In the past two months, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has managed to become a very, very unpopular person in Israel: he remained silent for two long weeks after the massacre in the south, when he bothered to talk about the issue he justified Hamas' atrocities, and now he is applying special laws to pressure Israel to stop its justified war against those who act unequivocally to destroy it. This is despite the fact that in the past he tried to appear objective, visited Israel immediately after his appointment to the position, and even spoke explicitly about the fact that there was originally a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount. So we turned to Bard to ask whether Guterres was involved in other scandals and hypocrisy.
UN-sponsored sexual abuse allegations:
In 2020, Guterres faced criticism that he might extend the contract of a senior UN peacekeeper in Western Sahara, even though that official was accused of sexual misconduct. This is in contrast to Guterres' stated "zero tolerance" policy on sexual harassment;
In 2021, he claimed he did not know that his former chief of staff, Fabrizio Hochschild-Drummond, had been accused of sexual harassment. This is despite the fact that other faculty members were familiar with the allegations. The affair exploded after he fired (or rather did not renew the contract of) the staff member who filed the complaint against Hochschild-Drummond, which was suspected of being an act of revenge for the harm done to his associate;
Guterres was criticized last year for receiving 66 complaints of sexual abuse and abuse in peacekeeping missions, and 91 complaints about UN personnel outside peacekeeping forces. This is despite the fact that when he became secretary-general in 2017, he promised to eradicate such incidents.
Claims about his performance within the UN: Prior to his appointment as secretary-general, Guterres expressed willingness to act on the "particularly complex question" of Haiti's cholera epidemic,
which erupted in 2010 after UN peacekeepers brought the virus from Nepal and spread it on the island after dumping their needs into local water sources. However, after receiving the appointment, he did little to fund the fund to fight cholera on the island;
In 2017, he condemned the genocide of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar, but two years later he was condemned and accused of hypocrisy by human rights groups for failing to similarly condemn China's appalling treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority;
In 2018, he was criticized for not being harsh enough to condemn the Saudi-led coalition's bombings of Yemen, which have caused a humanitarian crisis;
And in 2022, he was accused of being far too close to Russia because of his socialist-communist views (he served as head of the International International), and therefore failed to condemn its invasion of Ukraine.
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