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Op-Ed Columnist: Scandal at the U.N.
March 17, 2004
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
The cover-up in the office of the U.N. secretary general of
a multibillion-dollar financial fraud known as the Iraqi
oil-for-food program is beginning to come apart.
The scandal has been brewing for years. The first I learned
of it was in a New York Times Op-Ed article last April by
the journalist Claudia Rosett charging that the U.N.'s
secretive oversight of more than $100 billion in Iraqi oil
exports and supposed humanitarian imports was "an
invitation to kickbacks, political back-scratching and
smuggling done under cover of relief operations."
After checking with Kurdish sources in Iraq, I reported
that half the money allocated to their people had been
blocked by Saddam "conspiring with bureaucrats in the U.N.
Plaza."
Kofi Annan's right-hand man, Benon Sevan, had been named by
the secretary general to head the oil-for-food program and
report directly to him. Though he could not deny a favored
French banking connection, Sevan branded as "inaccuracies"
charges by Ms. Rosett and me of secrecy, citing a hundred
audits in five years. But he refused to make public what
companies in what countries got Saddam's largess.
Now, thanks to evidence of systematic thievery on a huge
scale, discovered by free Iraqis in Baghdad, the whole
rotten mess of 10 percent kickbacks on billions in
contracts is coming to light. In detailed accounts, Susan
Sachs in The Times, Therese Raphael in The Wall Street
Journal, and Charles Laurence and Inigo Gilmore of London's
Daily Telegraph have flipped over the flat rock of
corruption.
Assistant Secretary General Sevan, now on an extended
vacation until his retirement next month, denied through a
spokesman "that I had received oil or oil monies from the
former Iraqi regime" and demanded that his doubters produce
documentary evidence. The Journal then produced a document
in Arabic that suggests Sevan received an allocation of 1.8
million barrels of oil.
Under the U.N. bureaucracy's nose - and I suspect, in some
cases, with its collusion - nearly three-quarters of the
suppliers jacked up their prices to pay the 10 percent
kickback. These included European manufacturers, Arab trade
brokers, Russian factories and Chinese state-owned
companies. Corruption's take - out of the mouths of hungry
Iraqi children - was estimated by Sachs of The Times at
$2.3 billion.
Hired by the U.N. to monitor these imports was a
Swiss-based firm, Cotecna, which was paid out of the
exorbitant fee the U.N. charged for overhead. Ms. Rosett,
writing in National Review last week, notes that Kojo
Annan, the secretary general's son, was once on staff and
later a consultant to that tight-lipped company. In denying
to The Telegraph in 1999 that he worked on the U.N.
oil-for-food account, Kojo Annan said, "The decision is
made by the contracts committee, not by Kofi Annan."
About that "661 compliance committee," on which the U.S.
has a seat and to which the secretary general now wants to
pass the buck: a U.S. official familiar with its operation
tells me that "its purpose was formally to approve what the
U.N. staff recommended. Only the U.S. and the U.K. experts
ever put a hold on a contract, and that about items that
had dual use in weaponry. Few U.S. firms got contracts, and
those that did worked through middlemen to avoid the
General Accounting Office."
Annan's office kept blaming the 661 committee and
stonewalling the press until an irate Iraqi Governing
Council hired the accountants KPMG and a law firm to
investigate what its advisers told Annan was "one of the
world's most disgraceful scams."
Under mounting pressure, this week the U.N. let it be known
that its laughably titled Office of Internal Oversight
Services would look into the matter. An internal whitewash?
Not nearly good enough.
Will the Security Council appoint an independent counsel to
clean house in an inept or corrupt Secretariat? No, because
France and Russia had their hands in the kickback till.
But free Iraq, backed up by the U.S., is not helpless. Our
Congress supplies 22 percent of the U.N. budget, and we
have a right to an accounting. Chairman Henry Hyde, of
House International Relations, calls this "an outrage" and
will arrange for a G.A.O. briefing this week, to be
followed by open hearings in April.
The U.N. can redeem its sullied reputation by helping to
shape Iraq's future. To take up that challenge, it must
have clean hands.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/17/opinion/17SAFI.html?ex=1080569575&ei=1&en=7b999513f8b7346c
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