A devil's brew at the U.N.
Even worse, in 1998, according to documents and interviews conducted by Charles Duelfer, the head of the U.S.-Iraqi Study Group, Saddam's government may have begun covertly sending gifts of oil vouchers to Sevan, the U.N.'s under secretary assigned to the oil-for-food program by Annan, by way of a Panamanian firm, allegedly earning Sevan over $3 million. That same year, the U.N. dismissed the British firm that had been overseeing the oil-for-food contracts and hired a Swiss firm named Cotecna to do the job. Questions were raised by the move because Cotecna was thought to have employed Kofi Annan's son, Kojo, a 26-year-old of modest skill and experience. When questioned about the possibility of nepotism or conflict of interest, the U.N. said Secretary General Annan had no knowledge of Cotecna's having been hired--even though the contract was let by a U.N. agency that reported directly to him. After it became known publicly that Kojo Annan had indeed been employed by Cotecna, the U.N. asserted that that there was no nepotism or conflict of interest because Annan had resigned before Cotecna won the contract, in early December 1998. Now this assertion, too, has been proven false, to the chagrin of the elder Annan, who had apparently been misinformed by his son. The secretary general is angry about it, and with good cause. Now it is known that Kojo Annan was not only working for Cotecna when it got the U.N. contract but was paid $2,500 a month until Feb. 26, 2004--five years longer than the U.N. initially advised the public, covering the entire duration of Cotecna's contract with the U.N. In a letter to U.S. News , after an earlier editorial by me on this subject, the CEO of Cotecna denied Kojo Annan's role with the company after 1998.
Given that the U.N. asserted that the allegations about Kojo Annan had been "thoroughly investigated" by the U.N., with the finding that there was "nothing" to them, it is difficult to overlook the contradictions from the secretary general regarding the payments received by his son. Even more troubling than the role of Kojo Annan, though, is that of Under Secretary Sevan. He constantly urged the U.N. to remove limits on the sale of Iraqi oil at a time when Saddam, Rosett wrote, was selling it at below-market prices to handpicked customers, including the French and the Russians, who could then resell the oil to third parties at fat profits, part of which they returned to Saddam. When this was made public in the press, the U.N. haggled with Saddam but did not stop dealing with him. There was no investigation, and Sevan sidestepped questions about Iraq's demands for kickbacks by telling complainants to submit formal documents to the U.N. Security Council.
By 2002, it was no longer possible to believe that the U.N. remained unaware of Saddam's systematic violations. But Sevan said he had no authority to stop them. In May 2002, the U.N. Security Council passed a new resolution "cutting itself out of the loop on oil-for-food contracts deemed humanitarian," as Rosett put it, transferring responsibility for such contracts to Secretary General Annan and his staff. What happened? Kofi Annan promptly approved items that had nothing to do with food and medicine but a whole lot to do with propping up Saddam. There was the $20 million Annan approved to pay for an Olympic sports city, and an additional $50 million to support Saddam's propaganda-mad Ministry of Information. At no time did Annan reveal the commercial interests of key parties in continuing the oil-for-food program, nor was mention made of the fact that France and Russia were reaping fat profits on the Iraqi oil sales. Indeed, at the very time the Security Council was debating how to respond to Iraq's repeated violation of 16 U.N. resolutions, French legislators were promising Saddam's government that France would veto any Security Council effort to authorize military action against Iraq.
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