FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
June 5, 2015
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Since horrific allegations came to light that international soldiers may have abused children in the Central African Republic, the United States has been calling for a full and impartial investigation into these disturbing reports as well as into the manner in which they were handled. We thus welcome the Secretary General’s recent announcement of the establishment of an External Independent Review to examine the UN system’s response to the allegations.
The Secretary General’s establishment of this review is an opportunity for the UN to learn how it and member states can best safeguard the dignity and welfare of vulnerable people; ensure swift action to make certain potential abuses are investigated and halted; protect those who expose abuses; and provide appropriate privacy and other protection for witnesses who come forward with allegations of abuse. There are many questions that need to be answered, and we view this as an important opportunity for member states – and the people of the Central African Republic – to learn what went wrong at every point in this process.
Alongside this independent review, it is essential that all countries whose soldiers are alleged to have been involved in such abuses fully, urgently, and transparently investigate all claims to ensure that justice is served. Any individual found to have committed such heinous abuses must be held accountable.
The United States looks forward to reviewing the outcome of the Panel’s findings in a timely manner and working with all parties to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse.
Showing posts with label SAMANTHA POWER. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SAMANTHA POWER. Show all posts
Sunday, June 7, 2015
REMARKS AT UN ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EASTERN UKRAINE
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
June 5, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President, for organizing today’s meeting to speak to the recent developments in eastern Ukraine. And I join others in thanking our briefers, Under Secretary-General Feltman and OSCE Deputy Chief Monitor Hug, for providing the Security Council and the international community with the facts underlying the escalation in violence, which are critical in a conflict where some continue to try to obscure the truth.
On June 3rd, combined Russian-separatist forces launched multiple, coordinated attacks west of the Minsk line of contact in Donetsk. The attacks were concentrated on the towns of Marinka and Krasnohorivka.
The Russian Federation and its separatist allies have offered multiple – often conflicting – explanations for these attacks.
In some instances, Russia and the separatists have blamed Ukraine for inciting the attacks. For example, a Russian presidential spokesman attributed the violations of the ceasefire to the “provocative actions by the Ukrainian armed forces,” claiming, “the Ukrainian side has repeatedly taken similar efforts to escalate tensions against the backdrop of international operations.” Similarly, the so-called “Defense Minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic blamed Ukraine for “provocations” and, what he called, “a breach in the Minsk agreements,” which led to the fighting. Exactly what the so-called provocations are was never explained.
This argument, this set of arguments, have been undermined by some of the separatists themselves, who seem to have forgotten to run their tweets and their blog posts by Moscow. During the attacks, one tweeted, “Marinka is ours!” – posting a photo of armed soldiers atop a tank flying the separatists’ flag. A post on a separatist website said, “As a result of a massive attack by [DPR] armed forces, Marinka has been liberated.”
In other instances, Russia has argued that the attacks were justified because the areas that are actually part of the separatist-controlled territory under the Minsk agreements are these areas. They are not. This was the case Russia made about Marinka and Krasnohorivka yesterday, at a meeting of the OSCE. We’ve seen this tactic before; when combined Russian-separatist forces encircled and attacked Debaltseve immediately after signing the package of measures at Minsk on February 12th, 2015. As a separatist commander Eduard Basurin told Reuters on February 15th, “Of course we can open fire [on Debaltseve]…The territory is internal: ours. And internal is internal. But along the line of confrontation there is no shooting.”
The problem with this line of argument is, quite simply, that it is false. At no point did the Minsk Agreements recognize Marinka and Krasnohorivka as separatist-controlled territory. Nor did they grant the separatists control over Debaltseve or other areas combined Russian-separatist forces have seized, or tried to seize. Yet for Russia and the separatists, it seems the contact line can shift to include the territories that they feel they deserve.
The Kyiv-born surrealist master Mikhail Bulgakov put this problem a different way: “The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes, never!” In this case, the objective eyes in eastern Ukraine belong to the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission, the SMM. And what they tell us is that, on the evening of June 2nd and early morning of June 3rd, “SMM observed the movement of a large amount of heavy weapons in DPR-controlled areas – generally in a westerly direction toward the contact line – close to Marinka, preceding and during the fighting.” So, to repeat: according to the SMM, heavy weapons from the Russian-backed separatist side moved westward “preceding as well as during the fighting.”
The SMM tried to contact high-ranking DPR personnel over an hour-and-a-half period on the morning of June 3rd, but reported, “Either they were unavailable or did not wish to speak to the SMM.” The eyes do not conceal the truth. And the truth here is that the recent violence was rooted in a combined Russian-separatist assault.
These and other joint attacks by Russian-separatist forces have deadly consequences. At least 5 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, and 38 wounded, in the assault on the towns. The number of casualties is surely higher, but we do not, unfortunately, have reliable reports from the separatists’ side. That is because, as the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Unit noted in its May 15th report, independent media have been prosecuted, threatened, and otherwise muzzled in separatist-controlled territory.
We also do not know how many Russian soldiers were killed in recent attacks – or in any of their operations in eastern Ukraine, for that matter. Russia continues – despite incidents such as the recent capture of two special operations Russian soldiers in Schastya last month – to deny any military involvement in eastern Ukraine.
And just last week, President Putin signed a decree classifying any death of Russian soldiers in “special operations” in peacetime a state secret, a policy which previously was limited to wartime only. Not content with denying their military service in life, Russia now denies their loved ones the respect and closure – not to mention social services – for their service in death. And it denies the Russian people knowledge to which they are entitled – of a conflict their government has been fueling with weapons, training, and soldiers. No matter what your opinion of the open secret that is Russia’s military involvement in eastern Ukraine and occupied Crimea, the dignified recognition of one’s dead should have primacy.
Of course, suffering is hardly limited to those involved in the fighting. Civilians living near and along the front lines continue to endure profound hardship. Approximately 1.3 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the fighting. Small children on the front lines have gotten used to going to school and sleeping in basements. Families live underground for months at a time. The elderly and disabled are trapped with little access to vital medicine and other forms of assistance. A health professional working in Debaltseve said, “I’ve met elderly people who say that they would just like to die. They don’t have depression; they just don’t want to be 80 years old and living in a basement.”
By now, the international community is quite familiar with Russia’s playbook when it comes to efforts to occupy the territory of its sovereign neighbors – as it did in Crimea, and before that in Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. The consensus here, and in the international community, remains that Minsk’s implementation is the only viable way out of this deadly conflict.
The Ukrainian government has made good faith efforts to honor that consensus – notwithstanding the seemingly endless violations by Russia and the separatists – and deliver on the commitments made at Minsk. Ukraine is holding direct dialogue with the separatists, a bitter pill to swallow, but one they have swallowed for the sake of peace and for the sake of the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. At the same time, Ukraine has undertaken critical efforts, with the participation of Ukrainian civil society, to address pervasive problems it inherited from its predecessors, like widespread corruption, as well as to pursue crucial reforms such as decentralization. Ukraine cooperates with the international monitors and bodies, and has committed to address identified areas of concern. The United States will continue to raise tough issues and these areas of concern, including some raised here today by the briefers, with the Government of Ukraine, and we will support the government and Ukrainian people as they continue their efforts toward meaningful reform.
Yet Russia – and the separatists it trains, arms, fights alongside, and with whom it shares command and control systems in eastern Ukraine – continues to ignore this consensus, flouting the commitments it made at Minsk. It goes right on applying its playbook in new territories – as though this Council and the world are too blind, or too easily deceived to notice.
We must not let ourselves be deceived. The consequences of Russia’s contempt for Minsk and the rules undergirding our international peace and security are too great – both for the integrity of the international system, and for the rights and welfare of the Ukrainian people. We cannot fail to see and fail to act. We must not stop applying pressure until Ukrainians get the stable democracy, the territorial integrity, and sovereignty they yearn for and deserve. Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
June 5, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President, for organizing today’s meeting to speak to the recent developments in eastern Ukraine. And I join others in thanking our briefers, Under Secretary-General Feltman and OSCE Deputy Chief Monitor Hug, for providing the Security Council and the international community with the facts underlying the escalation in violence, which are critical in a conflict where some continue to try to obscure the truth.
On June 3rd, combined Russian-separatist forces launched multiple, coordinated attacks west of the Minsk line of contact in Donetsk. The attacks were concentrated on the towns of Marinka and Krasnohorivka.
The Russian Federation and its separatist allies have offered multiple – often conflicting – explanations for these attacks.
In some instances, Russia and the separatists have blamed Ukraine for inciting the attacks. For example, a Russian presidential spokesman attributed the violations of the ceasefire to the “provocative actions by the Ukrainian armed forces,” claiming, “the Ukrainian side has repeatedly taken similar efforts to escalate tensions against the backdrop of international operations.” Similarly, the so-called “Defense Minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic blamed Ukraine for “provocations” and, what he called, “a breach in the Minsk agreements,” which led to the fighting. Exactly what the so-called provocations are was never explained.
This argument, this set of arguments, have been undermined by some of the separatists themselves, who seem to have forgotten to run their tweets and their blog posts by Moscow. During the attacks, one tweeted, “Marinka is ours!” – posting a photo of armed soldiers atop a tank flying the separatists’ flag. A post on a separatist website said, “As a result of a massive attack by [DPR] armed forces, Marinka has been liberated.”
In other instances, Russia has argued that the attacks were justified because the areas that are actually part of the separatist-controlled territory under the Minsk agreements are these areas. They are not. This was the case Russia made about Marinka and Krasnohorivka yesterday, at a meeting of the OSCE. We’ve seen this tactic before; when combined Russian-separatist forces encircled and attacked Debaltseve immediately after signing the package of measures at Minsk on February 12th, 2015. As a separatist commander Eduard Basurin told Reuters on February 15th, “Of course we can open fire [on Debaltseve]…The territory is internal: ours. And internal is internal. But along the line of confrontation there is no shooting.”
The problem with this line of argument is, quite simply, that it is false. At no point did the Minsk Agreements recognize Marinka and Krasnohorivka as separatist-controlled territory. Nor did they grant the separatists control over Debaltseve or other areas combined Russian-separatist forces have seized, or tried to seize. Yet for Russia and the separatists, it seems the contact line can shift to include the territories that they feel they deserve.
The Kyiv-born surrealist master Mikhail Bulgakov put this problem a different way: “The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes, never!” In this case, the objective eyes in eastern Ukraine belong to the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission, the SMM. And what they tell us is that, on the evening of June 2nd and early morning of June 3rd, “SMM observed the movement of a large amount of heavy weapons in DPR-controlled areas – generally in a westerly direction toward the contact line – close to Marinka, preceding and during the fighting.” So, to repeat: according to the SMM, heavy weapons from the Russian-backed separatist side moved westward “preceding as well as during the fighting.”
The SMM tried to contact high-ranking DPR personnel over an hour-and-a-half period on the morning of June 3rd, but reported, “Either they were unavailable or did not wish to speak to the SMM.” The eyes do not conceal the truth. And the truth here is that the recent violence was rooted in a combined Russian-separatist assault.
These and other joint attacks by Russian-separatist forces have deadly consequences. At least 5 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, and 38 wounded, in the assault on the towns. The number of casualties is surely higher, but we do not, unfortunately, have reliable reports from the separatists’ side. That is because, as the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Unit noted in its May 15th report, independent media have been prosecuted, threatened, and otherwise muzzled in separatist-controlled territory.
We also do not know how many Russian soldiers were killed in recent attacks – or in any of their operations in eastern Ukraine, for that matter. Russia continues – despite incidents such as the recent capture of two special operations Russian soldiers in Schastya last month – to deny any military involvement in eastern Ukraine.
And just last week, President Putin signed a decree classifying any death of Russian soldiers in “special operations” in peacetime a state secret, a policy which previously was limited to wartime only. Not content with denying their military service in life, Russia now denies their loved ones the respect and closure – not to mention social services – for their service in death. And it denies the Russian people knowledge to which they are entitled – of a conflict their government has been fueling with weapons, training, and soldiers. No matter what your opinion of the open secret that is Russia’s military involvement in eastern Ukraine and occupied Crimea, the dignified recognition of one’s dead should have primacy.
Of course, suffering is hardly limited to those involved in the fighting. Civilians living near and along the front lines continue to endure profound hardship. Approximately 1.3 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the fighting. Small children on the front lines have gotten used to going to school and sleeping in basements. Families live underground for months at a time. The elderly and disabled are trapped with little access to vital medicine and other forms of assistance. A health professional working in Debaltseve said, “I’ve met elderly people who say that they would just like to die. They don’t have depression; they just don’t want to be 80 years old and living in a basement.”
By now, the international community is quite familiar with Russia’s playbook when it comes to efforts to occupy the territory of its sovereign neighbors – as it did in Crimea, and before that in Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. The consensus here, and in the international community, remains that Minsk’s implementation is the only viable way out of this deadly conflict.
The Ukrainian government has made good faith efforts to honor that consensus – notwithstanding the seemingly endless violations by Russia and the separatists – and deliver on the commitments made at Minsk. Ukraine is holding direct dialogue with the separatists, a bitter pill to swallow, but one they have swallowed for the sake of peace and for the sake of the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. At the same time, Ukraine has undertaken critical efforts, with the participation of Ukrainian civil society, to address pervasive problems it inherited from its predecessors, like widespread corruption, as well as to pursue crucial reforms such as decentralization. Ukraine cooperates with the international monitors and bodies, and has committed to address identified areas of concern. The United States will continue to raise tough issues and these areas of concern, including some raised here today by the briefers, with the Government of Ukraine, and we will support the government and Ukrainian people as they continue their efforts toward meaningful reform.
Yet Russia – and the separatists it trains, arms, fights alongside, and with whom it shares command and control systems in eastern Ukraine – continues to ignore this consensus, flouting the commitments it made at Minsk. It goes right on applying its playbook in new territories – as though this Council and the world are too blind, or too easily deceived to notice.
We must not let ourselves be deceived. The consequences of Russia’s contempt for Minsk and the rules undergirding our international peace and security are too great – both for the integrity of the international system, and for the rights and welfare of the Ukrainian people. We cannot fail to see and fail to act. We must not stop applying pressure until Ukrainians get the stable democracy, the territorial integrity, and sovereignty they yearn for and deserve. Thank you.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
U.S. CONDEMNS MORTAR ATTACKS ON UN MISSION IN SOUTH SUDAN
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
May 20, 2015
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the May 20 mortar attacks on the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) compound in Melut, South Sudan, that resulted in the death of four people, including one child, and severely injured eight others. We extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of the victims and reiterate our call for those responsible for attacks on civilians and UN facilities to be held accountable.
Today’s attacks are only the latest in a series of brutally violent acts against civilians, including the raping and murder of children, resulting from increased fighting between the Government of South Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in Opposition, and their respective affiliated militias and other armed groups, in Unity and Upper Nile States over the last two weeks. As this most recent incident underscores, the renewed fighting in South Sudan puts at risk UNMISS bases and protection of civilian sites; and it does so at a time when across the country more than 3 million people are lacking sufficient food and more than 2 million are internally displaced.
The international community is footing the bill for President Salva Kiir’s and opposition leader Riek Machar’s shameful disregard for the devastating humanitarian crisis facing the people of South Sudan. Political and military leaders on all sides of this conflict must put aside their self-serving ambitions, bring an end to the fighting, implement the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement to which both have already agreed, and engage in negotiations for a comprehensive and inclusive peace agreement to establish a transitional government and bring about a reform process that addresses the root causes of this conflict.
South Sudan’s political leaders continue to refuse to prioritize the well-being of their own people, necessitating an increase in international pressure on the South Sudanese parties so that they accept and implement a credible peace agreement. In this vein, we will continue our work with the UN Security Council’s South Sudan Sanctions Committee to gather and review evidence that might be useful for sanctions listings that target political spoilers and those who violate and abuse human rights and violate international humanitarian law.
We regret that South Sudan’s political leaders repeatedly fail to heed international humanitarian law’s prohibition on intentionally targeting civilians. Additionally, all parties should regard UNMISS sites as inviolable and the work of UNMISS personnel should be respected, supported and protected as they endeavor to protect the more than 120,000 internally displaced people sheltering at UNMISS bases and the many others outside these bases who are displaced by the ongoing fighting.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
May 20, 2015
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the May 20 mortar attacks on the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) compound in Melut, South Sudan, that resulted in the death of four people, including one child, and severely injured eight others. We extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of the victims and reiterate our call for those responsible for attacks on civilians and UN facilities to be held accountable.
Today’s attacks are only the latest in a series of brutally violent acts against civilians, including the raping and murder of children, resulting from increased fighting between the Government of South Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in Opposition, and their respective affiliated militias and other armed groups, in Unity and Upper Nile States over the last two weeks. As this most recent incident underscores, the renewed fighting in South Sudan puts at risk UNMISS bases and protection of civilian sites; and it does so at a time when across the country more than 3 million people are lacking sufficient food and more than 2 million are internally displaced.
The international community is footing the bill for President Salva Kiir’s and opposition leader Riek Machar’s shameful disregard for the devastating humanitarian crisis facing the people of South Sudan. Political and military leaders on all sides of this conflict must put aside their self-serving ambitions, bring an end to the fighting, implement the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement to which both have already agreed, and engage in negotiations for a comprehensive and inclusive peace agreement to establish a transitional government and bring about a reform process that addresses the root causes of this conflict.
South Sudan’s political leaders continue to refuse to prioritize the well-being of their own people, necessitating an increase in international pressure on the South Sudanese parties so that they accept and implement a credible peace agreement. In this vein, we will continue our work with the UN Security Council’s South Sudan Sanctions Committee to gather and review evidence that might be useful for sanctions listings that target political spoilers and those who violate and abuse human rights and violate international humanitarian law.
We regret that South Sudan’s political leaders repeatedly fail to heed international humanitarian law’s prohibition on intentionally targeting civilians. Additionally, all parties should regard UNMISS sites as inviolable and the work of UNMISS personnel should be respected, supported and protected as they endeavor to protect the more than 120,000 internally displaced people sheltering at UNMISS bases and the many others outside these bases who are displaced by the ongoing fighting.
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
U.S. VOTES NO ON PROPOSED CHANGE TO AUTHORITY OF UN SECRETARY GENERAL
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
March 24, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The United States will vote NO on the resolution proposed by the Russian Federation and we urge that other countries do the same.
This resolution attempts to undermine the Secretary-General’s authority as Chief Administrative Officer of the United Nations, a role entrusted to him by the UN Charter. At issue is a staff bulletin issued by the Secretary-General that made a straightforward change with respect to how the UN Staff Regulations and Rules are implemented. This is an administrative decision made by the UN, for the UN; this decision has not interfered and will not interfere with any Member State’s domestic legislation.
In issuing this bulletin, the Secretary-General acted within his legitimate authority and on the advice of the United Nations’ Office of Legal Affairs, OLA. OLA has shared that advice, in detail, with this Committee on several occasions. In our view, OLA’s advice is clear and persuasive, grounded in important and well-established precedents. Nonetheless, the Russian Federation has continued to press the Secretary-General to rescind the bulletin, leaving some in this Committee with a misleading impression of the bulletin’s effect.
Russia claims the administrative decision will impose a new standard on Member States. But this is not true. The bulletin changes the UN’s practice and does not seek to change Member States’ domestic legislation.
The sponsor claims the bulletin will carry significant costs. However, the UN Office of Human Resources Management has informed us that there have been no financial implications as of yet, and that any future costs would be insignificant.
It is the resolution we are being asked to vote on that would have a profound and lasting impact. This resolution seeks to alter the division of labor between the Secretary-General and the General Assembly. Of course, the General Assembly, and the Fifth Committee in particular, have essential roles to play in guiding the operation of the organization – and the United States joins all Member States here in guarding this role vigilantly. But this resolution would have us micromanage a decision that is well within the Secretary-General’s discretionary authority. It would set a dangerous precedent, diminishing the office of the Secretary-General and involving this Committee and the General Assembly in a degree of granularity that could negatively impact the effective delivery of mandates, and would create legal uncertainty around the extent of the Secretary-General’s administrative authority and legal uncertainty about the durability of future administrative decisions made by the Secretary-General.
The Secretary-General’s authority should not be undermined, this bulletin should not be politicized, and this Committee and the General Assembly should not be divided by a vote that almost none of us wanted. As such, the United States will be voting NO and we respectfully urge other countries to do the same. Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
March 24, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The United States will vote NO on the resolution proposed by the Russian Federation and we urge that other countries do the same.
This resolution attempts to undermine the Secretary-General’s authority as Chief Administrative Officer of the United Nations, a role entrusted to him by the UN Charter. At issue is a staff bulletin issued by the Secretary-General that made a straightforward change with respect to how the UN Staff Regulations and Rules are implemented. This is an administrative decision made by the UN, for the UN; this decision has not interfered and will not interfere with any Member State’s domestic legislation.
In issuing this bulletin, the Secretary-General acted within his legitimate authority and on the advice of the United Nations’ Office of Legal Affairs, OLA. OLA has shared that advice, in detail, with this Committee on several occasions. In our view, OLA’s advice is clear and persuasive, grounded in important and well-established precedents. Nonetheless, the Russian Federation has continued to press the Secretary-General to rescind the bulletin, leaving some in this Committee with a misleading impression of the bulletin’s effect.
Russia claims the administrative decision will impose a new standard on Member States. But this is not true. The bulletin changes the UN’s practice and does not seek to change Member States’ domestic legislation.
The sponsor claims the bulletin will carry significant costs. However, the UN Office of Human Resources Management has informed us that there have been no financial implications as of yet, and that any future costs would be insignificant.
It is the resolution we are being asked to vote on that would have a profound and lasting impact. This resolution seeks to alter the division of labor between the Secretary-General and the General Assembly. Of course, the General Assembly, and the Fifth Committee in particular, have essential roles to play in guiding the operation of the organization – and the United States joins all Member States here in guarding this role vigilantly. But this resolution would have us micromanage a decision that is well within the Secretary-General’s discretionary authority. It would set a dangerous precedent, diminishing the office of the Secretary-General and involving this Committee and the General Assembly in a degree of granularity that could negatively impact the effective delivery of mandates, and would create legal uncertainty around the extent of the Secretary-General’s administrative authority and legal uncertainty about the durability of future administrative decisions made by the Secretary-General.
The Secretary-General’s authority should not be undermined, this bulletin should not be politicized, and this Committee and the General Assembly should not be divided by a vote that almost none of us wanted. As such, the United States will be voting NO and we respectfully urge other countries to do the same. Thank you.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
U.S. WELCOMES PROGRESS IN HAITI
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
March 18, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President, thank you, Special Representative Honoré, for your briefing and your leadership. And thank you to all the dedicated men and women serving in MINUSTAH, who are working with you to build a more secure and stable Haiti.
The United States welcomes the recent progress Haiti has made toward holding elections this year, including the promulgation of an electoral decree on March 2 drafted by a new electoral council drawn from civil society, and that council’s subsequent announcement of voting dates. While we commend President Martelly’s efforts to promote an inclusive political process, including by forming a multiparty government, the health of Haiti’s democracy depends on restoring a functioning legislature without further delay. That is why it is so important that elections take place this year as planned, and that the government continue to use its extraordinary decree powers solely to administer elections and keep the state running. We also call upon all of Haiti’s political leaders and parties to participate in elections and to ensure an atmosphere of peace so that all eligible Haitians who wish to vote can do so without fear for their safety.
With the electoral decree in place and election dates set, urgent attention to preparing for and organizing the polls is required, to ensure elections that are free, fair, credible, and inclusive. Continued inclusive political dialogue and preparations for elections that are transparent and ensure a level playing field will be required to sustain the generally stable security situation that the Secretary-General has reported.
While MINUSTAH and the rest of the international community, including my government, stand ready to support the administration of the elections, ultimately the responsibility for ensuring their success lies with Haitians: the Haitian government, the electoral council, the political parties, and the Haitian people themselves.
The level of support provided by MINUSTAH, particularly its engineering battalions, for elections in 2010 and 2011 were part of the package of extraordinary measures that the international community took to help Haiti recover from the devastating 2010 earthquake, not an enduring precedent for elections this year or in the future. We join the Secretary-General’s call on the government to ensure the electoral council and other state institutions have adequate resources to administer elections in a manner that reflects Haitians’ increased assumption of a responsibility so central to the exercise of sovereignty. The United States will do our part in support.
Successful elections will require robust international support, of course, including from MINUSTAH. MINUSTAH should without delay catalogue the functions played in the last elections by each of its respective components, including the funds and programs. It should identify any of those critical functions each component will not be able to carry out in 2015. And it should work urgently across the UN system and with the electoral council, donors, Haitian and international civil society actors, and the government of Haiti to ensure that those functions are carried out effectively during this year’s elections. MINUSTAH also should work closely with the electoral council to identify any elements of Haiti’s election planning, including the number and location of polling centers, that may make the process more vulnerable to violence or manipulation, and to develop and implement corrective measures transparently and in consultation with Haitian political actors. The 2015 elections will not be Haiti’s last; it is important to use each electoral cycle to improve Haiti’s electoral system and to make it more sustainable.
We note the generally stable security situation that the Secretary-General reported. This comes amid the continued growth and professionalization of the Haitian National Police, to which donors and MINUSTAH should continue to offer maximum support. The Haitian National Police needs to continue to grow in size and capability. But while we were in Haiti, we heard that every trained Haitian National Policeman or woman is worth ten international police. Moreover, even with the reported increase in crime and gang-related violence, Haiti’s homicide rate remains well below the regional average. Incidents of violent unrest during the reporting period totaled only 215 events. In most of these cases, the HNP required no operational support from any MINUSTAH forces to manage the situation, and in only 16 percent of all incidents of violent unrest nationwide did the HNP require some level of operational support from MINUSTAH’s military forces.
Most of those incidents took place in close proximity to the three locations where the military component will be based following MINUSTAH’s reconfiguration. When support from the military component is required elsewhere in the country going forward, it will be available thanks to the mobility that the reconfigured Mission will have. The overall security situation in the six departments where MINUSTAH military no longer reside remains stable in this reporting period.
MINUSTAH continues to be an essential hedge against the risk of any future deterioration in security conditions. And the United Stated strongly supports a push by the UN, backed by member states, to ensure the dispatch of an additional three hundred international police forces to Haiti, as authorized but not yet deployed. We also support adding without delay medium-lift helicopters to MINUSTAH’s aviation component, which will make the Mission’s forces more quickly deployable in large numbers to any location in the country in the event of a different scale of unrest than we have seen so far. We also support the Secretary-General’s call, echoed here today by the Special Representative, to ensure maximum visibility of MINUSTAH’s forces, an objective well-served by ensuring the Mission’s leaders retain the flexibility to redistribute their forces as necessary to respond to evolving security conditions.
2015 poses extraordinary challenges for Haiti, but also extraordinary opportunities. An opportunity to break from past electoral cycles marred by fraud and disenfranchisement, and the violence that both have historically engendered. An opportunity for Haiti’s political parties to put aside their differences and cooperate to ensure elections that place Haiti’s democracy on sounder footing. An opportunity to adopt more sustainable elections architecture. An opportunity for Haitians to take a giant step forward toward sustained political stability and self-sufficiency. As they seize these opportunities, the government and people of Haiti can continue to count on the utmost support of the United States. Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
March 18, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President, thank you, Special Representative Honoré, for your briefing and your leadership. And thank you to all the dedicated men and women serving in MINUSTAH, who are working with you to build a more secure and stable Haiti.
The United States welcomes the recent progress Haiti has made toward holding elections this year, including the promulgation of an electoral decree on March 2 drafted by a new electoral council drawn from civil society, and that council’s subsequent announcement of voting dates. While we commend President Martelly’s efforts to promote an inclusive political process, including by forming a multiparty government, the health of Haiti’s democracy depends on restoring a functioning legislature without further delay. That is why it is so important that elections take place this year as planned, and that the government continue to use its extraordinary decree powers solely to administer elections and keep the state running. We also call upon all of Haiti’s political leaders and parties to participate in elections and to ensure an atmosphere of peace so that all eligible Haitians who wish to vote can do so without fear for their safety.
With the electoral decree in place and election dates set, urgent attention to preparing for and organizing the polls is required, to ensure elections that are free, fair, credible, and inclusive. Continued inclusive political dialogue and preparations for elections that are transparent and ensure a level playing field will be required to sustain the generally stable security situation that the Secretary-General has reported.
While MINUSTAH and the rest of the international community, including my government, stand ready to support the administration of the elections, ultimately the responsibility for ensuring their success lies with Haitians: the Haitian government, the electoral council, the political parties, and the Haitian people themselves.
The level of support provided by MINUSTAH, particularly its engineering battalions, for elections in 2010 and 2011 were part of the package of extraordinary measures that the international community took to help Haiti recover from the devastating 2010 earthquake, not an enduring precedent for elections this year or in the future. We join the Secretary-General’s call on the government to ensure the electoral council and other state institutions have adequate resources to administer elections in a manner that reflects Haitians’ increased assumption of a responsibility so central to the exercise of sovereignty. The United States will do our part in support.
Successful elections will require robust international support, of course, including from MINUSTAH. MINUSTAH should without delay catalogue the functions played in the last elections by each of its respective components, including the funds and programs. It should identify any of those critical functions each component will not be able to carry out in 2015. And it should work urgently across the UN system and with the electoral council, donors, Haitian and international civil society actors, and the government of Haiti to ensure that those functions are carried out effectively during this year’s elections. MINUSTAH also should work closely with the electoral council to identify any elements of Haiti’s election planning, including the number and location of polling centers, that may make the process more vulnerable to violence or manipulation, and to develop and implement corrective measures transparently and in consultation with Haitian political actors. The 2015 elections will not be Haiti’s last; it is important to use each electoral cycle to improve Haiti’s electoral system and to make it more sustainable.
We note the generally stable security situation that the Secretary-General reported. This comes amid the continued growth and professionalization of the Haitian National Police, to which donors and MINUSTAH should continue to offer maximum support. The Haitian National Police needs to continue to grow in size and capability. But while we were in Haiti, we heard that every trained Haitian National Policeman or woman is worth ten international police. Moreover, even with the reported increase in crime and gang-related violence, Haiti’s homicide rate remains well below the regional average. Incidents of violent unrest during the reporting period totaled only 215 events. In most of these cases, the HNP required no operational support from any MINUSTAH forces to manage the situation, and in only 16 percent of all incidents of violent unrest nationwide did the HNP require some level of operational support from MINUSTAH’s military forces.
Most of those incidents took place in close proximity to the three locations where the military component will be based following MINUSTAH’s reconfiguration. When support from the military component is required elsewhere in the country going forward, it will be available thanks to the mobility that the reconfigured Mission will have. The overall security situation in the six departments where MINUSTAH military no longer reside remains stable in this reporting period.
MINUSTAH continues to be an essential hedge against the risk of any future deterioration in security conditions. And the United Stated strongly supports a push by the UN, backed by member states, to ensure the dispatch of an additional three hundred international police forces to Haiti, as authorized but not yet deployed. We also support adding without delay medium-lift helicopters to MINUSTAH’s aviation component, which will make the Mission’s forces more quickly deployable in large numbers to any location in the country in the event of a different scale of unrest than we have seen so far. We also support the Secretary-General’s call, echoed here today by the Special Representative, to ensure maximum visibility of MINUSTAH’s forces, an objective well-served by ensuring the Mission’s leaders retain the flexibility to redistribute their forces as necessary to respond to evolving security conditions.
2015 poses extraordinary challenges for Haiti, but also extraordinary opportunities. An opportunity to break from past electoral cycles marred by fraud and disenfranchisement, and the violence that both have historically engendered. An opportunity for Haiti’s political parties to put aside their differences and cooperate to ensure elections that place Haiti’s democracy on sounder footing. An opportunity to adopt more sustainable elections architecture. An opportunity for Haitians to take a giant step forward toward sustained political stability and self-sufficiency. As they seize these opportunities, the government and people of Haiti can continue to count on the utmost support of the United States. Thank you.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
U.S. PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE TO UN MAKES REMARKS ON AFGHANISTAN
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
March 16, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Special Representative Haysom, Ambassador Tanin thank you for your observations today. And on behalf of the United States, I would like to thank you, SRSG Haysom and your team for your dedicated and humane work to help the Afghan people improve their lives, their institutions, and their nation. Today’s unanimous renewal of UNAMA’s mandate shows the Council’s ongoing support for your efforts and for your country.
As we mark the beginning of Afghanistan’s Transformation Decade, we have seen both encouraging advances and enduring challenges. Last year, we saw Afghans take real risks and conquer fear to cast their ballots in an election. We saw two candidates put the country’s future first – forming a unity government and sustaining it as they confront shared challenges, including cabinet formation, electoral reform, and peace and reconciliation. The United States calls on the leaders to put forward urgently a full slate of cabinet nominees who meet the rigorous requirements that they established and who can obtain parliamentary approval.
We commend President Ghani and CEO Abdullah’s shared commitment to prioritizing electoral reform. Last year’s election exposed chronic weaknesses in Afghanistan’s electoral system. Promptly identifying the necessary reforms and implementing them urgently and in a manner consistent with international standards is critical, including to ensure successful parliamentary and district council elections. Establishing the Special Electoral Reform Commission, which the two leaders agreed upon last fall, would be an important step toward that end.
Making fundamental changes to a country’s political and electoral system is challenging under any circumstances. Yet Afghans are undertaking this extraordinary task amid continued attacks by insurgents who seek to destabilize the country.
UNAMA’s exceptional reporting on the toll on civilians – a model for other missions – testifies to the impact of this violence on Afghan society, particularly some of its most vulnerable members. Compared to 2013, civilian casualties increased by 22 percent in 2014. Civilian deaths rose by 25 percent. The number of women casualties increased by 21 percent, and the number of children casualties by 40 percent. 714 children were killed in 2014. 714 kids. UNAMA’s reporting attributes roughly 75 percent of all civilian casualties to the Taliban and affiliated groups.
What statistics cannot capture is the immeasurable impact on the families of those wounded and killed. For example, UNAMA’s report tells us that women left as sole income-providers after their husbands were killed or maimed experienced lasting consequences, “with poverty forcing many women to give their daughters in marriage in exchange for debts or to take their children out of school often to work.” And this does not even capture the emotion and the pain of all the losses.
Afghanistan’s leaders understand the far-reaching impact of violence on the Afghan people, which is one of the many reasons they have committed to bringing peace to their country – a goal we strongly support. We see tremendous bravery exhibited by many Afghans. One unheralded group is de-miners. De-miners venture out day after day to clear minefields so that their fellow citizens are not maimed as they harvest their land or walk to school. Thirty-four de-miners were killed last year, including eleven who were killed on December 13th by insurgents, while they were clearing unexploded ordnance in Helmand province. We see similar dedication in the legions of Afghan teachers who show up to their classrooms every day, despite threats and harassments, to give boys and girls the education they need to build their future, and the future of their country. We also honor Afghan security forces who risk their lives – and in far too many cases, give their lives – protecting their fellow citizens.
The resolve and capabilities of these Afghan forces has improved a great deal. Continued professionalization of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces – with robust, sustained international support, including through NATO’s Resolute Support Mission – is crucial both to improve effectiveness, and ensure more faithful adherence to international human rights standards.
The abusive tactics reported to UNAMA and catalogued in its recent report on the treatment of Afghan detainees have no place in the pursuit of justice. Nor does the complicity of justice officials who – according to the same report – “overwhelmingly” rely on confessions from defendants in criminal prosecutions, even when credible evidence suggests such confessions may have been obtained through abusive tactics. That is why we applaud the Afghan government’s commitment to eliminate the use of torture.
As you all know, last week we marked International Women’s Day. It was a day for marking a number of inspiring stories from around the world, including Afghanistan – a country where, under Taliban rule, women could not walk outside without a male relative and a burqa.
Last week, members of the Afghanistan Women’s National Cycling team were not only walking outside, they were racing down the country’s roads on their bikes. Team members are pinched for resources, but big on courage. Some drivers yell at them and threaten them, but they ride on. One day, a man on a motorcycle reached out and tried to grab at the captain, causing her to crash and hurt her back.
But today she is back on her bike, leading more than 40 other women training with the team. Imagine what it must feel like to be a little girl, sitting in a car, and to suddenly drive by those 40 women, in a single file, flying down the road. Imagine how inspiring that must be.
One of the team members, Malika Yousufi, wants to become the first Afghan woman to complete the Tour de France. She told a reporter, “Nothing will stop us.” We believe that, if she is given the chance, and if her country stays on the brave but difficult path it has charted, Malika is right. Nothing will stop them. There is so much to lose, and so much left to gain in these difficult days, and the United States will support the Afghan people in every step of their journey to take their place as a stable, peaceful, independent, and democratic nation. Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
March 16, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Special Representative Haysom, Ambassador Tanin thank you for your observations today. And on behalf of the United States, I would like to thank you, SRSG Haysom and your team for your dedicated and humane work to help the Afghan people improve their lives, their institutions, and their nation. Today’s unanimous renewal of UNAMA’s mandate shows the Council’s ongoing support for your efforts and for your country.
As we mark the beginning of Afghanistan’s Transformation Decade, we have seen both encouraging advances and enduring challenges. Last year, we saw Afghans take real risks and conquer fear to cast their ballots in an election. We saw two candidates put the country’s future first – forming a unity government and sustaining it as they confront shared challenges, including cabinet formation, electoral reform, and peace and reconciliation. The United States calls on the leaders to put forward urgently a full slate of cabinet nominees who meet the rigorous requirements that they established and who can obtain parliamentary approval.
We commend President Ghani and CEO Abdullah’s shared commitment to prioritizing electoral reform. Last year’s election exposed chronic weaknesses in Afghanistan’s electoral system. Promptly identifying the necessary reforms and implementing them urgently and in a manner consistent with international standards is critical, including to ensure successful parliamentary and district council elections. Establishing the Special Electoral Reform Commission, which the two leaders agreed upon last fall, would be an important step toward that end.
Making fundamental changes to a country’s political and electoral system is challenging under any circumstances. Yet Afghans are undertaking this extraordinary task amid continued attacks by insurgents who seek to destabilize the country.
UNAMA’s exceptional reporting on the toll on civilians – a model for other missions – testifies to the impact of this violence on Afghan society, particularly some of its most vulnerable members. Compared to 2013, civilian casualties increased by 22 percent in 2014. Civilian deaths rose by 25 percent. The number of women casualties increased by 21 percent, and the number of children casualties by 40 percent. 714 children were killed in 2014. 714 kids. UNAMA’s reporting attributes roughly 75 percent of all civilian casualties to the Taliban and affiliated groups.
What statistics cannot capture is the immeasurable impact on the families of those wounded and killed. For example, UNAMA’s report tells us that women left as sole income-providers after their husbands were killed or maimed experienced lasting consequences, “with poverty forcing many women to give their daughters in marriage in exchange for debts or to take their children out of school often to work.” And this does not even capture the emotion and the pain of all the losses.
Afghanistan’s leaders understand the far-reaching impact of violence on the Afghan people, which is one of the many reasons they have committed to bringing peace to their country – a goal we strongly support. We see tremendous bravery exhibited by many Afghans. One unheralded group is de-miners. De-miners venture out day after day to clear minefields so that their fellow citizens are not maimed as they harvest their land or walk to school. Thirty-four de-miners were killed last year, including eleven who were killed on December 13th by insurgents, while they were clearing unexploded ordnance in Helmand province. We see similar dedication in the legions of Afghan teachers who show up to their classrooms every day, despite threats and harassments, to give boys and girls the education they need to build their future, and the future of their country. We also honor Afghan security forces who risk their lives – and in far too many cases, give their lives – protecting their fellow citizens.
The resolve and capabilities of these Afghan forces has improved a great deal. Continued professionalization of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces – with robust, sustained international support, including through NATO’s Resolute Support Mission – is crucial both to improve effectiveness, and ensure more faithful adherence to international human rights standards.
The abusive tactics reported to UNAMA and catalogued in its recent report on the treatment of Afghan detainees have no place in the pursuit of justice. Nor does the complicity of justice officials who – according to the same report – “overwhelmingly” rely on confessions from defendants in criminal prosecutions, even when credible evidence suggests such confessions may have been obtained through abusive tactics. That is why we applaud the Afghan government’s commitment to eliminate the use of torture.
As you all know, last week we marked International Women’s Day. It was a day for marking a number of inspiring stories from around the world, including Afghanistan – a country where, under Taliban rule, women could not walk outside without a male relative and a burqa.
Last week, members of the Afghanistan Women’s National Cycling team were not only walking outside, they were racing down the country’s roads on their bikes. Team members are pinched for resources, but big on courage. Some drivers yell at them and threaten them, but they ride on. One day, a man on a motorcycle reached out and tried to grab at the captain, causing her to crash and hurt her back.
But today she is back on her bike, leading more than 40 other women training with the team. Imagine what it must feel like to be a little girl, sitting in a car, and to suddenly drive by those 40 women, in a single file, flying down the road. Imagine how inspiring that must be.
One of the team members, Malika Yousufi, wants to become the first Afghan woman to complete the Tour de France. She told a reporter, “Nothing will stop us.” We believe that, if she is given the chance, and if her country stays on the brave but difficult path it has charted, Malika is right. Nothing will stop them. There is so much to lose, and so much left to gain in these difficult days, and the United States will support the Afghan people in every step of their journey to take their place as a stable, peaceful, independent, and democratic nation. Thank you.
Monday, March 9, 2015
REMARKS BY SAMANTHA POWER ON UKRAINE
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
March 6, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President. We continue to believe that compliance with the September Minsk Agreements and the February Implementation Package provides a roadmap to peace in Ukraine.
For the first time since the Minsk Implementation Package was signed on February 12th, we have seen a reduction in violence. Of course no one forgets that Russia and the separatists they trained, armed, directed, and fought alongside, started violating their commitments in the Package from the first minutes and hours after the deal was signed – by laying siege to Debaltseve, a city dozens of kilometers beyond the contact line, with their deadly and indiscriminate pummeling. Violations started on day one, and violations of the ceasefire continue in a number of places, particularly outside Mariupol, where Russian-backed separatists have engaged in intense fighting attacking the village of Shirokyne in recent days.
Unfortunately, although the violence has decreased, there has been only partial compliance with the Minsk Implementation Package. As members of this Council know, the package calls for, “an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire,” not a gradual and partial reduction in fire. It does not say that Russian-backed separatists can continue to shell, engage in sniper fire, or use barrel and rocket artillery – yet they have carried out all of these attacks in recent days. Since, February 20th, Russian separatist attacks like these have killed 15 Ukrainian military personnel and wounded nearly one hundred more.
A second condition in the Minsk Implementation Package is full, unfettered access for OSCE monitors to the entire conflict zone. While there have been occasional instances when the SMM has been stopped at Ukrainian checkpoints, the restrictions on the SMM by Russia and the separatists are documented as widespread.
Just as Russia and Russian-backed separatists prevented the SMM from going to Debaltseve while these forces carried out their vicious attack, recent SMM reports chronicle repeated, persistent obstruction by Russian-backed separatists, obstructions that include even threatening to kill OSCE monitors.
To date, the separatists have granted OSCE monitors sporadic access limited to certain roads, when and where it suits them. As we have asked before, it bears asking again: Who obstructs an objective observer other than someone who has something to hide from an unbiased eye?
The Minsk Implementation Package also calls for the full pullback of all heavy weapons. That, too, has not happened. Shortly after the package was signed, the OSCE’s Chief Monitor sent a letter to all of the signatories requesting that they provide information on what heavy weapons were present in eastern Ukraine, where they are, which routes will be used to withdraw them, and where they will be located after being withdrawn. Russia has not replied, as though by pretending it has no heavy weapons in Ukraine, we will forget all of the tanks, Grad missiles, and other heavy weapons we watched Russia send across the border.
All signatories to the Minsk Agreements and the Implementation Package – Ukraine on the one side, and Russia, and the so-called “DPR” and “LPR” on the other – are responsible for pulling back heavy weapons. The OSCE must have unfettered, unconditional access to verify the withdrawal.
Two days ago, Russia sent its 17th so-called humanitarian convoy into Ukraine, once again denying international observers and Ukrainian border guards the right to conduct a full and complete inspection of its contents. Russian convoys that should be coming out of Ukraine are instead going in. If these convoys are carrying humanitarian assistance, why not allow a full inspection?
Colleagues, the ceasefire, weapons pullback, and OSCE verification – none of which are complete – are all among just the immediate steps in the Implementation Package. Further, all of the Minsk Agreements to date have called for the release of all hostages by all sides. Nadiya Savchenko and other Ukrainians being held in Russia are hostages, just as surely as those being kept in basements in Donetsk and Luhansk. Again, we call on Russia to release Nadiya Savchenko, who has been on hunger strike for over 80 days, and her Ukrainian counterparts. This is something Russia can do today.
As we’ve seen before, the separatists have an established track record of using a lull in the fighting to regroup, rearm, and resupply. Russia supports this process by providing an unlimited supply of guns and weaponry. The United States and the rest of the world hopes that that is not the case this time. We are carefully watching what happens in Shyrokyne, a town just east of the strategic port city of Mariupol, which many fear will be the next target of the separatists and Russian military.
The devastating consequences of this conflict are brought into sharp relief by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ most recent report. More than 1.7 million people displaced. More than 5,800 people killed – a casualty count that does not include the hundreds of bodies found once Russian-backed separatists finished their deadly siege of Debaltseve.
An OCHA report from the end of last month said that 500 bodies had been found in houses and basements at the end of the siege – 500 bodies. Homes and basements where people took shelter from the endless barrage of Russian-made mortars and rockets as they rained down on the city’s residents – residents who could not escape. Weeks into the siege, at the end of January, the self-declared leader of the Russian-backed separatists had announced, “Anybody who leaves…will be in the interlocking field of fire of our artillery. From today, the road is under fire.” And so those inside were left with a choice: risk your life by staying, or risk your life by leaving. Civilians were killed doing both, and again, 500 hundred bodies found in homes and basements where people took shelter.
And the casualties and the displaced are one of the devastating consequences of this conflict. Another – and one we rarely speak about in this Council anymore – is the ongoing illegal occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea by a permanent member of this Council.
Crimea is important not only because it constitutes the continuing violation of the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation – a violation orchestrated in Moscow, and dressed up in a sham referendum – but also because it offers a preview of the kind of rule that we can expect in the other parts of Ukraine seized by those who see themselves as part of Novorossiya.
Let me give just one example of what it’s like to live in that world, from the long list of repressive practices documented in the UN’s February human rights report – part of the relentless persecution of the Crimean Muslim Tatar minority. According to the report, on January 29th, 2015, the de facto authorities arrested Akhtem Chiigoz, the Deputy Chairman of the Tatar Mejlis, the Tatars’ representative council. He was charged under the Russian criminal code with having participated in a “mass disturbance,” for protesting against what was then the imminent Russian occupation, which ended in a clash with pro-Russian demonstrators. On February 7th, another Crimean Tatar was detained on the same charges.
Both men are charged with violating Russian law – even though Russian law had not even taken effect at the time that they participated in the protest. Yesterday the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media released a statement saying that media freedom in Crimea was at an all-time low.
Among other violations, she reported that, “Journalists from at least thirteen independent media outlets, freelance journalists, and bloggers have been threatened, assaulted, physically attacked, banned from entry, interrogated, and kidnapped; their equipment confiscated or damaged.”
So, occupy territory, unilaterally attempt to annex it, and then retroactively and arbitrarily apply your laws to those who dared to question your takeover as it was occurring. It does not get much more Orwellian than that. And as anyone who has read the human rights report knows, this is just one in a long list of repressive tactics – including torture, enforced disappearances, and targeted political killings – that have defined Russia’s occupation.
It is to avoid an Orwellian world like this – where we talk of peace while undermining it – that we must ensure that Minsk is implemented. The Council members around this table must confront the situation on the ground as it exists rather than as we wish it were. Peace will not come from more words – and there have been so many words in this Chamber. It will come from the long-awaited and faithful implementation of the many agreements that have been entered into, and renewed respect for the territorial integrity of a Member State of the United Nations.
Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
March 6, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President. We continue to believe that compliance with the September Minsk Agreements and the February Implementation Package provides a roadmap to peace in Ukraine.
For the first time since the Minsk Implementation Package was signed on February 12th, we have seen a reduction in violence. Of course no one forgets that Russia and the separatists they trained, armed, directed, and fought alongside, started violating their commitments in the Package from the first minutes and hours after the deal was signed – by laying siege to Debaltseve, a city dozens of kilometers beyond the contact line, with their deadly and indiscriminate pummeling. Violations started on day one, and violations of the ceasefire continue in a number of places, particularly outside Mariupol, where Russian-backed separatists have engaged in intense fighting attacking the village of Shirokyne in recent days.
Unfortunately, although the violence has decreased, there has been only partial compliance with the Minsk Implementation Package. As members of this Council know, the package calls for, “an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire,” not a gradual and partial reduction in fire. It does not say that Russian-backed separatists can continue to shell, engage in sniper fire, or use barrel and rocket artillery – yet they have carried out all of these attacks in recent days. Since, February 20th, Russian separatist attacks like these have killed 15 Ukrainian military personnel and wounded nearly one hundred more.
A second condition in the Minsk Implementation Package is full, unfettered access for OSCE monitors to the entire conflict zone. While there have been occasional instances when the SMM has been stopped at Ukrainian checkpoints, the restrictions on the SMM by Russia and the separatists are documented as widespread.
Just as Russia and Russian-backed separatists prevented the SMM from going to Debaltseve while these forces carried out their vicious attack, recent SMM reports chronicle repeated, persistent obstruction by Russian-backed separatists, obstructions that include even threatening to kill OSCE monitors.
To date, the separatists have granted OSCE monitors sporadic access limited to certain roads, when and where it suits them. As we have asked before, it bears asking again: Who obstructs an objective observer other than someone who has something to hide from an unbiased eye?
The Minsk Implementation Package also calls for the full pullback of all heavy weapons. That, too, has not happened. Shortly after the package was signed, the OSCE’s Chief Monitor sent a letter to all of the signatories requesting that they provide information on what heavy weapons were present in eastern Ukraine, where they are, which routes will be used to withdraw them, and where they will be located after being withdrawn. Russia has not replied, as though by pretending it has no heavy weapons in Ukraine, we will forget all of the tanks, Grad missiles, and other heavy weapons we watched Russia send across the border.
All signatories to the Minsk Agreements and the Implementation Package – Ukraine on the one side, and Russia, and the so-called “DPR” and “LPR” on the other – are responsible for pulling back heavy weapons. The OSCE must have unfettered, unconditional access to verify the withdrawal.
Two days ago, Russia sent its 17th so-called humanitarian convoy into Ukraine, once again denying international observers and Ukrainian border guards the right to conduct a full and complete inspection of its contents. Russian convoys that should be coming out of Ukraine are instead going in. If these convoys are carrying humanitarian assistance, why not allow a full inspection?
Colleagues, the ceasefire, weapons pullback, and OSCE verification – none of which are complete – are all among just the immediate steps in the Implementation Package. Further, all of the Minsk Agreements to date have called for the release of all hostages by all sides. Nadiya Savchenko and other Ukrainians being held in Russia are hostages, just as surely as those being kept in basements in Donetsk and Luhansk. Again, we call on Russia to release Nadiya Savchenko, who has been on hunger strike for over 80 days, and her Ukrainian counterparts. This is something Russia can do today.
As we’ve seen before, the separatists have an established track record of using a lull in the fighting to regroup, rearm, and resupply. Russia supports this process by providing an unlimited supply of guns and weaponry. The United States and the rest of the world hopes that that is not the case this time. We are carefully watching what happens in Shyrokyne, a town just east of the strategic port city of Mariupol, which many fear will be the next target of the separatists and Russian military.
The devastating consequences of this conflict are brought into sharp relief by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ most recent report. More than 1.7 million people displaced. More than 5,800 people killed – a casualty count that does not include the hundreds of bodies found once Russian-backed separatists finished their deadly siege of Debaltseve.
An OCHA report from the end of last month said that 500 bodies had been found in houses and basements at the end of the siege – 500 bodies. Homes and basements where people took shelter from the endless barrage of Russian-made mortars and rockets as they rained down on the city’s residents – residents who could not escape. Weeks into the siege, at the end of January, the self-declared leader of the Russian-backed separatists had announced, “Anybody who leaves…will be in the interlocking field of fire of our artillery. From today, the road is under fire.” And so those inside were left with a choice: risk your life by staying, or risk your life by leaving. Civilians were killed doing both, and again, 500 hundred bodies found in homes and basements where people took shelter.
And the casualties and the displaced are one of the devastating consequences of this conflict. Another – and one we rarely speak about in this Council anymore – is the ongoing illegal occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea by a permanent member of this Council.
Crimea is important not only because it constitutes the continuing violation of the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation – a violation orchestrated in Moscow, and dressed up in a sham referendum – but also because it offers a preview of the kind of rule that we can expect in the other parts of Ukraine seized by those who see themselves as part of Novorossiya.
Let me give just one example of what it’s like to live in that world, from the long list of repressive practices documented in the UN’s February human rights report – part of the relentless persecution of the Crimean Muslim Tatar minority. According to the report, on January 29th, 2015, the de facto authorities arrested Akhtem Chiigoz, the Deputy Chairman of the Tatar Mejlis, the Tatars’ representative council. He was charged under the Russian criminal code with having participated in a “mass disturbance,” for protesting against what was then the imminent Russian occupation, which ended in a clash with pro-Russian demonstrators. On February 7th, another Crimean Tatar was detained on the same charges.
Both men are charged with violating Russian law – even though Russian law had not even taken effect at the time that they participated in the protest. Yesterday the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media released a statement saying that media freedom in Crimea was at an all-time low.
Among other violations, she reported that, “Journalists from at least thirteen independent media outlets, freelance journalists, and bloggers have been threatened, assaulted, physically attacked, banned from entry, interrogated, and kidnapped; their equipment confiscated or damaged.”
So, occupy territory, unilaterally attempt to annex it, and then retroactively and arbitrarily apply your laws to those who dared to question your takeover as it was occurring. It does not get much more Orwellian than that. And as anyone who has read the human rights report knows, this is just one in a long list of repressive tactics – including torture, enforced disappearances, and targeted political killings – that have defined Russia’s occupation.
It is to avoid an Orwellian world like this – where we talk of peace while undermining it – that we must ensure that Minsk is implemented. The Council members around this table must confront the situation on the ground as it exists rather than as we wish it were. Peace will not come from more words – and there have been so many words in this Chamber. It will come from the long-awaited and faithful implementation of the many agreements that have been entered into, and renewed respect for the territorial integrity of a Member State of the United Nations.
Thank you.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
SAMANTHA POWER'S REMARKS ON HUMANITARIAN SITUATION IN SYRIA
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
February 26, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you. Thank you, Assistant Secretary-General Kang, High Commissioner Guterres for your powerful presentations.
One year ago, the Security Council adopted resolution 2139, aimed at addressing the humanitarian and human rights catastrophe in Syria. As today’s briefings made clear, the humanitarian crises have only deepened – there are multiple crises.
It is estimated that 12.2 million people need humanitarian assistance in Syria. At this time last year, 9.3 million people were said to need humanitarian assistance. That’s nearly three million more people who need aid to survive, in just a year. Think about that.
That is why it is absolutely crucial that all donors make generous commitments at the Humanitarian Pledging Conference in Kuwait in March, commitments that are commensurate with the magnitude of Syria’s crisis – this is what the United States plans to do.
While the international community absolutely must meet the immediate and dire needs of the Syrian people, we must also face the fact that humanitarian assistance is a band aid, it must be accompanied by more intense political pressure to stop the violence and widespread abuses that are fueling the crisis. Although more people in Syria need humanitarian aid than ever before, the Assad regime also seems more intent on denying aid and causing civilian harm than ever before.
Security Council resolution 2139 called on the Syrian parties to immediately cease the indiscriminate use of weapons in populated areas, including through aerial bombardment using barrel bombs. Yet in the year since the resolution was adopted, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the Assad regime has dropped at least 1,950 barrel bombs, which have killed at least 6,480 people, 95 percent of whom were civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the report released earlier this week, satellite imagery identified at least 450 distinct major damage sites in ten opposition-held towns and villages in the Daraa governorate, and more than 1,000 major damage sites in the Aleppo governorate, between February 2014 and January of this year.
The Human Rights Watch report shows that many impact sites have damage signatures consistent with the detonation of large, air-dropped munitions, including improvised barrel and conventional bombs dropped by helicopters. Yet in spite of this clear evidence, Assad cheerfully denied that his forces used barrel bombs and called any such claims, “a childish story”– a particularly grotesque choice of words, given that well over 10,000 children have been killed in the conflict so far.
The recently released UN Commission of Inquiry report on Syria documents many attacks on civilians. One of them occurred on Aleppo’s al-Shaar neighbourhood on November 6th. The first barrel bomb reportedly killed civilians in its area of impact, and buried more in rubble. When others rushed to the area to dig out the people buried and assist the wounded, the government dropped a second barrel bomb. At least 15 people were killed in all, most of them women and children. Some of the wounded later died in field hospitals, according to the report, due to the lack of necessary medical supplies.
The lack of medical supplies is no accident – it is the result of the Assad regime’s routine confiscation of medical and surgical supplies transported by UN convoys. The UN and its implementing partners have tried to be maximally transparent with the Syrian regime by allowing the government to inspect cross-line shipments, going beyond the provisions in Security Council resolutions 2165 and 2191. Yet, even when these “regime approvals” for cross-line operations are granted, the regime seizes medical supplies such as surgical items, midwifery kits and rehydration kits, which could save the lives of mothers, small children, and babies. The Council was clear in its demand that all parties allow delivery of medical assistance and cease depriving civilians of food and medicine indispensable for their survival in resolution 2139.
The Physicians for Human Rights report that Assistant Secretary-General Kang mentioned documented 228 attacks on 179 separate medical facilities. Of these, PHR found, 90 percent were carried out by regime forces. To date, according to Physicians for Human Rights, 145 medical personnel have been executed or tortured to death in Syria. One hundred and thirty-nine of those 145 individuals, those deaths were carried out by Syrian government forces or by ISIL.
In Yarmouk, 18,000 civilians – most of them Palestinians refugees – are virtually cut off from assistance and surrounded by fighting. In 2014, the UN was only able to provide the equivalent of 400 calories a day for each inhabitant of Yarmouk – the equivalent of two cups of rice – due to the extremely limited access provided by the Syrian regime. If you haven’t seen the photos of the kids inside Yarmouk, you should force yourself to stare at their sunken, hollow faces and glossed eyes. This is what Assad’s regime has done to children, and he is under insufficient pressure from his backers to do something as simple as let food through. And Yarmouk is not an outlier. Of the 212,000 Syrians living in besieged areas, 185,000 of them, or 87 percent, live in areas being besieged by Syrian government forces.
Now, terrorist groups like ISIL have committed horrific abuses against Syrians, and we must be absolutely adamant and united in our condemnation of those horrors, which are on the rise. We condemn in the strongest possible terms ISIL’s attacks on February 23 on Assyrian Christian villages in the northeast Syrian province of Hasakeh, where they kidnapped hundreds of civilians, including women, children, and older persons, and we join others in demanding the immediate and unconditional release of these civilians, together with all of ISIL’s hostages.
In December, four mass graves were discovered in Deir ez-Zor, containing the bodies of some of the hundreds of people abducted by ISIL months before. ISIL has also established what they call “cub camps,” where they indoctrinate kids, teaching them how to use weapons and to carry out suicide attacks. At the same time we condemn ISIL and unite to confront them, we must remember that the rise of these violent extremist groups in Syria would not have happened without the atrocities perpetrated by the Assad regime. And the regime’s ongoing atrocities continue to be the extremists’ best recruiting tool. So any plan that would ally the international community with Assad to confront these violent extremist groups would be completely counterproductive, as it would further fuel ISIL’s rise.
There is only one way out of this horrific crisis, and that is through a comprehensive political solution. To that end, the United States again joins others in commending the efforts of UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura to halt – even for a limited time – the use of all aerial bombs and heavy artillery in Aleppo, whose civilians have suffered immensely amidst fierce fighting. While it would be a welcome step if the Assad regime were to fulfill the commitments it made to de Mistura to stop unilaterally its aerial bombardment in Aleppo and allow the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian assistance to civilians for six weeks, the regime has an abysmal track record on honoring its commitments. Indeed, these very commitments are supposed to have been implemented under resolutions adopted by this very Council. So what matters, and what we must look to, are the regime’s actions.
In addition to being a year since the adoption of Resolution 2139, we also mark other terrible benchmarks today. On March 15th, we will enter the fifth year of the Syrian conflict. And it has been three years since plain-clothes security officers raided the office of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression – a Damascus-based group dedicated to promoting freedom of expression – detaining 14 staff members. Many of those detained were tortured, according to staff members who were later released. Among those detained was the group’s director, Mazen Darwish, who was charged with so-called crimes, such as publishing human rights reports and documenting the names of people tortured, disappeared, or killed during the conflict.
Mazen is still behind bars today, despite a UN General Assembly resolution last May that included a demand for his immediate release. Writing from jail last year, Mazen said, “There is not a single prison in Syria today without one of my friends inside it, nor is there a cemetery in Syria today that doesn’t contain the remains of one of them.”
There is a risk, in our regular meetings on Syria, to get used to the fact that the numbers of individuals detained and killed and disappeared and displaced and denied food – and so many other measures of human suffering – those numbers continue to rise. Indeed, there is a perverse dynamic whereby, as those numbers continue to rise, our sensitivity falls. Our nerve endings harden, and a sense of inevitability takes hold.
We must not let that happen. We must remember each of those rising numbers, each one of those millions, stands for just another person. We must return to the commitments this Council has made, such as those in past resolutions to take further measures in the case of non-compliance and to hold accountable those responsible for violations and abuses.
This Council’s impact will increase only if member-states’ positions change. And that will happen only if we recognize that there are children just like our own starving in Yarmouk, and mothers just like our own who die in childbirth in Aleppo, because medical supplies have been stolen off UN trucks; or mothers who feel helpless in the face of their children’s pleas for food. If this doesn’t motivate us, literally nothing will. Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
February 26, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you. Thank you, Assistant Secretary-General Kang, High Commissioner Guterres for your powerful presentations.
One year ago, the Security Council adopted resolution 2139, aimed at addressing the humanitarian and human rights catastrophe in Syria. As today’s briefings made clear, the humanitarian crises have only deepened – there are multiple crises.
It is estimated that 12.2 million people need humanitarian assistance in Syria. At this time last year, 9.3 million people were said to need humanitarian assistance. That’s nearly three million more people who need aid to survive, in just a year. Think about that.
That is why it is absolutely crucial that all donors make generous commitments at the Humanitarian Pledging Conference in Kuwait in March, commitments that are commensurate with the magnitude of Syria’s crisis – this is what the United States plans to do.
While the international community absolutely must meet the immediate and dire needs of the Syrian people, we must also face the fact that humanitarian assistance is a band aid, it must be accompanied by more intense political pressure to stop the violence and widespread abuses that are fueling the crisis. Although more people in Syria need humanitarian aid than ever before, the Assad regime also seems more intent on denying aid and causing civilian harm than ever before.
Security Council resolution 2139 called on the Syrian parties to immediately cease the indiscriminate use of weapons in populated areas, including through aerial bombardment using barrel bombs. Yet in the year since the resolution was adopted, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the Assad regime has dropped at least 1,950 barrel bombs, which have killed at least 6,480 people, 95 percent of whom were civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the report released earlier this week, satellite imagery identified at least 450 distinct major damage sites in ten opposition-held towns and villages in the Daraa governorate, and more than 1,000 major damage sites in the Aleppo governorate, between February 2014 and January of this year.
The Human Rights Watch report shows that many impact sites have damage signatures consistent with the detonation of large, air-dropped munitions, including improvised barrel and conventional bombs dropped by helicopters. Yet in spite of this clear evidence, Assad cheerfully denied that his forces used barrel bombs and called any such claims, “a childish story”– a particularly grotesque choice of words, given that well over 10,000 children have been killed in the conflict so far.
The recently released UN Commission of Inquiry report on Syria documents many attacks on civilians. One of them occurred on Aleppo’s al-Shaar neighbourhood on November 6th. The first barrel bomb reportedly killed civilians in its area of impact, and buried more in rubble. When others rushed to the area to dig out the people buried and assist the wounded, the government dropped a second barrel bomb. At least 15 people were killed in all, most of them women and children. Some of the wounded later died in field hospitals, according to the report, due to the lack of necessary medical supplies.
The lack of medical supplies is no accident – it is the result of the Assad regime’s routine confiscation of medical and surgical supplies transported by UN convoys. The UN and its implementing partners have tried to be maximally transparent with the Syrian regime by allowing the government to inspect cross-line shipments, going beyond the provisions in Security Council resolutions 2165 and 2191. Yet, even when these “regime approvals” for cross-line operations are granted, the regime seizes medical supplies such as surgical items, midwifery kits and rehydration kits, which could save the lives of mothers, small children, and babies. The Council was clear in its demand that all parties allow delivery of medical assistance and cease depriving civilians of food and medicine indispensable for their survival in resolution 2139.
The Physicians for Human Rights report that Assistant Secretary-General Kang mentioned documented 228 attacks on 179 separate medical facilities. Of these, PHR found, 90 percent were carried out by regime forces. To date, according to Physicians for Human Rights, 145 medical personnel have been executed or tortured to death in Syria. One hundred and thirty-nine of those 145 individuals, those deaths were carried out by Syrian government forces or by ISIL.
In Yarmouk, 18,000 civilians – most of them Palestinians refugees – are virtually cut off from assistance and surrounded by fighting. In 2014, the UN was only able to provide the equivalent of 400 calories a day for each inhabitant of Yarmouk – the equivalent of two cups of rice – due to the extremely limited access provided by the Syrian regime. If you haven’t seen the photos of the kids inside Yarmouk, you should force yourself to stare at their sunken, hollow faces and glossed eyes. This is what Assad’s regime has done to children, and he is under insufficient pressure from his backers to do something as simple as let food through. And Yarmouk is not an outlier. Of the 212,000 Syrians living in besieged areas, 185,000 of them, or 87 percent, live in areas being besieged by Syrian government forces.
Now, terrorist groups like ISIL have committed horrific abuses against Syrians, and we must be absolutely adamant and united in our condemnation of those horrors, which are on the rise. We condemn in the strongest possible terms ISIL’s attacks on February 23 on Assyrian Christian villages in the northeast Syrian province of Hasakeh, where they kidnapped hundreds of civilians, including women, children, and older persons, and we join others in demanding the immediate and unconditional release of these civilians, together with all of ISIL’s hostages.
In December, four mass graves were discovered in Deir ez-Zor, containing the bodies of some of the hundreds of people abducted by ISIL months before. ISIL has also established what they call “cub camps,” where they indoctrinate kids, teaching them how to use weapons and to carry out suicide attacks. At the same time we condemn ISIL and unite to confront them, we must remember that the rise of these violent extremist groups in Syria would not have happened without the atrocities perpetrated by the Assad regime. And the regime’s ongoing atrocities continue to be the extremists’ best recruiting tool. So any plan that would ally the international community with Assad to confront these violent extremist groups would be completely counterproductive, as it would further fuel ISIL’s rise.
There is only one way out of this horrific crisis, and that is through a comprehensive political solution. To that end, the United States again joins others in commending the efforts of UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura to halt – even for a limited time – the use of all aerial bombs and heavy artillery in Aleppo, whose civilians have suffered immensely amidst fierce fighting. While it would be a welcome step if the Assad regime were to fulfill the commitments it made to de Mistura to stop unilaterally its aerial bombardment in Aleppo and allow the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian assistance to civilians for six weeks, the regime has an abysmal track record on honoring its commitments. Indeed, these very commitments are supposed to have been implemented under resolutions adopted by this very Council. So what matters, and what we must look to, are the regime’s actions.
In addition to being a year since the adoption of Resolution 2139, we also mark other terrible benchmarks today. On March 15th, we will enter the fifth year of the Syrian conflict. And it has been three years since plain-clothes security officers raided the office of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression – a Damascus-based group dedicated to promoting freedom of expression – detaining 14 staff members. Many of those detained were tortured, according to staff members who were later released. Among those detained was the group’s director, Mazen Darwish, who was charged with so-called crimes, such as publishing human rights reports and documenting the names of people tortured, disappeared, or killed during the conflict.
Mazen is still behind bars today, despite a UN General Assembly resolution last May that included a demand for his immediate release. Writing from jail last year, Mazen said, “There is not a single prison in Syria today without one of my friends inside it, nor is there a cemetery in Syria today that doesn’t contain the remains of one of them.”
There is a risk, in our regular meetings on Syria, to get used to the fact that the numbers of individuals detained and killed and disappeared and displaced and denied food – and so many other measures of human suffering – those numbers continue to rise. Indeed, there is a perverse dynamic whereby, as those numbers continue to rise, our sensitivity falls. Our nerve endings harden, and a sense of inevitability takes hold.
We must not let that happen. We must remember each of those rising numbers, each one of those millions, stands for just another person. We must return to the commitments this Council has made, such as those in past resolutions to take further measures in the case of non-compliance and to hold accountable those responsible for violations and abuses.
This Council’s impact will increase only if member-states’ positions change. And that will happen only if we recognize that there are children just like our own starving in Yarmouk, and mothers just like our own who die in childbirth in Aleppo, because medical supplies have been stolen off UN trucks; or mothers who feel helpless in the face of their children’s pleas for food. If this doesn’t motivate us, literally nothing will. Thank you.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
SAMANTHA POWER'S EXPLANATION OF U.S. VOTE ON UKRAINE
FROM U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
February 17, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you. We’ve gotten used to living in an upside-down world with respect to Ukraine. Russia speaks of peace, and then fuels conflict. Russia signs agreements, and then does everything within its power to undermine them. Russia champions the sovereignty of nations, and then acts as if a neighbor’s borders do not exist. Yet even for those of us growing accustomed to living in an upside-down world, the idea that Russia – which manufactured and continues to escalate the violence in Ukraine – has tabled a resolution today calling for the conflict’s peaceful solution, is ironic, to say the least. Bitterly ironic, given that this Council has dedicated some thirty meetings to calling on Russia to stop escalating the very same conflict, and given the human consequences that are growing daily.
Even as Russia puts forward this resolution, separatists that Russia has trained, armed and that it fights alongside are laying ruthless and deadly siege to the Ukrainian-held city of Debaltseve, approximately 30 to 40 kilometers beyond lines established by the September Minsk agreements. Throughout the day, we’ve heard conflicting reports as to whether Debaltseve has fallen. According to press reports, the so-called “road of life” leading out of Debaltseve has become a “road of death,” littered with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers. At just the time this Council is calling for the cease-fire that was supposed to take effect Saturday night at midnight, Russia is backing an all-out assault.
We do not know how many civilians are left in Debaltseve, because Russia and the separatists it supports have refused to guarantee the safety of impartial OSCE monitors who have been trying for days to enter the area – a commitment that, in this upside-down world, Russia and the separatists made on February 12th at Minsk.
But we know from credible press reports that thousands of civilians in Debaltseve and neighboring villages have been sheltering from heavy shelling in dank basements, often without running water, food, electricity, or basic medical supplies. We know that many of the civilians left, who are enduring the terror of this relentless assault, are the elderly and small children – people who could not evacuate on their own.
And even with such limited information, we know with certainty that at the same time that Russia signs onto yet another agreement committing itself to de-escalation and peace, forces that Russia trains, equips, and joins on the battlefield have only escalated this fighting, grabbing more territory and killing the Ukrainian soldiers who stand in their way.
We are caught in a deadly feedback loop. International leaders engage in rigorous, exhaustive negotiations to get Russia to commit to peace – in Geneva, in Normandy, in September in Minsk, in Berlin in February, and then again in Minsk on February 12th when the implementations were signed; and now in New York. Yet Russia’s commitments have no bearing on the actions of its soldiers and the separatists they back on the ground.
Mr. President, the United States has maintained the same position across thirty meetings before this Council with respect to Ukraine. Let me reiterate that position. We are for peace in Ukraine. We are for Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and unity. We are for ending the violence in eastern Ukraine that has taken more than 5,600 lives since last April, and displaced already approximately one million people. We are for all of the signatories to the agreements signed in Minsk in September 2014 – particularly Russia and the separatists they back – fulfilling the commitments that they have made. And we are for the “Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements” of September 5 and September 19th, the package of measures endorsed last week by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France. To be clear, the February 12th implementation package is a roadmap to fulfilling commitments made by these same signatories in the September Minsk Agreements.
President Hollande, President Poroschenko, Chancellor Merkel, and President Putin each made this clear when they endorsed the implementation package on February 12th and issued their joint declaration that they “remain committed to the implementation of the Minsk Agreements.” The “Minsk Agreements” in the title – plural – refer to those signed on September 5 and September 19 by the same signatories, while the “measures for implementation” in the title make clear that the February 12th package was designed to begin carrying out the September agreements, and not to supplant them, as Russia has now begun to argue.
The United States rejects any interpretation of this resolution that would abrogate the parties’ earlier commitments. All parties must implement all of the commitments made in the September Minsk agreements. The implementation steps agreed upon in the February 12th package include a comprehensive cease-fire; the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the September line of contact; the release of all hostages; and the eventual restoration of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and control of its international border.
Too often, debates in this Council occur in a vacuum, removed from the real world. In the real world, a man named Aleksei Kravchenko, a 73-year-old in the Ukrainian held-town of Svitlodarsk, near Debaltseve, recently told a reporter that he had spent nights huddled together with his grandchildren in a bomb shelter on his property as shelling continued through the night. Aleksei told the reporter that his grandchildren said to him in the shelter, “Grandpa, I don’t want to die young.” He said, “I held my grandchildren, and they were shaking, and I looked in their eyes, and they were afraid.” With the February 12th agreement, Aleksei said, “Now we are hoping.” The fighting, unfortunately, has in fact increased dramatically near Aleksei’s home.
But we call on Russia to translate hope into real action; to translate hope into real results, and to do so urgently.
Today’s Council session is an effort to throw the Council’s weight behind an agreement already jeopardized by statements by the separatists dismissing the full cease-fire, by their continued attacks on Debaltseve, and by the separatists’ refusal – together with Russia’s – to allow access to the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission. We are looking to Russia, which manufactured and fueled this conflict, to leave the upside-down world it has created and to honor the resolution it tabled today supporting efforts to end it. Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
February 17, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you. We’ve gotten used to living in an upside-down world with respect to Ukraine. Russia speaks of peace, and then fuels conflict. Russia signs agreements, and then does everything within its power to undermine them. Russia champions the sovereignty of nations, and then acts as if a neighbor’s borders do not exist. Yet even for those of us growing accustomed to living in an upside-down world, the idea that Russia – which manufactured and continues to escalate the violence in Ukraine – has tabled a resolution today calling for the conflict’s peaceful solution, is ironic, to say the least. Bitterly ironic, given that this Council has dedicated some thirty meetings to calling on Russia to stop escalating the very same conflict, and given the human consequences that are growing daily.
Even as Russia puts forward this resolution, separatists that Russia has trained, armed and that it fights alongside are laying ruthless and deadly siege to the Ukrainian-held city of Debaltseve, approximately 30 to 40 kilometers beyond lines established by the September Minsk agreements. Throughout the day, we’ve heard conflicting reports as to whether Debaltseve has fallen. According to press reports, the so-called “road of life” leading out of Debaltseve has become a “road of death,” littered with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers. At just the time this Council is calling for the cease-fire that was supposed to take effect Saturday night at midnight, Russia is backing an all-out assault.
We do not know how many civilians are left in Debaltseve, because Russia and the separatists it supports have refused to guarantee the safety of impartial OSCE monitors who have been trying for days to enter the area – a commitment that, in this upside-down world, Russia and the separatists made on February 12th at Minsk.
But we know from credible press reports that thousands of civilians in Debaltseve and neighboring villages have been sheltering from heavy shelling in dank basements, often without running water, food, electricity, or basic medical supplies. We know that many of the civilians left, who are enduring the terror of this relentless assault, are the elderly and small children – people who could not evacuate on their own.
And even with such limited information, we know with certainty that at the same time that Russia signs onto yet another agreement committing itself to de-escalation and peace, forces that Russia trains, equips, and joins on the battlefield have only escalated this fighting, grabbing more territory and killing the Ukrainian soldiers who stand in their way.
We are caught in a deadly feedback loop. International leaders engage in rigorous, exhaustive negotiations to get Russia to commit to peace – in Geneva, in Normandy, in September in Minsk, in Berlin in February, and then again in Minsk on February 12th when the implementations were signed; and now in New York. Yet Russia’s commitments have no bearing on the actions of its soldiers and the separatists they back on the ground.
Mr. President, the United States has maintained the same position across thirty meetings before this Council with respect to Ukraine. Let me reiterate that position. We are for peace in Ukraine. We are for Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and unity. We are for ending the violence in eastern Ukraine that has taken more than 5,600 lives since last April, and displaced already approximately one million people. We are for all of the signatories to the agreements signed in Minsk in September 2014 – particularly Russia and the separatists they back – fulfilling the commitments that they have made. And we are for the “Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements” of September 5 and September 19th, the package of measures endorsed last week by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France. To be clear, the February 12th implementation package is a roadmap to fulfilling commitments made by these same signatories in the September Minsk Agreements.
President Hollande, President Poroschenko, Chancellor Merkel, and President Putin each made this clear when they endorsed the implementation package on February 12th and issued their joint declaration that they “remain committed to the implementation of the Minsk Agreements.” The “Minsk Agreements” in the title – plural – refer to those signed on September 5 and September 19 by the same signatories, while the “measures for implementation” in the title make clear that the February 12th package was designed to begin carrying out the September agreements, and not to supplant them, as Russia has now begun to argue.
The United States rejects any interpretation of this resolution that would abrogate the parties’ earlier commitments. All parties must implement all of the commitments made in the September Minsk agreements. The implementation steps agreed upon in the February 12th package include a comprehensive cease-fire; the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the September line of contact; the release of all hostages; and the eventual restoration of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and control of its international border.
Too often, debates in this Council occur in a vacuum, removed from the real world. In the real world, a man named Aleksei Kravchenko, a 73-year-old in the Ukrainian held-town of Svitlodarsk, near Debaltseve, recently told a reporter that he had spent nights huddled together with his grandchildren in a bomb shelter on his property as shelling continued through the night. Aleksei told the reporter that his grandchildren said to him in the shelter, “Grandpa, I don’t want to die young.” He said, “I held my grandchildren, and they were shaking, and I looked in their eyes, and they were afraid.” With the February 12th agreement, Aleksei said, “Now we are hoping.” The fighting, unfortunately, has in fact increased dramatically near Aleksei’s home.
But we call on Russia to translate hope into real action; to translate hope into real results, and to do so urgently.
Today’s Council session is an effort to throw the Council’s weight behind an agreement already jeopardized by statements by the separatists dismissing the full cease-fire, by their continued attacks on Debaltseve, and by the separatists’ refusal – together with Russia’s – to allow access to the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission. We are looking to Russia, which manufactured and fueled this conflict, to leave the upside-down world it has created and to honor the resolution it tabled today supporting efforts to end it. Thank you.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
U.N. REPRESENTATIVE POWER'S REMARKS ON DARFUR VOTE
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
February 12, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you. In November, this Council was confronted with reports of an alleged mass rape in Thabit – a town in North Darfur, Sudan. The UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur attempted to investigate, but was systematically denied meaningful access. The one time the peacekeepers were permitted to reach Thabit, Sudanese military and intelligence officials refused to let them interview alleged rape victims in private, and in some cases recorded the interviews. To this day, the Government of Sudan has shamefully denied the UN the ability to properly investigate this incident, despite this Council’s mandate for UNAMID to do precisely that.
Yesterday, a report released by Human Rights Watch alleged that at least 221 women and girls were raped in an organized attack on Thabit, over a period of thirty-six harrowing hours beginning on October 30, 2014. According to the report, Sudanese soldiers went door to door – looting, beating, and raping inhabitants. Over 50 current and former residents provided testimony corroborating the crimes, as did two reported army defectors who separately told Human Rights Watch that their superiors had ordered them to rape women. Because the Government of Sudan denied the UN a proper investigation, we have to rely on organizations such as Human Rights Watch to gather witness and perpetrator testimony and to shine a light on what happened.
One woman told Human Rights Watch that soldiers entered her home and said, “You killed our man. We are going to show you true hell.” Then, she said, “They started beating us. They raped my three daughters and me. Some of them were holding the girl down while another one was raping her. They did it one by one.” Two of her daughters were younger than 11-years-old, she said. Many of the witnesses interviewed told Human Rights Watch that government officials had threatened to kill them if they told anybody what happened.
Nearly ten years after the Security Council first adopted Resolution 1591 with the aim of protecting civilians in Darfur and stopping the violence there, the horror of Thabit is just one attack, in one place, out of too many to count.
In 2014 alone, more than 450,000 additional people were displaced in Darfur – the highest number of new IDPs in any year since 2004 – adding to the approximately two million people already displaced. In the first six weeks of this year, humanitarian organizations estimate an additional 36,000 people have been driven from their homes in North Darfur State.
People living in areas afflicted by violence are in desperate need of humanitarian aid, yet obstruction, harassment, and direct attacks by the Sudanese government have made them increasingly hard to reach. Two weeks ago, Medecins Sans Frontieres shut down its operations in three states in Sudan – including two in Darfur – citing the “government’s systematic denial of access” to communities in the greatest need.
In one example MSF cited, the Government of Sudan prevented its emergency workers from traveling to the IDP camp in El Sereif, in Darfur, where the organization said residents did not have enough drinking water to survive. MSF also suspended operations in South Kordofan State, where its hospital was bombed by a Sudanese Air Force jet.
Today we renewed the mandate of an important UN panel that monitors the sanctions imposed by this Council – sanctions the government of Sudan continues to flout. The government and armed groups it supports routinely violate the arms embargo – a fact that they openly acknowledge. They continue to launch deliberate attacks on civilians, as well as on UNAMID peacekeepers; between December 2013 to April 2014 alone, 3,324 villages were destroyed in Darfur, according to the Panel of Experts. And the Sudanese government continues to allow individuals subject to sanctions to travel and access their finances.
Today we renewed a sanctions monitoring panel that has provided thorough, independent monitoring of the Government of Sudan and other armed groups in Darfur, with a resolution that is more forward-leaning than its predecessors.
But even as we take this important step, we are reminded that the sanctions regime is impotent when the Sudanese government systematically violates it, and the Council cannot agree to impose sanctions on those responsible for the violence and the abuses.
Nonetheless, today’s resolution matters. It speaks to our deep concern with these ongoing violations, it presses the Government of Sudan to take the long-overdue steps necessary to protect the people of Darfur and stop the violence. For the first time, it condemns the violence perpetrated by the government-backed Rapid Support Forces, the heirs to the Janjaweed. And, for the first time, it urges the Sudanese government to account for the situation of civilian populations, who are suffering from devastating waves of attacks in North Darfur, like the reported mass rapes at Thabit.
Yet encouraging as it is to see some very modest improvements to today’s renewals resolution, the most important measure of our efforts will be our ability to alleviate the immeasurable suffering of the people of Darfur. And on that front, this Council – and the international community – has failed. Our complacency is deadly for the people of Darfur. So perhaps today, with a slightly more robust sanctions resolution, we can reignite this Council’s engagement on this continuing crisis.
People’s lives depend on it, and so too does the credibility of this Council – because our ability to promote international peace and security depends on our ability to keep our word, and implement the measures that we impose. And we need to do it because for every Thabit we know about, there are so many more villages that have been the victims of unspeakable atrocities over the past decade in Darfur. They demand we find a way to stop this, and we must.
Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
February 12, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you. In November, this Council was confronted with reports of an alleged mass rape in Thabit – a town in North Darfur, Sudan. The UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur attempted to investigate, but was systematically denied meaningful access. The one time the peacekeepers were permitted to reach Thabit, Sudanese military and intelligence officials refused to let them interview alleged rape victims in private, and in some cases recorded the interviews. To this day, the Government of Sudan has shamefully denied the UN the ability to properly investigate this incident, despite this Council’s mandate for UNAMID to do precisely that.
Yesterday, a report released by Human Rights Watch alleged that at least 221 women and girls were raped in an organized attack on Thabit, over a period of thirty-six harrowing hours beginning on October 30, 2014. According to the report, Sudanese soldiers went door to door – looting, beating, and raping inhabitants. Over 50 current and former residents provided testimony corroborating the crimes, as did two reported army defectors who separately told Human Rights Watch that their superiors had ordered them to rape women. Because the Government of Sudan denied the UN a proper investigation, we have to rely on organizations such as Human Rights Watch to gather witness and perpetrator testimony and to shine a light on what happened.
One woman told Human Rights Watch that soldiers entered her home and said, “You killed our man. We are going to show you true hell.” Then, she said, “They started beating us. They raped my three daughters and me. Some of them were holding the girl down while another one was raping her. They did it one by one.” Two of her daughters were younger than 11-years-old, she said. Many of the witnesses interviewed told Human Rights Watch that government officials had threatened to kill them if they told anybody what happened.
Nearly ten years after the Security Council first adopted Resolution 1591 with the aim of protecting civilians in Darfur and stopping the violence there, the horror of Thabit is just one attack, in one place, out of too many to count.
In 2014 alone, more than 450,000 additional people were displaced in Darfur – the highest number of new IDPs in any year since 2004 – adding to the approximately two million people already displaced. In the first six weeks of this year, humanitarian organizations estimate an additional 36,000 people have been driven from their homes in North Darfur State.
People living in areas afflicted by violence are in desperate need of humanitarian aid, yet obstruction, harassment, and direct attacks by the Sudanese government have made them increasingly hard to reach. Two weeks ago, Medecins Sans Frontieres shut down its operations in three states in Sudan – including two in Darfur – citing the “government’s systematic denial of access” to communities in the greatest need.
In one example MSF cited, the Government of Sudan prevented its emergency workers from traveling to the IDP camp in El Sereif, in Darfur, where the organization said residents did not have enough drinking water to survive. MSF also suspended operations in South Kordofan State, where its hospital was bombed by a Sudanese Air Force jet.
Today we renewed the mandate of an important UN panel that monitors the sanctions imposed by this Council – sanctions the government of Sudan continues to flout. The government and armed groups it supports routinely violate the arms embargo – a fact that they openly acknowledge. They continue to launch deliberate attacks on civilians, as well as on UNAMID peacekeepers; between December 2013 to April 2014 alone, 3,324 villages were destroyed in Darfur, according to the Panel of Experts. And the Sudanese government continues to allow individuals subject to sanctions to travel and access their finances.
Today we renewed a sanctions monitoring panel that has provided thorough, independent monitoring of the Government of Sudan and other armed groups in Darfur, with a resolution that is more forward-leaning than its predecessors.
But even as we take this important step, we are reminded that the sanctions regime is impotent when the Sudanese government systematically violates it, and the Council cannot agree to impose sanctions on those responsible for the violence and the abuses.
Nonetheless, today’s resolution matters. It speaks to our deep concern with these ongoing violations, it presses the Government of Sudan to take the long-overdue steps necessary to protect the people of Darfur and stop the violence. For the first time, it condemns the violence perpetrated by the government-backed Rapid Support Forces, the heirs to the Janjaweed. And, for the first time, it urges the Sudanese government to account for the situation of civilian populations, who are suffering from devastating waves of attacks in North Darfur, like the reported mass rapes at Thabit.
Yet encouraging as it is to see some very modest improvements to today’s renewals resolution, the most important measure of our efforts will be our ability to alleviate the immeasurable suffering of the people of Darfur. And on that front, this Council – and the international community – has failed. Our complacency is deadly for the people of Darfur. So perhaps today, with a slightly more robust sanctions resolution, we can reignite this Council’s engagement on this continuing crisis.
People’s lives depend on it, and so too does the credibility of this Council – because our ability to promote international peace and security depends on our ability to keep our word, and implement the measures that we impose. And we need to do it because for every Thabit we know about, there are so many more villages that have been the victims of unspeakable atrocities over the past decade in Darfur. They demand we find a way to stop this, and we must.
Thank you.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
U.S. UN REP. POWER MAKES REMARKS ON NORTH KOREA
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
December 22, 2014
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you Assistant Secretary-General Simonovic and Assistant Secretary-General Zerihoun, for your informative and appropriately bleak briefings; and for the ongoing attention that your respective teams give to the situation in the DPRK, in spite of persistent obstacles put up by the North Korean government.
Today’s meeting reflects the growing consensus among Council members and UN Member States that the widespread and systematic human rights violations being committed by the North Korean government are not only deplorable in their own right, but also pose a threat to international peace and security.
A major impetus for the Security Council taking up this issue was the comprehensive report issued in February 2014 by the UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry. The Commission of Inquiry conducted more than 200 confidential interviews with victims, eyewitnesses, and former officials, and held public hearings in which more than 80 witnesses gave testimony. Witness accounts were corroborated by other forms of evidence, such as satellite imagery confirming the locations of prison camps.
North Korea denied the Commission access to the country, consistent with its policy of routinely denying access to independent human rights and humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross and UN special rapporteurs. And despite repeated requests, the DPRK refused to cooperate with the inquiry.
The main finding of the Commission’s thorough and objective report is that “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” The Commission found that the evidence it gathered provided reasonable grounds to determine that, “crimes against humanity have been committed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the State.”
If you have not watched any of the hours of victims’ testimony, or read from the hundreds of pages of transcripts from the Commission’s public hearings, I urge you to do so. They show North Korea for what it is: a living nightmare.
A former prisoner of Prison Camp 15, Kim Young-soon, said she and other prisoners were so famished they picked kernels of corn from the dung of cattle to eat. She said, “If there was a day that we were able to have mouse, that was a special diet for us. We had to eat everything alive, every type of meat we could find. Everything that flew, that crawled on the ground, any grass that grew in the field.”
Ahn Myong Chul, a former guard at Prison Camp 22, spoke of guards routinely raping prisoners. In one case in which a victim became pregnant and gave birth, the former guard reported that prison officials cooked her baby and fed it to their dogs. This sounds unbelievable and unthinkable; yet this is what a former guard told the Commission of Inquiry at a public hearing. His account fits a pattern across witnesses’ testimonies of sadistic punishments meted out to prisoners whose “crime” was being raped by officials.
The Commission estimates that between 80 and 120 thousand people are being held in prison camps like the ones where so many of these crimes occurred.
Many who testified before the Commission were tortured as punishment for trying to flee North Korea. One man who was sent back to the DPRK from China described being held in prison cells that were only around 50 centimeters high, just over a foot and a half. He said the guards told him that because the prisoners were animals, they would have to crawl like animals. A woman from the city of Musan told how her brother was caught after fleeing to China. When he was returned, North Korean security officials bound his hands and chained him to the back of a truck before dragging him roughly 45 kilometers, driving three loops around the city so everyone could see, his sister testified. “When he fell down, they kept on driving,” she said.
Nor are the horrors limited to prison camps or those who try to flee. The Commission found “an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as of the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association” in the DPRK.
On December 18th, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution expressing grave concern at the Commission’s findings, and roundly condemning the DPRK’s “widespread and gross violations of human rights.” One hundred and sixteen member States voted in favor, 20 against, and 53 abstained. The resolution also encouraged the Security Council to “take appropriate action to ensure accountability, including through consideration of referral of the situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the International Criminal Court and consideration of the scope for effective targeted sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible.”
The Security Council should demand the DPRK change its atrocious practices, which demonstrate a fundamental disregard for human rights and constitute a threat to international peace and security.
We should take this on for three reasons. First, the DPRK’s response to the Commission of Inquiry’s report – and even to the prospect of today’s session – shows that it is sensitive to criticism of its human rights record. Just look at all the different strategies North Korea has tried in the past several months to distract attention from the report, to delegitimize its findings, and to avoid scrutiny of its human rights record.
The DPRK ramped up its propaganda machine, publishing its own sham report on its human rights record, and claiming “the world’s most advantageous human rights system.” The DPRK tried to smear the reputations of hundreds of people who were brave enough to speak out about the heinous abuses they suffered, calling them “human scum bereft of even an iota of conscience.” This was in a statement North Korea sent to the Security Council today. And North Korea launched slurs against the Commission’s distinguished chairman, Justice Kirby.
The DPRK deployed threats, saying any effort to hold it more accountable for its atrocities would be met with “catastrophic consequences.”
All of North Korea’s responses – the threats, the smears, the cynical diversions – show that the government feels the need to defend its abysmal human rights record. And that is precisely why our attention is so important.
The second argument for exerting additional pressure is that when regimes warn of deadly reprisals against countries that condemn their atrocities, as the North Koreans have done, that is precisely the moment when we need stand up and not back down. Dictators who see threats are an effective tool for silencing the international community tend to be emboldened and not placated. And that holds true not only for the North Korean regime, but for human rights violators around the world who are watching how the Security Council responds to the DPRK’s threats.
The DPRK is already shockingly cavalier about dishing out threats of staging nuclear attacks, and has routinely flouted the prohibitions on proliferation imposed by the Security Council. In July, North Korea’s military threatened to launch nuclear weapons at the White House and the Pentagon, and in March 2013, it threatened to launch a pre-emptive strike on the United States, saying, “everything will be reduced to ashes and flames.”
In the most recent example of its recklessness, the DPRK carried out a significant cyber-attack on the United States in response to a Hollywood comedy portraying a farcical assassination plot. The attack destroyed systems and stole massive quantities of personal and commercial data from Sony Pictures Entertainment – not only damaging a private sector entity, but also affecting countless Americans who work for the company. The attackers also threatened Sony’s employees, actors in the film, movie theaters, and even people who dared to go to the theaters showing the movie, warning them to “Remember the 11th of September.” Not content with denying freedom of expression to its own people, the North Korean regime now seems intent on suppressing the exercise of this fundamental freedom in our nation.
North Korea also threatened the United States with “serious consequences” if our country did not conduct a joint investigation with the DPRK – into an attack that they carried out. This is absurd. Yet it is exactly the kind of behavior we have come to expect from a regime that threatened to take “merciless countermeasures” against the U.S. over a Hollywood comedy, and has no qualms about holding tens of thousands of people in harrowing gulags. We cannot give in to threats or intimidation of any kind.
Third, the international community does not need to choose between focusing on North Korea’s proliferation of nuclear weapons and focusing on its widespread and ongoing abuses against its own people. That is a false choice. We must do both. As we have seen throughout history, the way countries treat their own citizens – particularly those countries that systematically commit atrocities against their own people – tends to align closely with the way they treat other countries and the norms of our shared international system.
On November 23, a week after the UN’s Third Committee adopted its DPRK resolution, North Korea’s military said “all those involved in its adoption deserve a severe punishment” and warned, again, of “catastrophic consequences.” Now here, presumably, “all” would imply the more than 100 Member States who voted for the resolution. The military also that said if Japan “continued behaving as now, it will disappear from the world map.”
When a country threatens nuclear annihilation because it receives criticism of how it treats its own people, can there be any doubt regarding the connection between North Korea’s human rights record and international peace and security?
North Korea did not want us to meet today, and vociferously opposed the country’s human rights situation being added to the Security Council’s agenda. If the DPRK wants to be taken off the Security Council’s agenda, it can start by following the Commission of Inquiry’s recommendations to: acknowledge the systematic violations it continues to commit; immediately dismantle political prison camps and release all political prisoners; allow free and unfettered access by independent human rights observers; and hold accountable those most responsible for its systematic violations.
Knowing the utter improbability of North Korea making those and a long list of other necessary changes, it is incumbent on the Security Council to consider the Commission of Inquiry’s recommendation that the situation in North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court and to consider other appropriate action on accountability – as 116 Member States have urged the Council to do.
In the meantime, the United States will support the efforts of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to establish a field-based office to continue documenting the DPRK’s human rights violations, as mandated by the Human Rights Council, as well as support the work of the Special Rapporteur. Both should brief the Council on new developments in future sessions on this issue.
It is also crucial that all of DPRK’s neighbors abide by the principle of non-refoulement, given the horrific abuses to which North Koreans are subjected to upon return, and provide unfettered access to the UNHCR in their countries. The United States will continue to welcome North Korean refugees to our country, and help provide assistance to North Korean asylum seekers in other countries.
It is reasonable to debate the most effective strategy to end the nightmare of North Korea’s human rights crisis. What is unconscionable in the face of these widespread abuses – and dangerous, given the threat that the situation in the DPRK poses to international peace and security – is to stay silent. Silence will not make the North Korean government end its abuses. Silence will not make the international community safer.
Today, we have broken the Council’s silence. We have begun to shine a light, and what it has revealed is terrifying. We must continue to shine that light, for as long as these abuses persist. Today’s session is another important step – but far from the last – towards accountability for the crimes being perpetrated against the people of North Korea. The Council must come back to speak regularly about the DPRK’s human rights situation – and what we can do to change it – for as long as the crimes that brought us here today persist. That is the absolute minimum we can and must do.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
December 22, 2014
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you Assistant Secretary-General Simonovic and Assistant Secretary-General Zerihoun, for your informative and appropriately bleak briefings; and for the ongoing attention that your respective teams give to the situation in the DPRK, in spite of persistent obstacles put up by the North Korean government.
Today’s meeting reflects the growing consensus among Council members and UN Member States that the widespread and systematic human rights violations being committed by the North Korean government are not only deplorable in their own right, but also pose a threat to international peace and security.
A major impetus for the Security Council taking up this issue was the comprehensive report issued in February 2014 by the UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry. The Commission of Inquiry conducted more than 200 confidential interviews with victims, eyewitnesses, and former officials, and held public hearings in which more than 80 witnesses gave testimony. Witness accounts were corroborated by other forms of evidence, such as satellite imagery confirming the locations of prison camps.
North Korea denied the Commission access to the country, consistent with its policy of routinely denying access to independent human rights and humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross and UN special rapporteurs. And despite repeated requests, the DPRK refused to cooperate with the inquiry.
The main finding of the Commission’s thorough and objective report is that “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” The Commission found that the evidence it gathered provided reasonable grounds to determine that, “crimes against humanity have been committed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the State.”
If you have not watched any of the hours of victims’ testimony, or read from the hundreds of pages of transcripts from the Commission’s public hearings, I urge you to do so. They show North Korea for what it is: a living nightmare.
A former prisoner of Prison Camp 15, Kim Young-soon, said she and other prisoners were so famished they picked kernels of corn from the dung of cattle to eat. She said, “If there was a day that we were able to have mouse, that was a special diet for us. We had to eat everything alive, every type of meat we could find. Everything that flew, that crawled on the ground, any grass that grew in the field.”
Ahn Myong Chul, a former guard at Prison Camp 22, spoke of guards routinely raping prisoners. In one case in which a victim became pregnant and gave birth, the former guard reported that prison officials cooked her baby and fed it to their dogs. This sounds unbelievable and unthinkable; yet this is what a former guard told the Commission of Inquiry at a public hearing. His account fits a pattern across witnesses’ testimonies of sadistic punishments meted out to prisoners whose “crime” was being raped by officials.
The Commission estimates that between 80 and 120 thousand people are being held in prison camps like the ones where so many of these crimes occurred.
Many who testified before the Commission were tortured as punishment for trying to flee North Korea. One man who was sent back to the DPRK from China described being held in prison cells that were only around 50 centimeters high, just over a foot and a half. He said the guards told him that because the prisoners were animals, they would have to crawl like animals. A woman from the city of Musan told how her brother was caught after fleeing to China. When he was returned, North Korean security officials bound his hands and chained him to the back of a truck before dragging him roughly 45 kilometers, driving three loops around the city so everyone could see, his sister testified. “When he fell down, they kept on driving,” she said.
Nor are the horrors limited to prison camps or those who try to flee. The Commission found “an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as of the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association” in the DPRK.
On December 18th, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution expressing grave concern at the Commission’s findings, and roundly condemning the DPRK’s “widespread and gross violations of human rights.” One hundred and sixteen member States voted in favor, 20 against, and 53 abstained. The resolution also encouraged the Security Council to “take appropriate action to ensure accountability, including through consideration of referral of the situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the International Criminal Court and consideration of the scope for effective targeted sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible.”
The Security Council should demand the DPRK change its atrocious practices, which demonstrate a fundamental disregard for human rights and constitute a threat to international peace and security.
We should take this on for three reasons. First, the DPRK’s response to the Commission of Inquiry’s report – and even to the prospect of today’s session – shows that it is sensitive to criticism of its human rights record. Just look at all the different strategies North Korea has tried in the past several months to distract attention from the report, to delegitimize its findings, and to avoid scrutiny of its human rights record.
The DPRK ramped up its propaganda machine, publishing its own sham report on its human rights record, and claiming “the world’s most advantageous human rights system.” The DPRK tried to smear the reputations of hundreds of people who were brave enough to speak out about the heinous abuses they suffered, calling them “human scum bereft of even an iota of conscience.” This was in a statement North Korea sent to the Security Council today. And North Korea launched slurs against the Commission’s distinguished chairman, Justice Kirby.
The DPRK deployed threats, saying any effort to hold it more accountable for its atrocities would be met with “catastrophic consequences.”
All of North Korea’s responses – the threats, the smears, the cynical diversions – show that the government feels the need to defend its abysmal human rights record. And that is precisely why our attention is so important.
The second argument for exerting additional pressure is that when regimes warn of deadly reprisals against countries that condemn their atrocities, as the North Koreans have done, that is precisely the moment when we need stand up and not back down. Dictators who see threats are an effective tool for silencing the international community tend to be emboldened and not placated. And that holds true not only for the North Korean regime, but for human rights violators around the world who are watching how the Security Council responds to the DPRK’s threats.
The DPRK is already shockingly cavalier about dishing out threats of staging nuclear attacks, and has routinely flouted the prohibitions on proliferation imposed by the Security Council. In July, North Korea’s military threatened to launch nuclear weapons at the White House and the Pentagon, and in March 2013, it threatened to launch a pre-emptive strike on the United States, saying, “everything will be reduced to ashes and flames.”
In the most recent example of its recklessness, the DPRK carried out a significant cyber-attack on the United States in response to a Hollywood comedy portraying a farcical assassination plot. The attack destroyed systems and stole massive quantities of personal and commercial data from Sony Pictures Entertainment – not only damaging a private sector entity, but also affecting countless Americans who work for the company. The attackers also threatened Sony’s employees, actors in the film, movie theaters, and even people who dared to go to the theaters showing the movie, warning them to “Remember the 11th of September.” Not content with denying freedom of expression to its own people, the North Korean regime now seems intent on suppressing the exercise of this fundamental freedom in our nation.
North Korea also threatened the United States with “serious consequences” if our country did not conduct a joint investigation with the DPRK – into an attack that they carried out. This is absurd. Yet it is exactly the kind of behavior we have come to expect from a regime that threatened to take “merciless countermeasures” against the U.S. over a Hollywood comedy, and has no qualms about holding tens of thousands of people in harrowing gulags. We cannot give in to threats or intimidation of any kind.
Third, the international community does not need to choose between focusing on North Korea’s proliferation of nuclear weapons and focusing on its widespread and ongoing abuses against its own people. That is a false choice. We must do both. As we have seen throughout history, the way countries treat their own citizens – particularly those countries that systematically commit atrocities against their own people – tends to align closely with the way they treat other countries and the norms of our shared international system.
On November 23, a week after the UN’s Third Committee adopted its DPRK resolution, North Korea’s military said “all those involved in its adoption deserve a severe punishment” and warned, again, of “catastrophic consequences.” Now here, presumably, “all” would imply the more than 100 Member States who voted for the resolution. The military also that said if Japan “continued behaving as now, it will disappear from the world map.”
When a country threatens nuclear annihilation because it receives criticism of how it treats its own people, can there be any doubt regarding the connection between North Korea’s human rights record and international peace and security?
North Korea did not want us to meet today, and vociferously opposed the country’s human rights situation being added to the Security Council’s agenda. If the DPRK wants to be taken off the Security Council’s agenda, it can start by following the Commission of Inquiry’s recommendations to: acknowledge the systematic violations it continues to commit; immediately dismantle political prison camps and release all political prisoners; allow free and unfettered access by independent human rights observers; and hold accountable those most responsible for its systematic violations.
Knowing the utter improbability of North Korea making those and a long list of other necessary changes, it is incumbent on the Security Council to consider the Commission of Inquiry’s recommendation that the situation in North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court and to consider other appropriate action on accountability – as 116 Member States have urged the Council to do.
In the meantime, the United States will support the efforts of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to establish a field-based office to continue documenting the DPRK’s human rights violations, as mandated by the Human Rights Council, as well as support the work of the Special Rapporteur. Both should brief the Council on new developments in future sessions on this issue.
It is also crucial that all of DPRK’s neighbors abide by the principle of non-refoulement, given the horrific abuses to which North Koreans are subjected to upon return, and provide unfettered access to the UNHCR in their countries. The United States will continue to welcome North Korean refugees to our country, and help provide assistance to North Korean asylum seekers in other countries.
It is reasonable to debate the most effective strategy to end the nightmare of North Korea’s human rights crisis. What is unconscionable in the face of these widespread abuses – and dangerous, given the threat that the situation in the DPRK poses to international peace and security – is to stay silent. Silence will not make the North Korean government end its abuses. Silence will not make the international community safer.
Today, we have broken the Council’s silence. We have begun to shine a light, and what it has revealed is terrifying. We must continue to shine that light, for as long as these abuses persist. Today’s session is another important step – but far from the last – towards accountability for the crimes being perpetrated against the people of North Korea. The Council must come back to speak regularly about the DPRK’s human rights situation – and what we can do to change it – for as long as the crimes that brought us here today persist. That is the absolute minimum we can and must do.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Monday, December 22, 2014
SAMANTHA POWER'S REMARKS ON TERRORIST GROUPS AND TRANSNATIONAL CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
December 19, 2014
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Foreign Minister Faki. And thank you again for being here with us in person. The United States greatly appreciates Chad’s leadership and its work to focus the Council on the nexus between terrorism and transnational organized crime. Thank you, also, Foreign Minister Wali and Minister Asselborn for your presence here today underscoring the critical importance of these issues. I particularly appreciated Luxembourg’s attention to the impact these issues have on the welfare of children – an issue that Luxembourg insistently raises with regard to all the challenges we face and a critical part of Luxembourg’s legacy on this Council. The United States is very eager to support Nigeria, and Chad, and the other multinational partners in the effort against Boko Haram – a monstrous movement.
While the motivations of terrorists and transnational criminal organizations may differ, their use of brutal violence, and the insecurity, fear, and suffering that they cause, are often remarkably similar. Terrorists and transnational criminal organizations are increasingly learning from one another’s sophisticated tactics to raise funds, to move people and arms, and to spread the fear that is a critical source of their power.
We see this cross-pollination between terrorist groups and transnational organized crime all around us. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram, the al-Nusra Front, and numerous other terrorist organizations raise tens of millions of dollars annually through kidnapping for ransom. In Somalia, al-Shabaab has filled its coffers through illegal and environmentally devastating charcoal exports; of the $250 million worth of charcoal estimated to have been exported from Somalia in 2013 and 2014, 30 percent is estimated to have gone to al-Shabaab. AQIM and other terrorist groups regularly obtain arms through Maghreb and Sahel trafficking networks, relying on the same trade routes as transnational smugglers. And extremist groups raise cash through a variety of other criminal activities that cross borders – from selling drugs to stealing natural resources.
ISIL is another example of the increasingly similar modus operandi between these groups. While continuing to carry out deadly attacks propelled by its sadistic ideology, ISIL is also increasingly operating like a profit-driven criminal organization. Using fear, threats, and attacks, ISIL extorts money from local businesses and traders, and robs from banks and households alike. Working through long-established regional smuggling networks, ISIL transports oil across borders, netting roughly $1 million a day through black-market oil sales. And there are credible reports that ISIL is profiting from the sale of Syrian and Iraqi so-called "blood antiquities,” sold by criminal middlemen to unscrupulous or unknowing buyers worldwide. These new sources of financing allow extremist groups to diversify their revenue streams and reduce risk of disruption of the funds that they need to carry out their horrific attacks.
As terrorists’ criminal activities become more entrepreneurial and business-minded, the Security Council needs to better understand their tactics. And we must develop and deploy a set of sophisticated tools to disrupt these expanding networks, and cut off the funds that they are generating. To this end, the Council should prioritize three tasks.
First, the Council should build greater international cooperation needed to fight the interrelated problems of terrorism and organized crime. We have taken steps to address this urgent need in previous resolutions, including Resolution 2170 on ISIL, and Resolution 2178 on Foreign Terrorist Fighters. And we have established a robust international legal framework under the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, the UN Convention Against Corruption, and the three UN drug control conventions that, taken together and implemented effectively, provide common parameters and tools for recognizing and responding to different forms of transnational crime.
Building on this work, the Council should encourage member states to do more to collectively address transnational threats. For example, greater international cooperation should facilitate the exchange of information and analysis about terrorist and crime networks. For its part, the United States has effectively used the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime as the basis for international legal and law enforcement cooperation against transnational organized crime with more than 55 countries. And our use of the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and bilateral treaties has led to the return of nearly 30 fugitives to face prosecution in the United States. Greater cooperation is needed both among and within governments, so we can bring together experts from the law enforcement, military, diplomatic and intelligence communities. This is why today the Council called on Member States to work together to secure their borders, counter illicit financing and money laundering, and implement international best practices and existing conventions.
Second, the Security Council should acknowledge that weak governance both encourages and is exacerbated by terrorist use of crime. Terrorist groups and criminals gravitate towards places with rampant corruption and impunity. For this reason, strengthening criminal justice systems in vulnerable countries is one of the most effective ways to fight transnational organized crime. Since our collective security is only as strong as our weakest link, we have a shared interest in building stronger, more transparent governance and justice institutions beyond our own borders. Military measures alone will not be enough.
Third, the Security Council should call on states to provide assistance to those states most affected by these terrible threats. Tackling these challenges requires deploying all the tools we have, from innovative law enforcement and criminal justice tools, to financial measures and sanctions. Yet all states do not currently have the same ability to take these steps. Member states should therefore identify areas where targeted assistance is most needed, and focus support in those places. We particularly welcome the role of the UN's counterterrorism bodies – particularly the al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee’s Monitoring Team, the Counterterrorism Executive Directorate and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime – in identifying threat and capacity gaps.
We have come through a horrific week, as others have mentioned, of terrorist attacks. On Tuesday, the Pakistani Taliban killed 145 people – 132 of them kids, age 5 to 17. It was an appalling attack on a school. A young student named Zeeshan told a reporter: “I saw militants walking past rows of students, shooting them in the head.” On Wednesday, more than 230 bodies of people believed to have been executed by ISIL were found in a mass grave in Syria’s Deir al-Zor province. And yesterday, we learned that more than 100 women and children were kidnapped, and 35 people killed, during a weekend raid in the northeastern Nigerian village of Gumsuri, believed to have been carried out by Boko Haram.
We know that we must do more to prevent these attacks – not only in Pakistan, Syria, and Nigeria, but in all of our countries. We must dismantle the groups that threaten our collective security. But we cannot achieve that goal without tackling the organized criminal networks that extremists increasingly rely upon to fuel their terror. That is the work before us and we must succeed.
Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
December 19, 2014
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Foreign Minister Faki. And thank you again for being here with us in person. The United States greatly appreciates Chad’s leadership and its work to focus the Council on the nexus between terrorism and transnational organized crime. Thank you, also, Foreign Minister Wali and Minister Asselborn for your presence here today underscoring the critical importance of these issues. I particularly appreciated Luxembourg’s attention to the impact these issues have on the welfare of children – an issue that Luxembourg insistently raises with regard to all the challenges we face and a critical part of Luxembourg’s legacy on this Council. The United States is very eager to support Nigeria, and Chad, and the other multinational partners in the effort against Boko Haram – a monstrous movement.
While the motivations of terrorists and transnational criminal organizations may differ, their use of brutal violence, and the insecurity, fear, and suffering that they cause, are often remarkably similar. Terrorists and transnational criminal organizations are increasingly learning from one another’s sophisticated tactics to raise funds, to move people and arms, and to spread the fear that is a critical source of their power.
We see this cross-pollination between terrorist groups and transnational organized crime all around us. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram, the al-Nusra Front, and numerous other terrorist organizations raise tens of millions of dollars annually through kidnapping for ransom. In Somalia, al-Shabaab has filled its coffers through illegal and environmentally devastating charcoal exports; of the $250 million worth of charcoal estimated to have been exported from Somalia in 2013 and 2014, 30 percent is estimated to have gone to al-Shabaab. AQIM and other terrorist groups regularly obtain arms through Maghreb and Sahel trafficking networks, relying on the same trade routes as transnational smugglers. And extremist groups raise cash through a variety of other criminal activities that cross borders – from selling drugs to stealing natural resources.
ISIL is another example of the increasingly similar modus operandi between these groups. While continuing to carry out deadly attacks propelled by its sadistic ideology, ISIL is also increasingly operating like a profit-driven criminal organization. Using fear, threats, and attacks, ISIL extorts money from local businesses and traders, and robs from banks and households alike. Working through long-established regional smuggling networks, ISIL transports oil across borders, netting roughly $1 million a day through black-market oil sales. And there are credible reports that ISIL is profiting from the sale of Syrian and Iraqi so-called "blood antiquities,” sold by criminal middlemen to unscrupulous or unknowing buyers worldwide. These new sources of financing allow extremist groups to diversify their revenue streams and reduce risk of disruption of the funds that they need to carry out their horrific attacks.
As terrorists’ criminal activities become more entrepreneurial and business-minded, the Security Council needs to better understand their tactics. And we must develop and deploy a set of sophisticated tools to disrupt these expanding networks, and cut off the funds that they are generating. To this end, the Council should prioritize three tasks.
First, the Council should build greater international cooperation needed to fight the interrelated problems of terrorism and organized crime. We have taken steps to address this urgent need in previous resolutions, including Resolution 2170 on ISIL, and Resolution 2178 on Foreign Terrorist Fighters. And we have established a robust international legal framework under the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, the UN Convention Against Corruption, and the three UN drug control conventions that, taken together and implemented effectively, provide common parameters and tools for recognizing and responding to different forms of transnational crime.
Building on this work, the Council should encourage member states to do more to collectively address transnational threats. For example, greater international cooperation should facilitate the exchange of information and analysis about terrorist and crime networks. For its part, the United States has effectively used the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime as the basis for international legal and law enforcement cooperation against transnational organized crime with more than 55 countries. And our use of the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and bilateral treaties has led to the return of nearly 30 fugitives to face prosecution in the United States. Greater cooperation is needed both among and within governments, so we can bring together experts from the law enforcement, military, diplomatic and intelligence communities. This is why today the Council called on Member States to work together to secure their borders, counter illicit financing and money laundering, and implement international best practices and existing conventions.
Second, the Security Council should acknowledge that weak governance both encourages and is exacerbated by terrorist use of crime. Terrorist groups and criminals gravitate towards places with rampant corruption and impunity. For this reason, strengthening criminal justice systems in vulnerable countries is one of the most effective ways to fight transnational organized crime. Since our collective security is only as strong as our weakest link, we have a shared interest in building stronger, more transparent governance and justice institutions beyond our own borders. Military measures alone will not be enough.
Third, the Security Council should call on states to provide assistance to those states most affected by these terrible threats. Tackling these challenges requires deploying all the tools we have, from innovative law enforcement and criminal justice tools, to financial measures and sanctions. Yet all states do not currently have the same ability to take these steps. Member states should therefore identify areas where targeted assistance is most needed, and focus support in those places. We particularly welcome the role of the UN's counterterrorism bodies – particularly the al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee’s Monitoring Team, the Counterterrorism Executive Directorate and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime – in identifying threat and capacity gaps.
We have come through a horrific week, as others have mentioned, of terrorist attacks. On Tuesday, the Pakistani Taliban killed 145 people – 132 of them kids, age 5 to 17. It was an appalling attack on a school. A young student named Zeeshan told a reporter: “I saw militants walking past rows of students, shooting them in the head.” On Wednesday, more than 230 bodies of people believed to have been executed by ISIL were found in a mass grave in Syria’s Deir al-Zor province. And yesterday, we learned that more than 100 women and children were kidnapped, and 35 people killed, during a weekend raid in the northeastern Nigerian village of Gumsuri, believed to have been carried out by Boko Haram.
We know that we must do more to prevent these attacks – not only in Pakistan, Syria, and Nigeria, but in all of our countries. We must dismantle the groups that threaten our collective security. But we cannot achieve that goal without tackling the organized criminal networks that extremists increasingly rely upon to fuel their terror. That is the work before us and we must succeed.
Thank you.
Sunday, October 12, 2014
U.S. PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE MAKES REMARKS ON EBOLA TO UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
U.S. Mission to the United Nations: Remarks at a General Assembly Session on Ebola
10/10/2014 04:50 PM EDT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
October 10, 2014
Minister Gwenigale and Minister Fofanah and our distinguished colleague from Guinea, you are on the front lines of this struggle. We are humbled by the brave efforts of your people and stand by you as you face this unprecedented challenge. Everyone in this room must heed the urgent calls you have made today.
This is our 4th time convening at the highest levels of the United Nations to respond to the Ebola crisis. At the first Security Council meeting on September 18th, 134 nations came together to pass a resolution pledging to tackle this deadly outbreak with urgency and vigor – the greatest number of co-sponsors in the UN’s history.
Since then, some countries have punched far above their weight. Cuba – a country of just 11 million people – has already sent 165 health professionals to the region and plans to send nearly 300 more. Timor-Leste pledged $2 million to the effort – what the Prime Minister Gusmao called an act of “Fragile-to-Fragile” cooperation, from one conflict-affected country to others.
Under President Obama’s lead, the United States has contributed more than $156 million to fighting Ebola and deployed more than 100 experts from our CDC. We’re committed to sending 4,000 U.S. forces to the region – a number that will continue to adapt to mission requirements. These forces will oversee the construction of 17 100-bed Ebola Treatment Units, establish a regional training hub where we will train up to 500 local health care providers each week, and provide crucial logistic support to the complex regional operation.
But more countries need to step up. And those of us who have made commitments need to dig deeper and deliver faster. According to the UN’s financial tracking service, only 24 countries have pledged $1 million or more to the effort. Twenty-four countries. The Secretary General has said we need 20 times the international aid that has been pledged so far.
The need is growing, and it is growing fast. The longer we wait to meet it, the bigger the gaps grow, and the harder the epidemic gets to control. In Guinea and Sierra Leone, the number of infections is projected to double every month; in Liberia, infections are projected to double every 2 weeks.
We are facing the challenge of a generation. Every government, every organization, every business, every individual, needs to determine what the absolute maximum is that it can do, and then reach further. That is the only way that we can collectively bend the horrifying curve of this epidemic’s projected growth.
By failing to step up, the world is letting down every one of the courageous individuals on the front lines of this crisis. When we fail to provide doctors and nurses with more clinics and beds, they are the ones who have to turn away sick children, women, and men. Yet we have only a quarter of the beds that we need in Liberia and Sierra Leone. When we fail to ensure burial teams have the protective suits they need, they and their families are the ones who get sick. Yet more than 400 health care workers have been infected, and at least 232 of them have died. We are asking too much of these people. We have to ask much more of ourselves.
As the world’s response lags, Ebola’s spread is having a devastating impact beyond the individuals it infects. Its victims include children’s education in Sierra Leone, where schools have been closed since July. We know what is needed: more nurses, more doctors, more health workers and technicians, more treatment units with more beds and more labs, more protective gear, more medevac capacity, and more money to meet rising costs. As my Ugandan colleague has just described, we also need more education - much more education. If we provide these things, we can curb the spread of this deadly epidemic.
There is no better evidence of the potential to turn the tide than the infected patients who have already been cured in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, thanks to adequate medical care. For example, in just one Ebola Treatment Unit run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Paynesville, Liberia, 236 infected people have been cured. When discharged, patients are given a certificate affirming that they are healthy.
Recently, I watched a video of a woman being discharged from an MSF clinic. Her name was Jenneh Kromah. She had lost her sister and brother to Ebola, but thanks to MSF’s intervention, she survived her infection. After giving Jenneh her certificate, a doctor took off his protective glove and took hold of her hand: a simple, human gesture – but one that could be deadly when someone is infected. That touch, and the dignity and recovery it represents, should give all of us hope.
Until we are also thinking, though, about the taxi or bus that brought Jenneh to the clinic; or the family members who share her home and may also have been exposed to the virus; or all of the other people she may have come into contact with before arriving at the clinic; until we track all of those people and places, and so much more, victories like Jenneh’s and MSF’s will be pyrrhic ones.
And until we can promise the same dignified, quality attention that Jenneh received to every infected person in the affected countries, we will never get ahead of the outbreak. Until then, we will keep falling behind when we need to be surging ahead. The consequences of inaction, or of not enough action, are unacceptably high. And we have a responsibility to come together to meet this challenge.
Thank you.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
U.S. OFFICIAL'S REMARKS ON MASS ATROCITIES
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
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U.S. Mission to the United Nations: Remarks at a High Level Meeting on Mass Atrocities
09/26/2014 04:27 PM EDT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
September 25, 2014
AS PREPARED
Thank you, Minister Fabius and Minister Meade, for your leadership in convening this meeting.
It is difficult to imagine a more important objective than preventing mass atrocities and genocide. The horrific atrocities of the Second World War galvanized the international community to create the United Nations.
If we are to prevent these atrocities, we must respond earlier, we must respond systematically, and we must respond together. States must do more than endorse statements about the responsibility to protect. States must take real action to prevent mass atrocities.
President Obama has declared that the prevention of mass atrocities and genocide is a “core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.”
To translate those words into deeds, President Obama has taken unprecedented steps to ensure that our government can anticipate mass atrocities – because we know that the sooner we act, the more options we have.
He has established a standing body - the Atrocities Prevention Board - to focus our government on the risk of mass atrocities, and develop options for responding to potential mass atrocities before they metastasize and slaughter begins.
We are constantly considering what tools can best be deployed to prevent them, or to stop them from occurring. Our diplomats have exerted pressure on capitals, regional bodies, and here at the UN. Our Treasury Department has applied targeted sanctions on perpetrators, and blocked the flow of money to abusive regimes. And in certain circumstances, our military has intervened to stop atrocities from occurring, as it recently did to halt the mass killing of those trapped on Mt. Sinjar.
At the international level, the Security Council has a special responsibility for the preservation of international peace and security, and none of us should take this responsibility lightly.
In recent months, the Council has shown that it can act responsibly, mobilizing attention, resources, and support to end horrific cycles of violence. In South Sudan, we have surged forces to enable UNMISS to respond to a deadly civil war that has already claimed over 10,000 lives. And in the Central African Republic, we have authorized a new peacekeeping mission to support French forces in curbing a wave of sectarian violence that has caused thousands of deaths and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
I would single out France for its leadership in helping prevent mass atrocities in Libya and helping halt them in Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, and the Central African Republic. And I would applaud Mexico for its announcement this week that it will deploy military personnel to UN peacekeeping operations for the first time in 60 years. Over time, this will prove a decision that helps prevent atrocities.
We have all seen how the irresponsible use of the veto by Security Council members can deprive this body, and the international community, of some of its most effective tools for preventing and responding to atrocities. In Syria, the Assad regime has committed widespread and systematic violations against its own people. Yet – in the face of some of the worst horrors in modern history – four vetoes by members of this Council stood in the way of holding its leaders accountable.
We can ask ourselves whether some 200,000 lives would have been lost in Syria if the Security Council had been able to come together. We can even ask whether ISIL – the monstrous terrorist movement the international community is uniting against – would have gained the foothold it has if we had been united.
The Security Council has the power to play a critical role in stopping atrocities. That power carries with it great responsibility. All five permanent members have a responsibility to respond with acute urgency in the face of mass atrocities that take the lives of innocents and that threaten international peace and security.
Monday, September 22, 2014
U.S. UNITED NATIONS REPRESENTATIVE'S REMARKS TO SECURITY COUNCIL ON UKRAINE
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
U.S. Mission to the United Nations: Remarks at a Security Council Briefing on Ukraine
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
September 19, 2014
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Under-Secretary-General Feltman, for your informative briefing. Thank you, Ministers Timmermans, Bishop, and Asselborn for being here and signaling the importance of this issue with your presence.
First, on behalf of the United States, let me once again convey our condolences to the loved ones of the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. We do not presume to grasp the depth of your grief. But we mourn the lives of those you lost.
We convene today for an update on the investigation into a crime that abruptly ended too many lives. The purpose of the investigation is to determine the truth about what brought down that plane.
Now, for any investigation to be credible, we all agree that it must be thorough, impartial, and professional. Ukraine and the whole international community turned to the Dutch Safety Board because we believed it was more than capable of meeting these standards.
The Board’s preliminary findings reflect its independence and its expertise. Those findings, submitted to the Security Council on September 9th, include the following:
- First, the aircraft was brought down by, “a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from the outside.”
- Second, there were no engine warnings, aircraft system warnings, or distress messages detected.
- Third, the damage to the aircraft is, “not consistent with any known failure mode of the aircraft, its engines, or systems.”
- And fourth, the only planes identified in the report that were in the vicinity of Flight MH 17 were commercial aircraft.
Based on those preliminary findings, one can rule out that Flight MH 17 was brought down by a bomb on board. It was not. Russian claims that the flight was brought down by a Ukrainian fighter jet are also not supported by evidence in the report. Moreover, ground photography is consistent with the expected damage from a surface-to-air missile, but does not correspond with the damage that short-range, air-to-air missile from a smaller warhead would produce. These facts are important because they contradict the fiction that has been propagated by Russia.
The Dutch Safety Board’s findings are consistent, however, with evidence gathered by a group of countries, including the United States, pointing to the fact that Flight MH 17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Russia called for today’s meetings under the pretense of being briefed on the status of the investigation. The representative of the Russian Federation today has appealed for what he calls a “objective and transparent investigation.”
But in its intervention today, Russia made clear its real intention is not to learn about the investigation, but to discredit it. Russia is seeking to play the role of forensic aviation investigator but cannot do so in an impartial and objective manner.
Russian-backed separatists denied access to the crash site for days after Flight 17 was downed. Russian-backed separatists then restricted access after initially letting outside officials in.
This is not consistent with an objective and transparent investigation.
The representative of the Russian Federation today complained about the timeliness of the voice recordings being processed. Yet telephone conversations intercepted by the Ukrainian government indicate that the commander of a pro-Russian separatist unit told local state emergency service employees that Moscow wanted to find the black boxes; and he enlisted the support of these local officials to help recover the boxes.
This is not consistent with the desire to ensure the sanctity of the recordings that, today, the Russian representative professes a desire to protect.
The Russian representative says that the report does not contain “convincing information.” In order to be convinced of facts, one must acknowledge them. In order to be convinced of truth, one must allow it to be surfaced. One can be convinced if one confronts the facts as they are established and proven, not as one may wish they were.
It’s time to allow facts, however inconvenient, to be uncovered. And it is time to stop all attempts to undermine the credibility of a thorough, impartial, and independent investigation that the international community has no reason to doubt.
Russia does not have the track record to play the credible investigator here. Russia has repeatedly misled this Council, its own people, and the world about its support for illegal armed groups and its own military incursions into Ukraine. Just read the transcripts of the previous 24 Security Council sessions on Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Read Russia’s denials that it was arming and training separatists in Crimea, and later its denials that it had deployed troops to Crimea. Read Russia’s denials that it was arming and training separatists in eastern Ukraine, and later its denials that it had deployed troops to eastern Ukraine.
The Dutch Safety Board that has been delegated the authority by Ukraine, in line with ICAO standards, to investigate this crash. If Russia has evidence that it believes can help identify who shot down Flight MH 17, it has a responsibility to share that information with the independent investigators.
Too many lives have been lost and this conflict has gone on for too long. It is time for Russia to bring its intervention to an end. That is why we fully support the ceasefire and agreement signed in Minsk, which aims to de-escalate the conflict that has taken approximately 3,000 lives. We fully support a negotiated political solution to this crisis, as we have asserted since Russia’s incitements created the conflict. We welcome reports that Russia is decreasing its troop levels in eastern Ukraine – even if Russia continues to deny that its troops were there in the first place. And we welcome Russia’s recent statements expressing support for the ceasefire.
However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the crisis in eastern Ukraine, just like the occupation and annexation of Crimea before it, was manufactured by Moscow. And no country should support carving off pieces of sovereign Ukraine and handing them to the aggressors. The territorial integrity of Ukraine is non-negotiable.
Ukraine has demonstrated remarkably good faith in meeting its commitments. This week – notwithstanding the aggression against the state by the separatists and by Russian forces – Ukraine’s parliament passed legislation granting certain districts in eastern Ukraine special status that includes greater self-governance, economic control, and Russian language rights.
Now it is Russia’s turn. Russia must immediately withdraw all of its forces and equipment from Ukraine, including Crimea, and cease all forms of support and training for separatist groups. Russia and the separatists it backs must release all of their hostages and prisoners. Russia must finally close its borders to the flow of soldiers, separatists, tanks, artillery, and other machinery of war, and it must grant Ukraine control over its own border. Russia and the groups it backs must create an environment that allows the OSCE to fulfill its monitoring and verification mandate.
There is one very important imperative we must remember, which brings us back to why we convened today: truth. Two hundred and ninety-eight innocent people were killed on July 17th. The international community has identified an independent investigative body to uncover the truth about what happened to Flight MH 17. Today, we join the chorus of member states in reiterating our full support for the Dutch Safety Board’s investigation and we reject Russia’s efforts to disparage it or hinder its progress. The next step is the pursuit of justice. And when those responsible for this horrific crime are eventually identified, they will be punished.
Thank you.
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