Saturday, April 19, 2008

UN's Congo Envoy Speaks of Disarmament and Trains, No Comment on China Resource Deals

I love Inner City Press.*
From ICP:

We're not leaving the Congo any time soon, the UN's top envoy to Kinshasa, Alan Doss, told the press on Tuesday....

...
Doss said he served twenty years ago as the UN Development Program resident representative in the Congo; he spoke nostalgically about the train service at that time, which is now intermittent at best. Asked about a pending deal between China and Kinshasa, to build road in exchange for resources, Doss said he hadn't heard about it.
"It's on BBC," Inner City Press pointed out.


*From "How to do Journalism":
...The press conference was scheduled to coincide with the UN's daily noon briefing, thereby excluding most UN correspondents, and its locale was outside the UN, at the Inter-Continental Hotel on 48th Street and Lexington Avenue, seven blocks from UNDP. Nevertheless, Inner City Press ran to the UNDP briefing immediately after the noon briefing. Source


..."Rwanda has emerged," President Kagame told the two reporters on Thursday night, as an example for all of Africa. The duo thanked him for this time, and he proceeded north along the UN's second floor, with an entourage of six.

This method of interviewing was perfected this week by radio journalist Bessan Vikou of BBC Afrique. Vikou, as he is known, tells Inner City Press that in the first three days of the current General Debate, he has interviewed eight heads of state as they descended from meeting with Ban Ki-moon on the 38th floor. "It would have been nine if I had gotten Kabila," president of the DRC, Vikou said. "They get off on the second floor and there's no where they can go. I tell them 'BBC! BBC!' and they almost always stop. It is even more likely when I am with another journalist, like now." Source

Ya gotta love it