Go Ahead, Make Our Day

If Kofi Annan keeps his job, the upside is that we are going to learn a lot more about what ails the United Nations. Secretary-General Annan may not be the only cause of the secretive and self-serving U.N. system that produced the huge oil-for-food scandal, which has now led to calls for his resignation. But Mr. Annan has run the U.N. Secretariat for almost eight years now, and his handling of the top job is an excellent guide to the U.N.’s ills.For starters, the longer Mr. Annan stays, the more we may learn about the culture of privilege that pervades the upper reaches of the U.N. This is pretty well summed up by the arrogance of a secretary-general who has not yet had the grace to apologize for enabling Saddam Hussein’s embezzlement of more than $17 billion in oil money meant to aid sick and hungry Iraqis. Those stolen funds, their theft abetted by Mr. Annan’s personal signature of approval on every phase of the 1996-2003 oil-for-food program, including his oversight of Iraq’s oil production, helped fortify Saddam’s regime. This grand scam set the scene for war, and may be funding terrorists today.But to judge by Mr. Annan’s statements, he thinks the chief victim here is none other than the U.N., and, in particular, himself. Instead of coming clean on the disastrous design and administration of oil-for-food, Mr. Annan has devoted his energies to deflecting all criticism and protesting what he calls a “campaign” against the U.N. Last Friday, at a black-tie awards dinner of the U.N. Correspondents Association, Mr. Annan made light of the scandals swirling around his office, joking that “Tonight I have resigned myself…to having a good time.”Funny. But while Mr. Annan is getting a laugh, millions are still suffering the effects of what was either U.N. gross incompetence or corruption, or maybe some of each, under Mr. Annan’s management. There weren’t a lot of good times for Iraqis receiving their dole of expired medicines, rotten rations, and Baathist brutality under the protracted tyranny of a Saddam rescued from collapse in the late 1990s by oil-for-food. There are no more good times for the Iraqis and Coalition soldiers killed with weapons very likely bought with money grafted out of oil-for-food. There are no more good times for the Israelis murdered by Palestinian suicide bombers whose families got paid by Saddam under cover of oil-for-food.Senator Coleman is correct in warning that if Mr. Annan stays on as secretary-general until his term expires in late 2006, he may hinder the full investigation of oil-for-food. Mr. Annan did more to shape the program during its final, most corrupt years than anyone on the planet except perhaps Saddam. Mr. Annan in 1997 consolidated oil-for-food into an entrenched U.N. department, reporting to him. Mr. Annan picked the director, Benon Sevan (alleged to have taken bribes, which he has denied). Mr. Annan for each new six-month phase urged the Security Council to continue the program, personally signed off on Saddam’s distribution plans, and periodically pushed to expand the program. Mr. Annan, in mid-2002, took over direct responsibility, bypassing the Security Council, for all staple humanitarian goods shipped into Iraq. Mr. Annan, who kept the records, and received the internal audits, cast over the entire program a veil of secrecy that he has kept in place to this day, refusing to disclose details of Saddam’s deals or release the internal audits even to Congress.And Mr. Annan was the man with the fat budget to oversee oil-for-food. During the life of the program, Mr. Annan’s secretariat collected a 2.2% cut of all Saddam’s oil sales, amounting to $1.4 billion to cover the U.N.’s own administrative costs in supervising relief under Saddam. Evidently, Mr.Annan had enough direct control over that administrative budget so that this October he decided to use its residual holdings as a slush fund, allocating $30 million of the money left over from running oil-for-food to pay for the U.N.-authorized inquiry, led by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, into allegations of the U.N.’s own mismanagement and abuse of oil-for-food. This decision was described to me as “normal,” in an e-mail this October from one of Mr. Annan’s spokesmen, who wrote: “Like any audit or internal investigation, it is normal that this investigation be paid out of the programme’s administrative costs.”In other words, it is apparently considered normal by now at the U.N. to include in a relief program’s budget the cost of an ensuing inquiry into allegations of massive graft and incompetence in the program.Mr. Annan did not necessarily invent such U.N. definitions of “normal,” and he did not create the long-standing habits of U.N. privilege and secrecy that have so corroded the institution. But he has without question employed this system to the full, first in grossly mismanaging oil-for-food, then in trying to deny, evade, and cover it up. And with some 10 investigations now in play, the longer Mr. Annan stays, the more reasons will emerge for the public, especially American taxpayers, who fund almost a quarter of Mr. Annan’s salary and operational budget, to ask what exactly is this U.N. version of “normal,” which they are paying for.We are going to learn more about the U.N.’s oblivious approach to gross conflicts of interest. This goes well beyond the failure by Mr. Annan to disclose, or by his account even notice, that his own son, Kojo Annan, was receiving money for years from a big U.N. oil-for-food contractor, Cotecna Inspection Services, SA.On a broader scale, we are going to learn more about Mr. Annan’s failure to alert the public to Saddam’s influence-buying within the Security Council. We may even learn more about the cozy networks and decadent customs that have developed at the U.N. over the decades, including those, for example, that last year brought us Libya chairing the U.N. Human Rights Commission. We may even learn enough to get some handle on how to actually go about reforming the U.N.It’s unlikely, of course, that Mr. Annan will resign. He has immunity, U.N. secrecy, his own sense of aggrieved victim hood, and a lot of Saddam’s former favored business partners in his corner. The silver lining is that scandal surrounding Mr. Annan has opened a window on the U.N. that offers a terrific chance to clean up the rot within the entire institution. So, speaking as one of those who think an honest U.N. is worth campaigning for, I’d say, Kofi, keep your job. Make our day.Ms. Rosett is a journalist in residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Go Ahead, Make Our Day

Go Ahead, Make Our Day

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