. She said that the Secretariat disagrees with the findings of the UN's own Office of Internal Oversight Services.


UN's Ban and Kane, Ahlenius and Lockheed not shown

Then, she said to ask the head of OIOS, Inga Britt Ahlenius, about a non-public report she says cleared the Medical Service of wrongdoing. Ahlenius hasn't answered Press questions for months, and Kane could not commit to making the report purportedly clearing the “doctors” public, despite chiding the Press for not reporting on it. (Kane is known to be asking the Office of Legal Affairs to make publications print the UN's position, even if based on reports the UN withholds.)

She said of course US licenses are required>>>

UN Child Sex Slave Scandals Continue

Wave after wave of child abuse reports pour forward from all over the globe

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, January 3, 2007

The UN is to investigate itself again after it was revealed by the London Telegraph today that more than twenty different cases of child sex slavery involving UN staff have been reported in southern Sudan.

The Telegraph reports that it has learned of dozens of victims’ accounts claiming that some peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex. The Telegraph states that it is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.

The UN has up to 10,000 military personnel in the region, of all nationalities and the allegations involve peacekeepers, military police and civilian staff.

The Telegraph also states that the Sudanese government, which is deeply opposed to the deployment of UN troops to Darfur, has evidence of child sex slavery, including video footage of Bangladeshi UN workers allegedly having sex with three young girls.

Stating that such events are ultimately the work of "a few bad apples", a UN spokesperson promised that they will be thoroughly investigated.

Over the past few years, however, there seems to have been a hell of a lot of rotting fruit in the UN barrel.

Last November a BBC Investigation found that children as young as 11 have been subjected to rape and prostitution by United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti and Liberia. A previous BBC investigation in Liberia discovered systematic abuse, involving food being given out to teenage refugees in return for sex. In both instances the UN promised to investigate.

In 2003 the AP reported that UN officials were identified as using a ship charted for 'peacekeepers' to traffick young girls from Thailand to East Timor as prostitutes.

In the same year it was also revealed that UN staff were guilty of raping women on a systematic scale in Sierra Leone.

Previous to this, in early 2002 a massive pedophilia scandal within the UN was uncovered involving sexual abuse against West African refugee children in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. UPI reported that Senior U.N. officials knew of the widespread pedophilia and not only did they not take action against the perpetrators, they covered up the atrocities.

It was later reported that after The UN's' investigating arm had cleared several U.N. workers of charges of sexual abuse against West African refugee children, it substantiated 10 new cases against aid workers.

Damning cases involving workers making home porn movies and so called weapons inspectors having bizarre sadomasochistic, pansexual and leather fetishes also emerged at this time.

In 2004 The New York Post reported>>>

UN doubts major Hezbollah rearming in south Lebanon

Wed May 20, 2009 4:23pm EDT

* U.N. cannot be certain about Hezbollah arms stockpiles

* U.N. peacekeeping department wants to cut costs

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS, May 20 (Reuters) - It is highly unlikely that Lebanese Hezbollah militants have more weapons now in southern Lebanon than they did at the time of their 2006 war with Israel, the head of U.N. peacekeeping said on Wednesday.

Israel says Hezbollah continues to increase its weapons stockpiles south of the Litani River where the 13,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission is charged with keeping out armed fighters and illicit weapons.

"I think it would be very difficult for Hezbollah to put additional weapons in the area," Alain Le Roy, the French head of the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping, told reporters.

"I don't speak of north of the Litani River, because there UNIFIL has no mandate," he said. "But south of the Litani River, we consider it very unlikely."

But Le Roy added that he could not be certain: "We cannot give a 100 percent guarantee."

Western diplomats have privately voiced concerns that the Shi'ite militant group has succeeded in replenishing its weapons caches and that UNIFIL has not been entirely effective in preventing weapons smuggling due to its limited mandate.

Le Roy spoke of the limitations on UNIFIL's mandate, under which peacekeepers are there to assist the Lebanese army. For example, he said, UNIFIL lacks the authority to search houses for weapons unless they have "clear evidence" of hidden arms.

UNIFIL has been in Lebanon since 1978>>>