22668: (Chamberlain) Annan names Chilean diplomat as UN envoy to Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Evelyn Leopold

    UNITED NATIONS, July 12 (Reuters) - Chile's former U.N. ambassador,
Juan Gabriel Valdes, was appointed on Monday as Secretary-General Kofi
Annan's top envoy in Haiti, the United Nations announced.
     Valdes, 60, will serve as special representative for the operation in
Haiti, which includes an authorized deployment of 6,700 troops and up to
1,622 civilian police in the impoverished, unstable Caribbean nation.
     A former foreign minister who assumed his U.N. post in 2000, Valdes is
now ambassador to Argentina. He was transferred to Buenos Aires in 2003 for
what some diplomats believe related to his questioning of the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq in the U.N. Security Council where Chile has a seat.
     Valdes has also served as ambassador in Spain and has a doctorate in
political science from Princeton University. He was in exile in the United
States and Mexico throughout the reign of Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, working closely with Orlando Letelier, a former foreign minister
assassinated in Washington in 1976.
     Since he left his U.N. post, Valdes has publicly accused the United
States of spying on various U.N. missions when a half-dozen undecided
nations, including Chile and Mexico, met to discuss their positions on Iraq
in early 2003.
     In the middle of the discussions, diplomats began receiving calls on
their mobile phones telling them to walk out of the meeting. Washington was
calling the countries' foreign ministers complaining that the meeting was
"an unfriendly act against the United States," one envoy present told the
Los Angeles Times.
     "That morning, we realized that our friends knew everything," Valdes
said. They had prior knowledge of the text, of the meeting, and exactly
what was being discussed, while it was being talked about, he said.
     Valdes also told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that technicians who
had been called to check the telephones at the Chilean mission discovered
they had been tampered with in early 2003. "Indeed, we verified that the
majority of our phones had been bugged," he said.