Nobody Knows Who's Behind This Puppet Criticizing The United Nations

Someone is so upset about the way the United Nations is handling a sex abuse scandal that they've hired a puppet to explain how absurd it all seems.

This, apparently, is Professor Hans von Puppet. He has a thing or two to tell the United Nations leadership investigating a leaked report of child sex abuse in the Central African Republic.

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The abuse, allegedly committed by French peacekeepers, was documented last year by a UN human rights staffer. The French soldiers were part of a mission authorized by the UN Security Council but they are not officially UN peacekeepers.

Anders Kompass, a senior official at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, was given a copy of the report. He shared it with French authorities, who are pursuing a criminal investigation into the soldiers' alleged sexual abuse and exploitation.

But when the UN's top brass found out Kompass had given the report to the French, they began an investigation — not into the abuse, but into Kompass, for breaking the rules by sharing a confidential document.

Quick-and-tragic backstory: French peacekeepers allegedly sexually abused the children, and when a report about the abuse got back to French authorities last year, senior UN leadership apparently freaked out.

Marco Longari / AFP / Getty Images

The controversy isn't about UN peacekeepers — the French troops weren't under United Nations command. Instead, critics say the top UN human rights officials were too slow to respond.

Here's what happened, according to emails acquired and released by AIDS-Free World.

Last spring, a UN staffer in the Central African Republic interviewed children who said they had been sexually exploited by French soldiers, who had been authorized by the UN Security Council to join a UN stabilization mission in the CAR but who were not, officially, UN peacekeepers.

The human rights officer, whose identity has not been documented, filed a report about this abuse to her higher-ups. That report was shared by a senior UN staffer in Bangui with Andreas Kompass, who was then in charge of field operations for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Kompass' office was in charge of, among other things, helping to implement human rights protections in peace missions around the world, according to the OHCHR.

Last July, Kompass brought the report to the French. In April, Zeid Ra'ad AI Hussein — the top human rights official at the UN and the son of the Prince of Jordan — formally requested an investigation into Kompass for leaking details of the situation, which other senior UN leadership has characterized as "politically sensitive."

Kompass was initially suspended but the suspension was overturned last month.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said earlier this month that there will be an independent inquiry into the UN's handling of the CAR report and of these matters generally.

Critics say the UN is more worried about punishing the whistleblower than addressing the abuse. This is where the puppet comes in.

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But those critics aren't just the puppet, whose words are actually scripted by an unknown writer. A new advocacy campaign called Code Blue launched last month, pushing for greater accountability for peacekeepers who commit sexual exploitation or abuse around the world. Code Blue and its parent organization, AIDS-Free World, have made public several leaked documents about the abuse and the ensuing investigation. (AIDS-Free World told BuzzFeed News it did not make the videos, and it does not know who did.)

In this video, the puppet play-acts a professor of ethics, who is giving advice to a top UN independent ethics official, Joan Dubinsky. "I am involved in a huge embarrassment," she writes to the puppet.

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To be clear: This is satire. Dubinsky didn't really write a letter to a puppet at an imaginary university. But someone clearly wrote this script — no one knows who, although several sources inside and outside the United Nations told BuzzFeed News they believe the script was written by a UN employee — to expose what they feel is the double standard at work in this case.

"i'm supposed to protect staff from retaliation," Dubinsky's faux letter continues, "but instead I have been caught helping my friends collect evidence to have someone fired. I really need to blame someone else; what would you advise me to do?"

Obviously, to really get this video, you have to know what Joan Dubinsky does.

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Dubinsky is the head of the UN Ethics Office. If you worked for the UN and you needed to exposed wrongdoing, you'd go to Dubinsky. According its website, her office is supposed to protect whistleblowers, and it's supposed to work independently, confidentially and impartially. There's another UN oversight agency, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), that's also so supposed to run independent investigations into UN misconduct.

Paula Donovan, of AIDS-Free World, says these offices violated those norms in a meeting and in a series of emails marked "confidential" and sent in April. In those emails, which were acquired and released by AIDS-Free World, Dubinsky and senior UN leadership strategize about the Kompass investigation. That leadership includes a top human rights official, the UN Secretary General's chief of staff, the UN Under-Secretary General for Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), and, at one point, the executive director of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations.

The same group had met to discuss the matter during a retreat in Turn, according to the documents. "They should never have been sitting down together," says Donovan, who herself spent nearly 20 years working at the UN.

The two investigative offices — including Dubinsky's — are supposed to be "completely independent, completely separate, and unbiased," she said. "It's like having the head of your trade union sitting down with the board behind behind closed doors, saying 'How are we going to get rid of this union rep who's causing problems of the company?'"

Stephane Dujarric, chief spokesman for the UN secretary general, told BuzzFeed News by telephone that the inquiry announced earlier this month will examine "all the issues that have been raised in terms of who knew what, how the report was handled."

All that apparently makes Dubinsky an appealing punching bag for what the video maker seems to consider UN hypocrisy.

"Ms. Dubinsky has 'ethics' in her job title but so what? North Korea has 'democratic' in their name as well," the puppet says.

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"Here’s the actual question. Little boys are being sexually abused in Africa. What do you do about it?"

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"If you think the answer is you must report it and then do everything possible to make sure it stops straight away like most people capable of cognitive reasoning I would then agree with you"

It's the second video to be released this week, but no one knows who's making them.

The first video appeared on the "UN staff unions" Facebook page. BuzzFeed News reached out to the UN Staff Union in New York; two of that group's members said the video wasn't likely made by any UN union group. "We couldn't have come up with something as funny," one member said in an email.

Another suggested that the video "most likely came from someone in Geneva," which is home to the headquarters of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The high commissioner, Zeid Ra'ad AI Hussein, has been criticized for his response, which critics say centered on investigating wrong-doing by a whistleblower rather than explaining why the UN took no action on the report for nearly a year.

Just to be extra clear: The puppet is not affiliated with the United Nations.

Both videos were produced by Mark Gray, whose puppet will read just about any script you send to him. He's done more than 7,000 of these videos, always with (what is supposed to pass for) a German accent. You can hire him, like the UN video mastermind(s) did, through Fiverr.com, a gig marketplace, at a rate of $5 for every 70 or so words his puppet says.

Gray, reached by phone in Colorado, only knew the Fiverr username of the person who commissioned the videos but said there may be more Turtle Bay University lectures in UN-watchers' future. "It sounded like they wanted to do a bunch," he said.

Basically, the puppet says it boils down to this. "If you work at the UN and you want to know about ethics...you should ask someone who owns a dictionary. You must know by now that at the UN, ethics is is only found in the dictionary."

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Dujarric, the secretary-general's spokesman, said of the video, "People obviously are free to express themselves in ways creative or not creative about what they feel about the system, but I think the bottom line is that everyone here is on the same side."

And if that's not enough for you, there's an even geekier video, that probably only makes sense if you read all those leaked emails, you can check out as a sequel.