U.N.'s 'Disgrace' Worsens: Investigation Shows Bureaucracy Disintegrating Stewart Stogel March 31, 2004 NewsMax.com http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/3/31/144759.shtml UNITED NATIONS – There is no accountability. It is a disgrace, a senior U.N. official confided to NewsMax.com. The official, a U.N. veteran of more than 25 years, insisted on confidentiality. NewsMax verified that the official has one of the organization's highest level of clearances and is permitted access to numerous sen sitive files. In the coming weeks, we will report details about a bureaucracy run amok. A summary of some of the U.N.'s irregularities: ·ð 1. The Iraq oil-for-food program, beset by charges of massive embezzlement, resisted repeated warnings about p roblems that might arise from the approval of certain contracts. Under rules governing the program, contracts that contained products with a possible military use needed the Security Council's approval. Other nonmilitary contracts that exceeded a set value also needed approval. The U.N. official tells NewsMax that the director of the U.N.'s Iraq aid program, Benon Sevan, on several occasions took contracts whose value exceeded the set figure and split them to come under the cutoff line for the Security Council's approval. Sevan was repeatedly warned by staffers to have an independent, outside auditor review the contracts. He refused. Published reports claim that as much as $10 billion might have been siphoned from the aid program. ·ð 2. Security at th e U.N.'s operations center in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), is so poor that it is likely to become the target of a terrorist attack. The DRC is in the midst of a bloody civil war the U.N. is trying to mediate. More than 600 personnel are said to work in the U.N. center, which is fairly small with cramped workspace. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been reluctant to approve the expenditures needed to improve the security situation. This comes as Annan and his staff were severely criticized in a recently completed investigation into the bombing of the U.N.'s Baghdad headquarters last August. That attack, the worst in U.N. history, left 22 killed and 150 wounded. ·ð 3. In an effort to contain costs, the United Nations often moves its relief personnel around the world in substandard aircraft. The planes are frequently old Soviet-built military transports, without seats and commonly overloaded. What U.N. personnel are not told is that insurance companies refuse to cover such transportation. U.N. staffers and contract employees can and have found themselves injured or killed with little or no benefits, other than that which the world organization might elect to offer. ·ð 4. U.N. aid operations are victims of embezzlement to a greater degree than commonly reported. More than $8 million has gone missing from operations in Angola. More than $3.5 million disappeared from the U.N. center in Mogadishu, Somalia. More than $ 20 million disappeared from the U.N.'s Cambodia relief effort. $10 million disappeared from a UNICEF operation in Nairobi, Kenya. This in addition to the $10 billion that might have been skimmed from the Iraqi aid program. ·ð 5. Recently, the French att orney-general complained to the Paris daily Le Monde that U.N. headquarters was impeding his investigation into a 1994 plane crash that killed the leaders of the African nations of Rwanda and Burundi. The official said a cockpit voice recorder recovered near the site of the crash was sent to the U.N. in New York for analysis and then disappeared. At first, Annan denied any knowledge of a black box. At the time he was a U.N. undersecretary-general in charge of peacekeeping. It was his department that was commissioned to launch an investigation. Last month, a flight recorder was indeed discovered in a locked file cabinet, where it apparently had been since 1994. The U.N. has cast doubt on whether the black box found was indeed the one from the 1994 crash. NewsMax has learned that despite denials, the voice recorder discovered was in fact the one from the 1994 crash. Annan not only knew of the recovery of the recorder in 1994, but ordered its tape analyzed. A French translator was retained for $25,000 to listen to the flight recorder. NewsMax was told that most of the conversation was no more than technical exchanges between the pilot and air traffic controllers. Annan, for reasons not made clear, asked for a second translation (French-English) of the tape. When a second French translator was not immediate available, Annan ordered a member of his staff, Denis Beissel, to put the voice recorder in a safe and secure place until a second translator became available. Apparently, the black box became forgotten until the French resurrected the issue in February. There is no accountability and as such things like this happen. Nobody wants to take responsibility, the U.N. official reluctantly admitted.