Please read the following press releases by the Sahara Press
Service on the Sahrawi government’s condemnation of the Crans Montana Forum’s
decision to hold their annual meeting (March 12-14, 2015) in the illegally
occupied city of Dakhla and their call for a boycott of the Forum.
Shaheed Elhafed (refugee
camps), December 30, 2014 (SPS) - The Sahrawi government condemned Crans
Montana Forum’s decision to organize its 2015 session in the occupied Sahrawi
city of Dakhla, calling the forum’s organizer to reconsider this serious
decision.
“This decision is a flagrant violation of the international law, a blatant aggression against the Sahrawi people and a contradiction with the principles and the objectives stated in the Crans Montana Forum,” said the Sahrawi government in a communiqué.
After recalling that the city of Dakhla is illegally occupied since 31 October 1975 by the Moroccan military forces, the Sahrawi government said that “it is not reasonable that the forum justifies this dangerous behaviour by Moroccan illusions on the Western Sahara issue.”
In this regard, the Sahrawi authorities underlined that the Western Sahara issue “is not an ordinary African conflict, but an international issue, monitored by the United Nations’ Secretary General and discussed at least twice a year by the UN Security Council.”
The occupied Western Sahara is on the UN’s list of the non-self governing territories, and eligible to the implementation of the Resolution 1514 declaration on the granting of independence to colonized countries and peoples. (SPS)
“This decision is a flagrant violation of the international law, a blatant aggression against the Sahrawi people and a contradiction with the principles and the objectives stated in the Crans Montana Forum,” said the Sahrawi government in a communiqué.
After recalling that the city of Dakhla is illegally occupied since 31 October 1975 by the Moroccan military forces, the Sahrawi government said that “it is not reasonable that the forum justifies this dangerous behaviour by Moroccan illusions on the Western Sahara issue.”
In this regard, the Sahrawi authorities underlined that the Western Sahara issue “is not an ordinary African conflict, but an international issue, monitored by the United Nations’ Secretary General and discussed at least twice a year by the UN Security Council.”
The occupied Western Sahara is on the UN’s list of the non-self governing territories, and eligible to the implementation of the Resolution 1514 declaration on the granting of independence to colonized countries and peoples. (SPS)
ShahidAlhafed, January 6,
2015 (Sps)- the National Secretariat of Polisario Front called on countries,
organizations and financial institutions to boycott the Crans Montana forum,
which will be organized in the occupied city of Dajla next March.
In a statement culminated its tenth
ordinary session headed by the General Secretary and the President of Republic,
Mr. Mohamed Abdelaziz, the National Secretariat of the Frente Polisario,
appealed to the organizers of Crans Montana forum to reconsider such serious
decision which represents a provocative step and a violation to the legal
statusof Western Sahara.
It also underlined that the move
encourages Moroccan to continue its intransigence and fuels tension in the
region.
Recalling that Western Sahara is a
non-self-governing territory awaiting to be decolonized, the statement
requested the United Nations to take the necessary measures and procedures to
stop such violation of international law.
It is to be recalled that the
Sahrawi government has already deplored the decision to hold the annual session
of Crans Montana Forum in the occupied city of Dajla, considering it as a
flagrant violation of international law and blatant aggression against an
entire people.
The decision
of the Crans Montana Forum to meet in the occupied territory is a thoroughly
corrupt assault on international law, and their meeting in Dakhla must be
stopped.
The Crans
Montana Forum is quite simply one of the slimiest, sleaziest, and corrupt
organizations I have run across in my 25 years of researching Western Sahara.
From a look
at the Forum’s website, it is hard to see this organization as
anything more than an international networking club where the rich, famous, and
powerful of the world can rub elbows with the corrupt, brutal, and murderous
scum of the earth. Take a look at the presenters, awardees, participants, and
leaders of the Forum. Alongside the likes of Richard Holbrooke, Mikhail
Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Lech Walesa, Jesse Jackson, Aung San
Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi, and Ban Ki- moon, you find the likes of Antoinette T.
Sassou-Nguesso (the First Lady of the Republic of Congo, which is to say the
wife of the corrupt and brutal President Denis Sassou Nguesso), Benazir Bhutto,
(Pakistan’s legendary queen of corruption), Afghansitan’s President Hamid
Karzai (well-known for his nepotism, corruption, electoral fraud, and worse),
Dileita Mohamed Dileita (Prime Minister of Djibouti, quite possibly the most rapacious
autocratic countries of Africa), and many many more. It is a great mystery to
me how the long list of bureaucrats from international organizations such as
the United Nations and Transparency International can justify hobnobbing with
such a collection of lowlifes.
The Crans
Montana Forum is notorious for its lack of transparency. How exactly does this
group finance its annual junkets? Its website has no information about the
Forum’s financials, donors, and support. They do tell us that their annual
meeting last year in Rabat, Morocco, was under the High Patronage of King
Mohammed VI of Morocco, but they certainly are silent about what that means.
They did award all kinds of awards to lots of Moroccan government, business,
and NGO leaders, which certainly smells very fishy to me. In general, the Forum’s strange collection of awardees,
many of them corrupt and savage, really makes one wonder whether this group is
in the business of selling its awards to the highest bidders. As an aside, it
is a great mystery to me how Huguette Labelle, chairperson of Transparency
International, would join the Crans Montana African Women’s Forum in 2013. The
lack of any transparency by this outfit is mind boggling.
On the
subject of transparency, the Forum mentions four officers – HSH Prince Anton von und zu Liechtenstein,
Honorary Chariman of the Board (Fondation du Forun Universale), Pfr. Daniel
Warner, Chair, Advisory Board (Crans Montana Forum) Mr. Jean-Paul Carteron,
Founder (Fondation du Forum Universale & Crans Montana Forum), Mr. Nicolas
Buzaianu, Founder and Executive Chariman (Council on World Public Affairs CWPA)
- but doesn’t enlighten us with biographies on any of them.
Prince Anton
of Liechtenstein’s main accomplishment appears to be that he is a Prince of the
House of Liechtenstein, because there is precious little information around
about what he does.
Daniel Warner since 2011 has been an Assistant Director for International Relations, Management, of The Geneva
Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) , ”an international
foundation whose mission is to assist the international community in pursuing
good governance and reform of the security sector.” It is exceedingly hard to
figure out what an academic who is committed to “Democratic Control of Armed
Forces” and “pursuing good governance and reform of the security sector” is
doing as Chair of the Advisory Board of an outfit seemingly committed to
autocratic control of armed forces and pursuing totally corrupt governance.
And then there is
Jean-Paul Carteron, the Founder and apparently Master of Ceremonies of the
Crans Montana Forum. There is little information around about this guy, but
luckily there is one Santa Barbara-based journalist, Robert Eringer, who has
made a career digging up dirt about Carteron. In a December 27, 2008, article
in the Santa Barbara News-Press titled “The Investigator” we get a short bio of
Carteron:
Another shady character in sunny Monaco is Jean-Paul Carteron.
Carteron left Paris in 1981 to work for "Papa Doc" Duvalier
and wound up looking after the Haitian dictator's corrupt fortune. He carried
on with "Baby Doc," facilitating real estate deals along the French
Riviera. The Duvalier dynasty was brutal and murderous--and the beginning of
Carteron's own fortune. After bloodying his hands with both "Docs,"
Carteron--in 1989--created Crans Montana Forum in Switzerland and re-styled
himself as "humanitarian." His forum provided respectability for
brutal, corrupt regimes in Africa, from which Mr. Carteron personally profited.
The Swiss, by 1996, suspected Carteron of laundering money and requested he move his forum elsewhere. He took it to the Principality and re-named it Monaco World Summit, creating the erroneous perception among foreign governments that his private entity was a Monaco institution. Then, mixing with representatives of the world's smaller nations, Carteron became a broker. Not stocks and bonds. Carteron brokers honorary consulships to Monaco. His going rate is 50,000 euros.
Prince Albert knew about these unethical antics, but rather than point the door to Carteron, His Serene Highness designated him co- fundraiser for a pet project called "Peace Through Sport."
The Swiss, by 1996, suspected Carteron of laundering money and requested he move his forum elsewhere. He took it to the Principality and re-named it Monaco World Summit, creating the erroneous perception among foreign governments that his private entity was a Monaco institution. Then, mixing with representatives of the world's smaller nations, Carteron became a broker. Not stocks and bonds. Carteron brokers honorary consulships to Monaco. His going rate is 50,000 euros.
Prince Albert knew about these unethical antics, but rather than point the door to Carteron, His Serene Highness designated him co- fundraiser for a pet project called "Peace Through Sport."
Lovely stuff, all of
this. What is the Crans Montana Forum all about? Eringer truly says it best, “His
forum provided respectability for brutal, corrupt regimes in Africa, from which
Mr. Carteron personally profited.” And the bit about Carteron brokering
honorary consulships to Monaco sounds oh so much like his brokering
sexy-sounding awards to the highest bidder at the Crans Montana Forum. And if
you want a longer and uglier bio of Carteron by Erlanger take a look at TheSpymaster of Monte Carlo 29: Duvalier Humanitarianism.
While Carteron’s bio
is probably bad enough, moving on to Mr. Nicolas Buzaianu, Founder and
Executive Chariman of the Forum’s Council on World Public Affairs, is also
fascinating, to say the least. A good
place to start about him is an article on a blog named “The Power Brokers”
about the electricity industry in Romania, “a world where many organizations
make huge amounts of money, from God (literally the Romanian Orthodox Church)
to the devil (convicted criminals and organized crime).” Noting that “The true owners of many of these
companies [in Romania’s electricitiy industry] are hidden behind anonymous
companies from Switzerland or Cyprus,” the article continues,” By far, the most
important private company in Romania is Energy Holding, which specializes in
international electric power trading,” and which “is 95 percent-owned by the
Swiss company Energy Consult SA ECSA, while the rest of the shares are owned by
an off-shore company from Cyprus called Atell Investments.” This is where we run into Nicolae Bogdan
Buzaianu, the “sole administrator” of Energy Consult” until June 2006” and “one
of the most controversial characters in the Romanian power market.” A cloud of
corruption had followed Buzaianu and Energy Consult for years and “Energy
Holding came under scrutiny in 2006 by the [Romanian] National Anticorruption
Directorate because of its power dealings with two state-owned power plants….”
In a nutshell, it certainly looks as if Buzaianu made a ton of money in the
thoroughly corrupt world of energy trading in Romania.
Like Cartenon,
Buzaianu appears to have tried to reinvent himself as a philanthropist. While he
has continued his energy trading ways since he resigned from Energy Consult in
2006, he has moved on to several eclectic projects. He became obsessed with
Zambia, where he served as this country’s representative to UNESCO, developed a
charity to improve their educational system, and got implicated in a “soured
gold deal” over “gold which allegedly went missing from the vaults of the Drug
Enforcement Commission under mysterious circumstances.” If you want to look further into the shady
world of Nicolae Bogdan Buzaianu in Zambia, I urge you to take a look at
WIREDPROJECT316, a blog published by Sanday Chongo Kabange, a pan-African
journalist. Then there was in 2010 his appointment in Tokyo as Honorary Black
Belt of the International Judo Federation (IJF); his being awarded in 2011 the
Gold Medal of the Church of Russia, its highest honor, “for his charity work to
complete the refurbishment of several churches in Moldavia.” and also in 2011 his
“supporting the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan in Northern India in order to
promote their message for the respect and protection of nature.” And somewhere along the way he became Founder
and Executive Chariman of the Crans Montana Forum’s Council on World Public
Affairs. Believe me, I’m only touching the tip of the iceberg. It really appears and at least a couple
journalists concur that this guy spends a lot of time laundering a very dirty
fortune though an extraordinary collection of causes. His conversation at Crans
Montana Forum dinners must be fascinating.
It should be very
clear to anyone reading all of this that the Crans Montana Forum intends to
hold its annual meeting in Dakhla in the illegally occupied Western Sahara because the event is “under the High
Patronage of HM King Mohammed VI of Morocco,” one of the world’s most corrupt
monarchs. The King is bribing the Crans Montana Forum to break international
law by meeting in a city that no country recognizes as part of Morocco. Last
year the King’s High Patronage of the Forum’s meeting in Rabat bought him a
wealth of Moroccan participants, presenters, and awardees. This year he is
trying to buy respectability for Morocco’s illegal occupation and looting of
Western Sahara.
The Crans Montana
Forum must be forced to cancel its meeting in Dakhla.
Algeria’s President Abdelaziz
Bouteflika was a guest of the Crans Montana Forum at its meeting in Switzerland
in 1996. Bouteflika, as the host and largest supporter of the Polisario Front
and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in Algeria, must exert all
diplomatic efforts to force the Forum to cancel their annual meeting in Dakhla
and to force King Mohammed VI to retract his High Patronage of the Dakhla
meeting.
The Sahrawi in the
occupied territory must organize non-violent demonstrations throughout Western
Sahara to prevent the meeting from taking place and to disrupt the meeting if
the Forum refuses to cancel.
The Crans Montana
Forum is an International Organization, Swiss owned and managed, but based in
the Principality of Monaco. Both Monaco and Switzerland must use all legal
means to prevent the Forum from meeting in a non-self-governing territory
illegally occupied by Morocco.
The large collection
of business, governmental, inter-governmental, and non-governmental leaders
that have undoubtedly been invited to the meeting in Dakhla must boycott this
event. In particular, the United Nation should prohibit its bureaucrats and
leadership from participating at this
meeting. The UN, after all, does not recognize Moroccan sovereignty over
Western Sahara.
The bottom line is
that the Crans Montana Forum is a thoroughly corrupt and mercenary organization
that is colluding with Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara. The
Forum in Dakhla should be boycotted by all and must be destroyed if it does not
cancel its meeting.