A native of Kenya, Alice Nderitu became the United Nations’ special adviser on the prevention of genocide in 2020. She traveled to conflict zones on four different continents, visited refugee camps, published statements, and found herself generally ignored. Then she unwittingly broke the UN’s rules about Israel. Johanna Berkman reports:
Nderitu’s first statement on “the situation in the Middle East,” issued on October 15, [2023], called for the return of the Israeli hostages as well as a cease-fire. “And then I spoke about Hamas,” she says, “what they did. I described it. . . . And of course, the key thing that made me the enemy was saying that the attacks happened on Israeli territory, which they did.” (Hamas does not recognize the existence of the state of Israel, which was founded in 1948 and admitted to the UN in 1949.)
That night, a UN Office of Human Rights civil servant sent her an e-mail on which he copied several top UN officials. . . . In his e-mail, the UN civil servant described Nderitu’s statement as “one-sided,” suggesting that it “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” For an institution as hierarchical as the UN, this kind of direct written critique of an undersecretary-general by a junior staffer was highly unusual.
But the criticism mounted, especially when she failed to accuse Israel of “genocide,” which, she says, would violate the institution’s normal procedures. She was the target of formal petitions as well as threatening emails, like the one that said “Filthy zionist rat, you will burn in hell forever.” Rather than defend her, Secretary-General António Guterres decided in November not to renew her contract. She told Berkham:
It’s too much, the focus on Israel. . . . I really don’t think people care about Africans. . . . I went to Chad, and I met the refugees from Sudan, and they were telling me, “Right now, nobody is paying attention to our country.” . . . The ICC, the ICJ: Where are you when it comes to Sudan? You are very efficient when it comes to Gaza.
But this is in fact how the system functions. Chad and Sudan—not to mention more powerful countries like China—are UN member states with allies and interests. But a condemnation of Israel gets almost automatic buy-in from a majority of the United Nations.
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