A deeply disturbing piece about the campaign to oust Alice Wairimu Nderitu—the now former U.N. Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide—from her position. An exclusive for @AirMailWeekly by @johanna_berkman: Last November, @antonioguterres chose not to renew Nderitu's contract after she refrained from labeling Israel’s war against Hamas as genocide. Now, for the first time, she is speaking out about her contentious tenure at the U.N. "They knew that I’m not a court of law, and it’s only a court of law that can determine whether a genocide has happened,” says Nderitu. “But I was hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody.” “It’s instructive that this never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for D.R.C. [Democratic Republic of Congo], not for Myanmar,” she says. “The focus was always Israel.” “This was a war,” she says. “Palestinians were killing Israelis, Israelis were killing Palestinians. It needs to be treated like other wars. In other wars, we don’t run and take one side and then keep going on and on about that one side… By taking one side, condemning it every day, you completely lose the essence of what the U.N. was created for.” A longtime human-rights advocate who has mediated identity conflicts all over the world, Nderitu arrived at the U.N. from her native Kenya in November 2020, at the height of the pandemic. Sworn in virtually by Guterres, she was the first woman in her position. Nderitu’s first statement on “the situation in the Middle East,” issued on Oct. 15, 2023, called for the return of the Israeli hostages as well as a ceasefire. “And then I spoke about Hamas,” she says, “what they did. I described it...." That night, a U.N. Office of Human Rights civil servant sent her an e-mail on which he copied several top U.N. officials, including the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, and also the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs. In his e-mail, the U.N. civil servant described Nderitu’s statement as “one-sided,” suggesting that it “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” Little more than a week later, Nderitu received a two-page letter signed by an unnamed group of “concerned UN staff including Palestinians.” While they joined her “in condemning the intentional attacks and abduction of Israeli civilians by Hamas,” they wrote, “we expected that your statement regarding Israel’s attacks on and collective punishment of Palestinian civilians would have been equally clear and unequivocal.” That December 9, Nderitu hosted a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, an event that she had been planning for a year. On the same day as the commemoration of the Genocide Convention, another anonymous group, this one calling itself Concerned Citizens of the International Community, posted a petition calling for Nderitu’s resignation on Change(dot)org, which garnered more than 22,000 signatures. “The gravity of her failures demands immediate action,” it stated. Meanwhile, the social-media pages of Nderitu’s office were being inundated with threatening messages. “They started sending me the threats on my phone,” Nderitu says. “And then they even started threatening me on the U.N. e-mail.” “Filthy zionist rat, you will burn in hell forever for supporting the rape and torture and murder of little kids by your bestial masters,” read one such e-mail. In Nderitu’s final months at the U.N., the secretary-general’s daily press briefings became a forum where reporters, including those from Al-Arabiya, a Saudi state-owned outlet, and Al Jazeera, which is backed by the Qatari government, asked questions not just about Israel’s alleged genocide but also about Nderitu.”They made me the centerpiece,” she says. “Every day they were talking about me. Why wouldn’t she say there’s a genocide? Everybody thinks there’s a genocide. Why won’t she say it?”