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November 26, 2007
By
Michael Barker
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Having introduced the ‘democratic' credentials of the new head of the UN Democracy Fund, Roland Rich, in part 1 of this article, this section of the article will now provide a critical examination of the ‘democratic' background of a key former UN staffer, Mark Malloch Brown.
"Charm, toughness, sophistication, experience, vision. These talents overflow in the person of Mark Malloch Brown..." - Jeffrey Sachs (2005)
According to the US State Department (2006) the:
"UN Development Program (UNDP) moved under the leadership of Mark Malloch Brown [in 1999] to embrace democracy promotion, considering political liberalization not just a product of economic development but an enabler of it... And the new UN Democracy Fund, called for by President Bush in 2004, has helped to fill a void in the UN's work by fostering vital civil societies through grants primarily to NGOs."
Before rushing in to analyse the work of the UN Democracy Fund, this essay will initially examine the pioneering ‘democratic' work and affiliations of Mark Malloch Brown, the man who served as the Administrator of the UNDP from July 1999 to August 2005, and arguably paved the way for the creation of the Democracy Fund in 2005.[1] Indeed, Brown oversaw a dishonourable period in the UN's history, which saw the UN legitimize US imperial interests by supporting their so-called ‘humanitarian' interventions. Brown's involvement in propagating
Carola Hoyos (2001) writing for the Financial Times recounts some of Brown's oft-ignored background.[2] She notes that after studying history at Cambridge University (Magdalene College), and then studying political science at the University of Michigan, Brown worked as a political reporter for the Economist magazine for two years before joining the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1979. For the next two years he was based in
Consistent with Miller's analysis, Hoyos goes on to note that for the next eight years Brown "worked in the sometimes more shadowy world of political and corporate consulting - getting leaders elected and corporations back on track through spin that often teetered on manipulation, critics say." Subsequently, Brown went on to co-own "this fast-growing firm with three other partners", and in 2002 the Sawyer-Miller Group became a part of Weber Shandwick Worldwide - one of the world's largest PR firms.
During his eight year stint with the Sawyer-Miller Group, the one piece of information that is highlighted in most of his (online) biographies is the key role he played in "advis[ing] Corazon [Cory] Aquino of the Philippines when she ran against Ferdinand Marcos" in the 1986 elections: which is significant because the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was highly involved in hijacking this particular electoral contest (for further details see Robinson's Promoting Polyarchy).
Brown's biographies also sometimes note that he also advised "other presidential and political candidates, particularly in
"'Shock therapy' neoliberalism really isn't most closely associated with Milton Friedman, but rather with Jeffrey Sachs... Sachs first introduced shock therapy in
Furthermore, while with the Sawyer-Miller Group one of the key tasks that Brown undertook was to work "extensively on privatisation and other economic reform issues with leaders in Eastern Europe and Russia." Thus the Wall Street Journal noted that in 1990 Brown acted as an advisor for Poland's Solidarity-led government, which at the time was being "literally deluged by [foreign] lawyers and lobbyists offering their services".[5] Carl Berstein (1992) observed that:
"Until Solidarity's legal status was restored in 1989 it flourished underground, supplied, nurtured and advised largely by the network established under the auspices of Reagan and John Paul II. Tons of equipment - fax machines (the first in Poland), printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers, word processors - were smuggled into Poland via channels established by priests and American agents and representatives of the AFL-CIO [a core NED grantee] and European labor movements. Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the
In fact, as Hernando Calvo Ospina (2007) points out, Poland became "[o]ne of the most historic victories" for the US-led democracy manipulators, and during "the 1989 parliamentary elections, the NED handed $2.5m to the Solidarity movement, whose leader Lech Walesa, a powerful ally of the
Returning to Bolivia, during the 1989 elections, Brown acted as the campaign advisor for presidential candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, helping conduct what critic Eduardo Gammara (1990) referred to as "a bitter negative campaign that mimicked the worst of U.S. presidential campaigns".[6] Reflecting on Brown's Bolivian escapades, Perry Anderson (2007) writes that Brown's "main claim to fame was to have been campaign manager for Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a Bolivian ruler so hated by the population for his neoliberal zeal and subservience to Washington that he had recently had to flee the presidential palace by helicopter, and make for Miami." Indeed, Lozada's pro-US credentials are exemplified by his having served as a director of the Institute of the Americas (in 2001 at least), an organization that was "founded in 1983 to improve the opportunities for and relationships among companies and individuals who currently conduct or hope to conduct business in the Americas". Regardless of Lozada's background, Brown's electioneering certainly paid off for him, and Lozada eventually went on to serve as
Charles Trueheart (1991) also points out that, while with the Sawyer-Miller Group, Brown acted as the media advisor for Mario Vargas Llosa's unsuccessful 1990 run at
The Sawyer-Miller Group has also provided valuable propaganda services to the Columbian government (which receives strong
"...the Sawyer/Miller Group, which earned nearly a million dollars in fees and expenses in the first half of 1991 alone. The PR specialist's job was to transform the perceptions of the Colombian state as a corrupt and brutal abuser of human rights, to a staunch ally of the
To their credit, Stokes concludes that the Sawyer-Miller Group's "PR job seems to have worked as the
Given that Brown has such exemplary ‘democratic' connections, it is none too surprising to discover that other former Sawyer-Miller Group associates have similarly democracy manipulating ties. Indeed, the founding president of the Sawyer-Miller Group, Scott Miller, is currently listed as a "key player" at the strategic and communications consultancy, David Morey Group, Inc. (DMG) - a consultancy whose stated mission is to provide "core control of the total communications of a company, a campaign or a government". Miller's link to DMG is interesting because three of DMG's eight key players are linked to the ‘democratic' Fund for Peace: these include DMG's founder and president, David E. Morey, the vice chairman of the Fund for Peace,[8] and DMG partners Mark L. Mawrence and Joel McCleary, who are both Fund for Peace trustees. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, McCleary is also a former president of the Sawyer-Miller Group, and in addition he is a director of the NED-funded International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), and a former president of the NED-linked Institute for Asian Democracy (see footnote [9] for further details). Finally, one last ‘democratic' Sawyer-Miller Group aficionado is Gyorgy Banlaki, who in 1989 co-founded a "joint-venture strategic communications consulting firm with the American Sawyer-Miller Group". Subsequently while:
"...heading
More recently, in 2003 (at least), Banlaki served as an international advisor to Integrated Control Systems, Inc. (IMPAC). This is significant because IMPAC's chair, James B. Irwin, has not only served as the treasurer of the International Democratic Union ("an alliance of more than 70 center right political parties"), but he is also a former director of the Center for Democracy, whose president from 1985 to 2003 was Allen Weinstein - the NED's first acting president. Likewise, the current president of IMPAC, Colm B. Hendrick, has also served as a director of the now defunct Center for Democracy.
Returning to the main man of this present story, Mark Malloch Brown: while honing his ‘democratic' teeth with the Sawyer-Miller Group, he briefly served as the vice chair of Refugees International (in 1993 at least).[10] Furthermore Brown's wife, Trish Malloch Brown, recently stepped down from her position as the vice chair of Refugees International, and it is important to note she worked for the Sawyer-Miller Group (from 1986 onwards), and also served as a program officer for the Soros Foundation in Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1992.
In 1994, Mark Malloch Brown joined the World Bank as director of external affairs, and went on to serve as their vice president for external affairs and vice president for United Nations affairs from 1996 to 1999. Thereafter, in 1999, the UN Development Program rewarded him by making him the first non-American UN administrator that had been appointed in decades: however, as Betsy Pisik (1999) pointed out, although he is not American, "Brown's ties to the
"During his second mandate, floundering in the Oil for Food crisis, [Kofi] Annan was summoned by Richard Holbrooke to his residence on the
For readers unfamiliar with the key democracy manipulating credentials of the four aforementioned characters a brief summary follows:
(1) Richard C. Holbrooke served as the US Ambassador to the UN from 1999 until 2001: he is currently a director of the NED, Refugees International, and the Humpty Dumpty Institute, serves on the advisory board of the Partnership for a Secure America, and is a former director of the International Rescue Committee.
(2) Robert C. Orr was named assistant secretary-general of the UN in August 2004: he previously served as a "deputy in Washington to Richard C. Holbrooke, the United States ambassador to the United Nations", and prior to this served as "Director of Global and Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council, where he was responsible for peacekeeping and humanitarian affairs", and for the International Peace Academy and USAID. Between 2001 and 2003 Orr "co-directed a bipartisan commission on post-conflict reconstruction sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and the Association of the United States Army". In July 2002, Orr signed a Freedom House letter to President Bush, which was co-signed by what might be described as the who's who of the ‘democracy promoting' community.
(3) John G. Ruggie served as the assistant secretary-general and chief advisor for strategic planning to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan between 1997 and 2001, he then became the special adviser to the secretary-general on the Global Compact, and in 2005 he was appointed the UN's special representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises. Ruggie serves on the advisory council of Realizing Rights.
(4) Nader Mousavizadeh an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, and has formerly worked as a "United Nations political officer in
Mousavizadeh is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a group that describes itself as the "world's leading authority on political-military conflict". Crucially, IISS played a major role in promoting the war on Iraq as it supplied a "dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" on September 9, 2002, which "was immediately seized on by Bush and Blair administrations as providing ‘proof' that Saddam was just months away from launching a chemical and biological, or even a nuclear attack". Mousavizadeh is a member of Human Rights Watch's
Perry Anderson (2007) writes that the two key figures "who wrote the speeches and articles furbishing the secretary-general with his rhetorical image" were Edward Mortimer [11] and Nader Mousavizadeh.
"...came from the Financial Times and the
"Few episodes are more revealing of the part played by this Anglo-American duo than the way in which the world came to learn that Nato's blitz on
Returning to the outcome of Annan's meeting with Holbrooke and company, Oliver Burkeman (2006) observed that "[w]ithin a week" Annan "had arranged a meeting with Condoleezza Rice" and "[s]hortly after that, he revealed a new chief of staff, a personable Englishman named Mark Malloch Brown." So in January 2005, after spending six years as administrator of the UN Development Programme, Brown became the secretary-general's chef de cabinet. In April 2006, he was then promoted to the role of deputy secretary-general of the UN, a position he held until the end of the year.
Upon leaving the UN, Brown's long-time friend George Soros rewarded his ‘democratic' commitment by recruiting him (in May 2007) as the new vice president his hedge fund, the Quantum Fund. At around the same time, Brown was also appointed a distinguished visiting fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization:[12] a center whose director, Ernesto Zedillo, serves on the board of directors of both the International Crisis Group and the Institute for International Economics, and on advisory boards for both Realizing Rights and the Center for Global Development. Incidentally Brown himself had also recently served (in early 2007) as a director of the Center for Global Development, and he is presently a director of NetAid - an organization whose president, Kimberly A. Hamilton, is an advisor for Americans for Informed Democracy, and a former associate director for social policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Brown also currently serves on the advisory board of the Global Public Policy Institute - a think tank whose "mission is to develop innovative strategies for effective and accountable governance and to achieve lasting impact at the interface of the public sector, business and civil society through research, consulting and debate". This recently formed Institute's focus is based upon the work initiated by the Global Public Policy Project in 1999, a project whose findings were published in early 2000 by the International Development Research Centre. Democracy manipulating individuals, sitting on the Global Public Policy Institute's advisory board, include Kemal Dervis (who is the new head of the UN Development Program, and serves on the advisory group of the Center for Global Development), Moises Naim (who is a director of the NED, serves on the executive board of the Institute for Global Leadership, was formerly an executive director at the World Bank, and has chaired projects on economic reforms in Latin America at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Mary Robinson (who was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002, vice president of the Club of Madrid, the founder of Realizing Rights, a commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists, is a council member of the International Council on Human Rights Policy, chair of the Fund For Global Human Rights, and serves on the advisory board of Transparency International, and Interights), Adele S. Simmons (who is a former president of the MacArthur Foundation - one of the largest US philanthropic foundations - serves on the advisory council of Realizing Rights, as the chair of the Fair Labor Association, on the strategy committee of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition), and Anne-Marie Slaughter (who is the chair of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, a director of the New America Foundation, a trustee of the World Peace Foundation, serves on the strategy committee of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition, and is a member of both the Inter-American Dialogue and the Task Force on the United Nations). Two other notable members of the Global Public Policy Institute's advisory board are the executive director of the UN Environment Program, Achim Steiner, and Bjorn Stigson, who is the president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Last but not least, Mark Malloch Brown was recently granted a peerage in the House of Lords and was appointed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to serve as Foreign Minister for Africa,
The first two parts of this four part series of articles initially introduced the new head of the UN Democracy Fund, Roland Rich, which was followed by a critical examination of the ‘democratic' background of a key former UN staffer, Mark Malloch Brown. Part three of this series will now examine the history of the UN Democracy Fund itself, and introduce some of the individuals who work with the Fund.
Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at
Endnotes
[1] Brown's biography notes that during his tenure at the UNDP: "His efforts included a major push to expand UN support to developing countries in areas such as democratic governance, a new advocacy dimension as reflected in pioneering publications, including the Arab Human Development Reports, and strengthened UNDP operational leadership in natural disasters and post-conflict situations."
[2] Carola Hoyos, Reconstructing
[3] Diane Johnstone (2000) refers to NED director Morton Abramowitz as "the eminence grise of NATO's new ‘humanitarian intervention' policy". In her book Fool's Crusade (2002, p. 9) Johnstone also wrote: "He helped found the high-level International Crisis Group, a chief policy designer from
[4] In 2002, Jeffrey Sachs was "named a special adviser to the United Nations secretary-general on the UN's Millennium Development Goals." In this position Sach's "work[ed] closely" with his old friend the "UN Development Programme Administrator Mark Malloch Brown who has been charged with coordinating the campaign to reach the millennium development goals across the UN system."
[5] Jill Abramson, Eager
[6] Eduardo A. Gammara, ‘Hybrid Presidentialism and Democratization: The Case of Bolivia', In: (eds) Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America,
For more on the role of the Sawyer-Miller Group in Bolivia see Eduardo A. Gamarra, and James M. Malloy, ‘Bolivia: Revolution and Reaction', In: H.J. Wiarda and H.F. Kline, Latin American Politics and Development. 3rd edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990).
[7] Doug Stokes (2002) adds that: "Media requests for interviews with Colombian government officials went through Sawyer/Miller. They steered sympathetic reporters to key government ministries and made sure that critics of
[8] According to his biography: "Over the years, Mr. Morey has worked with a number of foreign candidates, parties and governments including: Colombian President Virgilio Barco; Philippine President Corazon Aquino; Russian President Boris Yeltsin and The Dalai Lama. In 1997, he advised the winning presidential campaign of Kim Dae Jung, the first opposition leader to be elected in Korean history. Subsequently, he was an advisor to the Government of Korea during its financial crisis and recovery. Recently, Mr. Morey advised the successful campaigns of Chen Shui-bian, whose victory represented the first peaceful transfer of power to an opposition party in Chinese history,
[9] The Institute for Asian Democracy was founded in 1991 and "seeks to promote human rights and nurture the forces of self-governance in Asia... work[ing] primarily for the restoration of democracy in
[10] Annon, Soros Humanitarian Fund for Bosnia-Hercegovina Asks President Clinton to Lift Arms Embargo to
[11] Mortimer "worked in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations since 1998, as head of the Speechwriting Unit and also, since 2001, [as] Director of Communications", a position he held until December 2006. Upon leaving the UN, Mortimer has become the senior vice-president and chief programme officer of the Salzburg Seminar.
[12] According to Brown's online biography: "Lord Malloch Brown spent the spring of 2007 at the Center writing a book tentatively titled ‘The Unfinished Global Revolution,' which describes changing leadership in a globalized world where old models of organization no longer prevail. The book focuses on efforts to create a more effective partnership of governments and international organizations to manage world problems."
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