Election of new international civil servants' union FICSA chief raises questions

 BRINDISI – The election of Imed Zabaar as the new president of the international civil servants’ labor union federation FICSA has raised new questions about the meteoric rise to influence of the murky Tunisian former supermarket salesman with alleged links to the fundamentalist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, diplomatic sources say. The FICSA Council met in the Italian port of Brindisi from Feb. 23 to 27 to elect its new President https://indico.un.org/event/1021011/ 

 “The consequences for FICSA, which oversees 85 Staff Associations within the UN Common System, and represents more than 30,000 international staff members worldwide, are very serious because the new President’s background is everything but transparent, it is possibly polarized in terms of religious ideology (can you picture him helping Jewish or Israeli staff members?), and there are also concrete examples of the fact that he might have been rewarded for his disservice to staff of the NE Department, leaning towards the wishes and best interests of the IAEA’s Administration,” a well-placed source in Vienna said.

 The dizzy trajectory of Zabaar from supermarket dogsbody to President of the IAEA Staff Association is well documented in previous articles by the Insider including his starting as G-3 in 2003, rising to P-3 as Staff Council President, thanks to some legally dubious staff referenda held with the alleged connivance of the IAEA Administration led by Yukiya Amano.

 “While he was president of the IAEA staff body, Zabaar allegedly deflected a number of cases involving investigation by OIOS of Alina Josan denying the legal insurance to staff members. One such cases, that resulted in ILOAT Judgment 4954, saw the IAEA losing the lawsuit for the botched investigation and paying the staff member, who claimed mobbing on the part of Josan, as much as 20.000 euros.

 The IAEA Staff Council appears to be established in some grey legal area, thanks to the IAEA’s extraterritorial status in Austria, meaning decisions taken by Zabaar could be contested neither before the IAEA’s internal appeals body (the Joint Appeals Body), nor before the ILOAT, nor the Austrian law. In other words, Zabaar was providing legal support at his unfettered discretion, rather like a monarch would do. His right hand man in this was an American, self-proclaimed lawyer, Laurence Fauth, whose high fees per ILOAT case (exceeding 10.000 euros per case), could make or break a case, as the denial of legal insurance to staff could create an unsurmountable hurdle for staff members, especially those losing their job, the sources added.  

 When Josan was promoted to P-5, after all these investigations into her misconduct, Zabaar took her place as Administrative Officer of the Department of Nuclear Energy at the P-4 grade, where such position, instrumental in implementing administrative decisions across the whole department, was historically occupied either by Russian Officials or by citizens of CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), of which Moldova – Josan’s own citizenship – for  example, is a member.

 The above appointment of Zabaar was a substantial deviation from the IAEA documented practice of appointing people from CIS who would speak Russian, a fact which many people at the IAEA felt amounted to Josan and DDG Mikhail Chudakov giving some sort of “reward” to Zabaar for his services protecting them, by unduly deflecting, opposing or closing cases, in his role of Staff Association President, at the expense of staff of a Department, that of NE, where harassment, be it sexual or else, was rampant. Zabaar’s step-brother, Ahmed Zaabar (misspelled willingly), and Zabaar himself, seem both tied to the Muslim Brotherhood via their common father, which in Tunisia is expressed by the Ennahda Movement, which has long been aligned with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

 “In such a coordinating role, it is not clear what it will be of FICSA with Zabaar as President, but it is certain that Zabaar will be in a position to exert pressure and influence not only on IAEA’s self-governing body, but also on those of several other notable organisations present in Italy, including but not limited to FAO, IFAD, UNHCR (Rome), UNGSC, UNHRD-WFP, UNICC-WHO and UNOPS (Brindisi), UNICRI, ILO-ITC, UNSSC (Turin), ICTP-IAEA, UNIDO (Vienna and Rome), UNICEF (Perugia), ICGEB (Trieste) among many others,” a veteran UN observer said.

 jf