Mostly AWOL. It seems that for top UN officials, it has been more urgent these past two weeks to focus on almost anything else — accepting awards, holding conferences and providing a stage for Zimbabwe’s prescriptions for global financial stability, and the UN’s own politicized projections of weather patterns by the year 2050. But Iran?
Since Iranians took to the streets en masse after their June 12th “election,” and had their calls for freedom answered by the Iranian regime with beatings, shootings, and killings, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has called not a single press conference to address the crisis. Apart from mentioning it last night (he could hardly avoid it) as part of a long interview with Charlie Rose, Ban has limited himself to three public utterances, on June 15, 16 and 22. In the first two comments, he told reporters he was “closely watching” Iran. Almost a week later he had progressed to expressing “growing concern,” urging the Iranian protesters and regime to just talk out their differences (no doubt that is being done inside places like Iran’s Evin prison right now) and describing himself, in language that might just as well apply to getting soup on his tie, as “dismayed.”
Compare that with Ban’s frenzy of impassioned pronouncements (“outrageous, shocking and alarming), activity and demands when Israel went into terrorist-run Gaza this past December and January. Or with the otherwise chronic impulses emanating from the UN by now to meddle at every level in lives worldwide, from regulating the air you breathe, to recommending a prohibition on plastic bags. But Iran? More in my column this week for Forbes.com , on “Where’s the U.N. on Iran?”
The UN Security Council has been doing… nothing.
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