Neither she nor her staff has ever replied. Since news broke of Ban’s decision, I have asked Power’s office for a direct response to Saudi funding threats. ally does as it pleases in Yemen with political, logistical and military cover from Washington. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, the erstwhile human-rights icon (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell) who has been forced to look the other way as a powerful U.S. No one has become more familiar with this awkwardness than the U.S. The removal of the Saudis from the list was also, he claimed, “pending review.”įor the United States, it was another reminder of what an uncomfortable ally the Saudi kingdom can be (as was the July release of a hitherto classified section of a 2002 report into the 9/11 attacks that suggested, among other things, that the wife of then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan gave money to the wife of a suspected 9/11 co-conspirator).
member states to exert undue pressure,” Ban added. programs.”īut the secretary-general wasn’t done. “At the same time, I also had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would defund many U.N. “The report describes horrors no child should have to face,” Ban told reporters. that he bowed to its demand to remove the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, where it has launched a harsh military intervention, from a list of violators of children’s rights contained in the annex of his annual Children and Armed Conflict report. Ban openly admitted that it was only after Riyadh threatened to cut off funding to the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon managed to get in a dig at the Kingdom over its blackmail-style tactics. But few nations have been more publicly brazen in this practice than Saudi Arabia, and earlier this summer, U.N. secretaries-general have usually been forced to grit their teeth and take it quietly.
The United Nations has long been bullied by its most powerful members, and U.N. Samuel Oakford is a journalist based at the United Nations in New York, where he was previously correspondent for VICE News.
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