She was the UN’s special adviser on genocide. They didn’t want to listen to her

For three years, Alice Wairimu Nderitu’s important work went mostly unnoticed. Hired in 2020 as the United Nations special Aadviser on the prevention of genocide, Ms Nderitu, a human rights expert and mediator from Kenya, visited refugee camps in Bangladesh, Chad and Iraq, examined instances of genocide denial in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and drew attention to the dire humanitarian situation in Sudan.

Ms Nderitu’s real troubles at the UN began in the wake of the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023. A week after the worst single-day attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust, on October 15, she issued a statement condemning Hamas’ “unacceptable” attacks “into Israeli territory” as well as the “abduction of a very significant number of civilians by Hamas”.

The statement, understandably critical of a terrorist organisation’s barbaric slaughter of 1,200 innocent Israelis and foreigners and kidnapping of 250 more, should not have garnered controversy. But it did.

The very evening she issued her statement, Ms Nderitu revealed in an interview with US magazine Air Mail, she started being “bullied” and “hounded” from within the UN and outside “with protection from nobody”.

She received a stern email from a civil servant at the UN Office of Human Rights, who, copying in top UN officials, lampooned Ms Nderitu’s statement for being “one-sided”, adding that it “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body”.

That email was followed by an open letter penned by a group of “concerned UN staff including Palestinians” who demanded that Ms Nderitu show an “equal and unequivocal” measure of dissent toward Israel as she had towards Hamas.

Pressure then began mounting on Ms Nderitu to describe Israel’s defensive war in Gaza against Hamas as “genocide”, which she denied.

From a legal standpoint, she maintained, Israel’s war in Gaza did not meet the definition of genocide since Israel was seeking to eliminate Hamas, a terrorist regime intentionally and strategically embedded within a civilian population – and was not seeking to eliminate an ethnic group or civilian population.

In 2022, Ms Nderitu’s office even published a paper meant to guide on appropriate uses of the term “genocide” given its “frequent misuse”. Instances in recent history of entire ethnic groups being intentionally massacred with the goal of eliminating them, the paper noted, included the Holocaust, the Hutus’ genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 and the Serbian killing of Bosnian Muslims between 1992 and 1995.

But in recent years, the UN’s maniacal obsession on Israel meant the institution ignored other humanitarian atrocities taking place globally, instead embarking on a reprehensible persecution campaign of its own special adviser on the prevention of genocide for refusing to accuse Israel of genocide. “This never happened for any other war,” Nderitu said. “Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for [the] Democratic Republic of Congo, not for Myanmar. The focus was always Israel… By taking one side, condemning it [Israel] every day, you completely lose the essence of what the UN was created for.”

In the following months, Ms Nderitu endured relentless harassment at press conferences and faced multiple Change.org petitions, including one amassing 22,000 signatures, demanding her resignation for “her failure to fulfil her mandate”.

She received threatening phone calls, emails and social media messages. “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 message sent to her UN email address.

Unwilling to relent to anti-Israel pressure from inside the UN, Nderitu’s contract was not renewed by the secretary-general at the end of 2024. Her chief failure was approaching the subject of Israel with a degree of objectivity most UN personnel might not be accustomed to – or even loathe.

Even before stepping into her new role, Ambassador-designate Elise Stefanik has already spoken out against the UN’s blinding bias against Israel. Once confirmed as United States ambassador to the United Nations, one immediate priority may be to investigate this most unjust treatment of  Nderitu.

​

Jonathan Harounoff is Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations and author of Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt, out in August.