Mick Hartley

Last year the UN failed to renew the contract of its Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu-Nderitu. This was, almost certainly, because she refused to use the term to describe Gaza. Daniel Sugarman interviews her at Jewish News:

On 15 October 2023, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the United Nations’ Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, published a statement on the 7 October attacks the previous week, and what had happened since.

The statement was trenchant in its criticism of “multiple and coordinated attacks” from terrorist organisations within the Gaza Strip, calling them “unacceptable” and “inexcusable”, but also cited “the loss of civilian lives resulting from Israeli bombardments in the Gaza Strip”, calling “for all possible measures to protect those who are most vulnerable”. It mentioned the “unacceptable withholding of Israeli hostages by Hamas in the area” and called for their unconditional release, but it also highlighted, “the vulnerability of Palestinian and other civilians remaining in or fleeing their homes in light of ongoing and escalating risks of violence irreversibly affecting them.”

Not good enough. She didn't say "genocide".

On 9 December 2023, Nderitu hosted an event she had been organising for a year, to mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the UN Genocide Convention. It honoured Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer who had coined the term “genocide” to describe the actions of the Nazis. That same day, a public petition was launched, falsely claiming that Nderitu’s original statement had “failed to acknowledge Israel’s overwhelming violence against Palestinian civilians”. It condemned Nderitu for what it described as a “failure to fulfil her mandate”, demanded that the UN investigate her conduct and called for her immediate resignation.

Shortly after that, the death threats started.

The UN's response? She should say "genocide" anyway. C'mon, what's the big deal?

She described how within the UN she was then being told that perhaps she should issue a statement on genocide in Gaza – not because she believed it, but just to prevent further attacks on her.

“The daily press briefings, all these messages…colleagues were telling me, ‘what will it cost you just to put up a statement and say that you see clear risks of Israel perpetrating genocide?’ And I kept telling them, no, no, no.”

It is clear, talking to Nderitu, that she was deeply troubled, not by the focus on Gaza as much as the corresponding total lack of focus on any other terrible world crisis.

“This had not happened for any other conflict”, she said, referring to the protests against her based on her original statement. “Ukraine, the Congo, Sudan, Myanmar – I mean nothing, nothing like that whatsoever.”

In particular, the situation in Sudan troubled her.

“I went to Chad [the neighbouring country] and I had interviews with people from Darfur. I briefed the Security Council, and I was so clear, I told the Security Council, ‘My role is to identify risk factors for genocide and I’m here telling you that every single risk factor for genocide exists in Sudan’. I gave them very granular details of who was killing who in Sudan. And I told them, ‘Security Council, you have to act, because one day you’ll be held accountable for not acting on Sudan’. I then went to Geneva, and I briefed the Human Rights Council in great detail.”

I asked her whether there was any action. “Nobody, nobody”….

It became clear that there was what she described as “media prioritisation”.

“They would ask about Gaza every day, and I would say ‘ok, people are dying in other places too…I was issuing statements about Myanmar, South Sudan, the Sahel, the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], places where risk factors for genocide clearly existed, people dying in different parts of the world. And really, I didn’t get a single journalist in the daily press briefing saying she’s been speaking, you know, about South Sudan, or about DRC. It was, ‘why will she not say that there is a genocide in Gaza?’”

Wairimu-Nderitu looks at me.

“You know, South Sudan is actually on the verge of a genocide right now? In terms of Sudan, it is already being perpetrated, in South Sudan they are very close.”

But no one cares unless Israel's involved.

Alice Nderitu previously – I was hounded out.

“I was hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody.”

These are the words of Alice Nderitu, the UN’s former Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. In a shocking article, she details the appalling treatment she endured at the hands of the United Nations—months of relentless pressure to label Israel’s actions against Hamas as “genocide.”

She even received death threats for refusing to comply: “They started sending me threats on my phone. And then they even started threatening me on the U.N. e-mail.”

One such e-mail read: “Filthy Zionist rat, you will burn in hell forever for supporting the rape and torture and murder of little kids by your bestial masters.”

Nderitu exposes the UN’s blatant bias against Israel: “It’s instructive that this never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for D.R.C., not for Myanmar. The focus was always Israel.”