Blog of UN diplomat

October 25, 2006 11:30 AM

When you have a blog, and you're the Special Representative of the UN in Darfur, be careful about what you write. Jan Pronk's blog gives you a good idea in what a high level UN diplomat actually does, and how difficult it is to get anything done in a country torn by war. Oh, and check these photos out, if you just want the non-political goodness.
posted by Harry (11 comments total)

I thought that this was an interesting article in the NYT about the oil profits-driven boom in Sudan's capital, Khartoum.
posted by billysumday at 11:47 AM on October 25, 2006

Dooced: To be lose your job because of your blog.

Pronked: To be expelled from a country because of your blog.
posted by donovan at 12:25 PM on October 25, 2006

It's brilliant. His comments have had 10,000x the publicity they would have received otherwise.
posted by dhartung at 12:29 PM on October 25, 2006

Too bad he wasn't using AdSense.

Oh, and giant sand storm = holy poop!
posted by lekvar at 12:48 PM on October 25, 2006

Pronk!
posted by rogue haggis landing at 1:01 PM on October 25, 2006

I heard this story on NPR last night and I was so amused. It was like a normal politics story: "So-and-so was expelled due to comments made..." and then "on his weblog" instead of the usual "during his speech to the cabinet".
posted by smackfu at 1:53 PM on October 25, 2006

Good for him.
posted by sciurus at 2:31 PM on October 25, 2006

Yup, what dhartung said. Pronk was leaving Darfur soon anyway when Annan left, and this way he's drawing attention to the situation which is one of the things he can still do (the relations with the Sudan government were shot anyway).
posted by fvw at 2:49 PM on October 25, 2006

It's impressively weighty to read a blog which has a sentence like the following: "Last week I asked this question to the members of the Security Council, when I briefed the Council on the situation in Sudan and in particular Darfur."

I am very impressed Mr Pronk has made this all public, and I already know more about the situation than I ever have. It gets such scattershot coverage.
posted by blacklite at 5:45 PM on October 25, 2006

Diplomacy 2.0 in a flatworld theory of creative class flight to left and right brain whole brain empathy kind of meme here? oh the don't forget, you can't do diplomacy without social networking.
posted by infini at 7:48 PM on October 25, 2006

Apart from the fact that Mr Pronk owns a Canon digicam, I'm more amused by the following comment in the BBC article:

There was a famous case during World War I when the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, started reporting his conclusion that Armenians were the subject of genocide by the Turks.

"It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion," he wrote to the State Department.

His cables to Washington did not have much effect so he began to talk to the New York Times and other papers.

The modern equivalent might be to set up a personal website and talk directly to the world instead of to journalists. (emphasis mine)

Is the BBC actually saying that journalists are irrelevant now in 'modern' (I think they meant 'contemporary') times?
posted by the cydonian at 1:37 AM on October 26, 2006