Failure at the U.N.

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The New York Sun

“The U.N. has failed,” a former speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, told the World Jewish Congress Friday, summing up Turtle Bay’s current state while Ambassador John Bolton and the U.N. chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, all but nodded in agreement.


Mr. Gingrich’s harsh statement, which even the most adamant Turtle Bay supporters would find hard to dispute these days, comes just a few years after the habitually behind-the-times members of the Nobel Prize committee handed a peace prize to the United Nations and its leader, Secretary-General Annan.


Now Turtle Bay bigwigs highlight the failure to deliver a “San Francisco moment” of unity, comparable to the 1945 U.N. founding, at next week’s summit of more than 170 heads of states, the largest such gathering in history. They seem to hope that the summit’s almost inevitable failure will obscure the bad news on Mr. Annan’s close circles that came out in last week’s Volcker report.


Two pieces of hard evidence – memos written by the principles at the time the abuses took place – were discarded by Paul Volcker, who heads the committee investigating the U.N. oil-for-food scandal. Both had to do with Kojo Annan’s using “my people in New York,” as he called his father’s closest aides, in his attempts to secure a U.N. contract for his employer, Cotecna, and to cheat Ghana of taxes. Unlike in the courts, where contemporaneous documentation tends to trump denials made by the accused, Mr. Volcker discarded the documents and believed denials that recalled Groucho Marx’s famous line: “Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?”


But the Volcker committee may not have the last word, as U.N. advocates insist. The federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York is still investigating, and so is Congress.


One of Mr. Annan’s American critics, Senator Coleman, a Republican of Minnesota, told reporters Friday that he would “extend an invitation” to Mr. Volcker, asking him to appear before his senatorial permanent subcommittee on investigations. But Mr. Volcker told me a day earlier that if I thought he would forgo diplomatic privileges and immunities to appear before Congress, I “should get my head examined.”


Mr. Volcker has “a good sense of humor,” Rep. Henry Hyde, a Republican of Illinois, said when I relayed that conversation to him. “He is a citizen,” Mr. Hyde said of Mr. Volcker. “I have no immunities and no privileges.” He added that he does not intend to issue a subpoena to Mr. Volcker. As Ambassador Bolton later said, “Where Congress has a strong interest, Congress often has a way of getting the information.”


Oil for food aside, what has the United Nations been up to lately?


In his address to the WJC, Mr. Malloch Brown rightly highlighted a recent Turtle Bay success: Lebanon. America and France united to end the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and their leadership paid off with the pullout by Syrian troops. The Lebanese people also rose to the occasion, but the United Nations deserves kudos for its role in shaping a future for the land of cedars.


Mr. Annan’s special representative, Terje Roed Larsen, is doing a yeoman diplomatic job: Russia has stymied the U.N. Security Council, so last week Mr. Roed Larsen quietly visited Moscow, pushing and prodding Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The tough-as-nails German investigator Detlev Mehlis has put on guard Damascus fear mongers and their Lebanese henchmen, and is getting closer to fingering the culprit in the assassination of Rafik Hariri. Together, the two U.N. envoys might help in turning the February car bombing that killed the former Lebanese prime minister into a moment that changes the direction of Middle East politics.


But why are there so few Larsens and Mehlises at Turtle Bay? Not being cited for corruption in last week’s Volcker report or in press, congressional, and criminal probes is a mark of excellence for mostly mediocre officials here who were appointed according to their bureaucratic survival skills. Mr. Annan has presided over an environment in which nepotism and corruption are the rule, and where excellence in diplomacy is the rare exception.


Mr. Coleman, a longtime advocate of Mr. Annan’s resignation, said on Friday that he does not believe that the secretary-general is corrupt, but is “an incompetent administrator.” In the corporate world, any such chief executive would be fired, he said. Last week, Mr. Annan said that describing him as the U.N.’s CEO is “simplistic.” That is perhaps the reason that calls for his resignation will only intensify.


The New York Sun

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