A devil's brew at the U.N.
Knaves or fools. After Saddam's government was finally toppled, the oil-for-food contracts had to be turned over to the new Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, and officials in the U.N.'s New York office began frantically editing them to expunge evidence of skimming and graft. This could mean only that at least some U.N. staff had known exactly what was going on with the contracts. Yet, in November 2002, incredibly, Benon Sevan praised oil-for-food as "one of the most efficient U.N. programs." Kofi Annan chimed in, offering praise to staffers who administered the program and "particularly to its executive director," Sevan--the same person who had delayed the turnover of the oil-for-food contracts to the Coalition Provisional Authority so that they could be "edited."
This, by any standard, is a sorry bill of particulars. Rosett, who first alerted the public to the bribery and graft in the oil-for-food program, wrote that the U.N. was peopled by either knaves or fools. It was about this time, unsurprisingly, that Sevan stopped giving interviews and headed into retirement. Kofi Annan has since been forced to bow to demands for an independent inquiry, recognizing the perception these transactions created and acknowledging, after his son's employment at Cotecna was revealed, the possibility that there had been "a lot of wrongdoing."
Kofi Annan cannot be held responsible for the activities of his son. He can, and should, be held responsible for the failures of the U.N. bureaucracy and for not having made a more diligent attempt to unearth and publicize what was going on, especially with regard to theactivities of Sevan and the Cotecna contract. Quiet mismanagement and grave negligence have put the U.N. under a moral cloud.
The secretary general has appointed former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to investigate all these matters, and he can be trusted to be thorough and forthright. It will be tragic if Volcker concludes that the U.N. has sustained and protected a tyrant at the expense of the very people the U.N. is in business to protect. It will be a disgrace if payments to U.N. officials led them to avert their eyes from the abuses in the oil-for-food program. It will be an outrage if he finds that the payments enabled Saddam to fund insurgents and other terrorists in the region. And it will be a grievous moment for Kofi Annan to find his efforts to reform the U.N. now overshadowed by scandal. One cannot sup with the devil without a very long spoon.
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