Even by the recent standard of twitter badness it seems to have gotten dramatically worse in the last couple of months
Even after the takeover I've logged in regularly because I need the updates from official accounts, etc; last week I logged in at my place of work & my timeline was absolutely FILLED with graphic pornography from two once-professional, now hacked accounts I follow. Been afraid to log back in since.
It’s genuinely strange we don’t know!
I need someone to write a normal book about this so I can stop sounding like I have a tinfoil hat on every time this comes up
also fwiw, depending on who you ask, it’s possible someone murdered Dag Hammarskjöld for being a thorn in the side of great powers, so there’s an argument that being PNG’d is maybe not that big of a deal in comparison, but still. “Didn’t shoot his plane out of the sky” is the lowest diplomatic bar
As for the peacekeepers, in past missions, dangerous conditions on the ground sometimes translate to specific troop-contributing countries calling their contingents home; despite political commitment from the UN, if it gets more dangerous for peacekeepers, we might see that here as well
Fwiw, it’s not actually clear that you can PNG a UN official under the Vienna Convention; practically, though, it doesn’t matter, since it translates to a government refusing you entry—for his part, Guterres says that he’ll continue to work with the Israeli government because it’s necessary to do so
Another big takeaway is peacekeepers are on the ground as a diplomatic force, not a fighting force; the Israeli govt has asked them to relocate & the UN has declined, indicating the mission will uphold the 2006 political consensus it’s there to help oversee—this does potentially imperil them too
One big takeaway is that there seems to be no previous precedent for a member state PNGing the UN Secretary General; the closest parallel is probably the USSR in 1961 saying they’d no longer recognize Dag Hammarskjöld as a UN official; it’s a pretty unusual political act
This week’s episode is for premium subscribers (gotta keep the lights on at Global Dispatches), but we talk about Israel PNG’ing UNSG António Guterres, & what we might expect for the 10,000 UN peacekeepers currently stationed on the blue line between Israel & Lebanon substack.com/redirect/981...
Crude AND Churlish