[News] UN bowed to fearmongering and threats from powerful governments to cover up painful truth of Israeli apartheid — UN official’s resignation letter

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://mondoweiss.net/2017/03/fearmongering-governments-resignation/


  UN bowed to ‘fearmongering and threats’ from powerful governments to
  cover up ‘painful truth’ of Israeli apartheid — UN official’s
  resignation letter

March 18, 2017 by Mondoweiss Editors.

/Yesterday Rima Khalaf resigned as executive secretary 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2017/03/resigns-refusing-apartheid/> of the 
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia after the 
agency was forced to retract a report stating that Israel is an 
“apartheid regime.” Khalaf’s letter of resignation to UN 
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was translated and posted by poet 
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha today on her Facebook 
<https://www.facebook.com/lena.khalaf.tuffaha/posts/10154444542606699> 
page. Here is that translation: /

Honorable Secretary General,

I have given a great deal of consideration to the letter I received from 
your office, and I assure you that I in no way question your right to 
issue instructions to remove the report from the ESCWA web site, as I do 
not question that as employees of the United Nations, we must all 
execute the orders of our Secretary General.

I know very well your commitment to the principles of human rights in 
general and your position on the rights of the Palestinian people 
specifically. And I also understand the anxiety you must have in these 
difficult times that leave you with few good choices.

It is clear to me the kinds of pressures and threats to which the United 
Nations and you personally are subjected by states with authority and 
influence, because of the publication of the ESCWA report (Israeli 
Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of 
Apartheid)[still available here 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2017/03/resigns-refusing-apartheid/>]. I am 
unsurprised that these states, which are run today by governments with 
little concern for international principles and human rights, should 
resort to tactics of fearmongering and threats when they fail to defend 
their policies and practices which violate the law. It makes sense that 
a criminal would attack those who defend the cause of his victims, but I 
find myself incapable of bowing to such pressures, and not because of my 
role as an employee of the United Nations, but simply as a sane human 
being. For I believe—as you do—in the values and noble principles that 
have always represented the forces of good throughout history, and upon 
which our organization, the United Nations, was founded. And, like you, 
I also believe that discrimination against any human being on the basis 
of religion or skin color or gender or ethnicity is absolutely 
unacceptable, and cannot be made acceptable by political maneuvering or 
brute force. And I believe that to speak truth to power is not only a 
human right, it is our obligation.

Over the course of two months, I have been instructed to withdraw two 
reports published by ESCWA, not for any error or shortcomings within the 
reports themselves and not necessarily because you yourself disagree 
with their content, but because of political pressures from countries 
implicated by their blatant violations of the rights of people in the 
region and human rights in general.

You have seen with your own eyes how the people of this region are 
enduring episodes of pain and suffering unprecedented in their modern 
history, and that the deluge of catastrophes that has overtaken them 
today is a direct result of unchecked oppression which has been ignored, 
or covered up, or openly engaged in by governments with dominance and 
force within the region and outside of it. These same governments are 
the ones pressuring you today to silence the voice of truth and the 
calls for justice represented by this report.

In view of all that I have stated here, I can only insist on the 
findings of the ESCWA report, which state that Israel has built an 
apartheid regime which aims to give one ethnic group control over 
another. The evidence provided in the report is incontrovertible, and 
here it is sufficient to point out that anyone who has attacked the 
report has been incapable of calling into question a single word of its 
actual content. I see it as my obligation to shine a light on the truth 
and not to hide it or obscure the testimony and evidence it provides.

The painful truth is that an apartheid regime still exists in the 21st 
century, and this is unacceptable under any law and is morally 
unjustifiable.

As I make this statement, I claim no moral superiority and no greater 
clarity than you possess, the matter is simply that my statements are a 
result of an entire life spent here, in this region, witnessing the 
horrific consequences of stifling people and preventing them from 
expressing the truth of their suffering through peaceful means.

As such, and after great consideration, I realize that I too have no 
choice. I cannot withdraw, once again, a United Nations report, an 
exceptionally researched and well-documented report about grave 
violations of human rights. I also realize that the clear directives of 
the Secretary General of the United Nations must be executed. And so the 
only way to resolve this tangle is for me to step aside and leave it to 
someone else to do what my conscience prevents me from doing. I realize 
I have only two weeks of service remaining in my post, so my resignation 
is not meant to exert any political pressure on you. I am simply 
resigning because I believe my duty to the peoples of the region that we 
serve, and to the United Nations, and to myself, is not to silence the 
testimony about a crime that causes such suffering to so many human 
beings. For this reason, I submit to you my resignation from the United 
Nations.

Translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha prefaced the posting 
<https://www.facebook.com/lena.khalaf.tuffaha/about?lst=540600655%3A549221698%3A1489852006> 
with these words:

    Dr. Rima Khalaf, career diplomat extraordinaire, personal hero, and
    Executive Secretary of ESCWA, resigned today after the UN Secretary
    General tried to withdraw a report that correctly identified Israel
    as an apartheid regime. Anyone who cares about freedom and equality
    should read her letter of resignation, which I have translated here.
    Her letter is a document that is now part of the history of the
    struggle for freedom. And anyone in the west who’s super worried
    about women in the Arab world should sit down, because we have Rima
    and many women like her who just need everyone to get out the way so
    we can get our work done. Khalaf women don’t play. Palestinian women
    don’t play.

/Thanks to Nada Elia 
<https://www.facebook.com/nada.elia.14/posts/10154651748454833>./

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