Zuzana Caputova, the president of Slovakia, addressing the General Assembly’s 74th session, Sept. 24, 2019. This year, she is the first woman to speak at the opening session, No. 53 on the UN’s provisional list of speakers, reflecting the abysmally low number of female heads of state, 22. CIA PAK/UN PHOTO
Secretary-General António Guterres and Dr. Denis Mukwege, founder and head of Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Feb. 1, 2019. The UN peacekeeping mission in Congo has been providing security to Dr. Mukwege, as he has been receiving death threats for years, but the UN also waffled recently on ensuring such protection. EVAN SCHNEIDER/UN PHOTO
In Bamako, a signing ceremony of an agreement between the UN and Mali through its Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, to strengthen the response to Covid-19 with approximately $2.6 million, April 6, 2020. HARANDANE DICKO/MINUSMA
In the Congo, celebrating the International Day of Women’s Rights, 2019. The author of this essay, who led the video unit for the UN mission in the country for nearly five years, warns against the UN forgoing original media programming for social media content. MICHAEL ALI/MONUSCO.
Michael Sharp and Zaida Catalán in a UN conference room in New York, date unknown. The two UN experts were murdered in 2017 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and their deaths have never been fully solved. Zobel Behalal, nameplate above, was also a member of the UN experts group working in the country.
A trip by the members of the UN Security Council, above background, to the Congo in October 2018 included meeting with female political candidates (front rows) who are competing in the country’s Dec. 23 elections. Recent murders of UN peacekeepers in the Congo raise the question as to whether the Council is clear on the consequences of peacekeepers becoming parties to a conflict. MICHAEL ALI/Monusco
A memorial service was held for the six peacekeepers from Malawi and one from Tanzania who died during clashes with the ADF militia in the Congo on Nov. 15, 2018. Seventeen members of the same UN force intervention brigade were killed nearly a year ago battling the ADF. MIRIAM ASMANI/MONUSCO
United Nations peacekeepers working for the mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were killed by a militia in a jungle in North Kivu Province on Nov. 15, leaving seven soldiers dead: six Malawians and one Tanzanian. Ten were injured.
Justine Masika Bihamba, who runs a women’s rights group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told the UN Security Council on July 26, 2018, that the UN peacekeeping mission there can no longer afford to pay for human-rights experts on the ground, a result of budget cuts recently approved by the UN General Assembly. JOE PENNEY
The western propaganda system is again trotting out the refrain that “rebels in Congo have been defeated.” The latest so-called “rebels” — the M23 forces — are actually Rwandan government troops, not rebels. (True Congolese “rebels” — such as the Mai Mai [also spelled Mayi-Mayi] are always denigrated by the international corporate media system.)
