Release of Secret Documents Offers Look at Efforts To Stop Corruption

The New York Sun
June 23, 2005 
Claudia Rosett

A new window has opened into the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, with the release by congressional investigators of formerly secret U.S. documents chronicling some of the efforts by the American and British missions to the United Nations to stop corruption in the program over the indifference or even the active cooperation with Saddam Hussein's regime of Security Council members France, Russia, and China, and the U.N. Secretariat itself. 
Among congressional exhibits, aired at a hearing held Tuesday by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, is a series of cables raising questions involving oil-for-food dealings by the United Nations Development Program, a U.N. agency administered at the time by Secretary-General Annan's new chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown. Mr. Malloch Brown, who has run the UNDP since 1999, and still does, took on the additional staff duties this past January. He replaced Mr. Annan's longtime chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, one of whose final acts on the job was to spend more than seven months shredding U.N. documents from a crucial period. Mr. Riza has remained on staff with a salary of $1 a year, which allows him to retain his U.N. privileges and immunities. 
The U.S. documents now released by Congress involve questions raised quietly with the UNDP in 2001 by the American mission to the United Nations, regarding what one cable, dated May 30, 2002, described as allegations that representatives of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) were encouraging violations of the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program.
The cables, labeled at the time as releasable to the oil-for-food program and to UNDP senior officials, discuss allegations that a UNDP staffer, Michel Gautier, had tried to contravene American anti-terrorist restrictions on the export of a micro-computer system to Iraq. Neither the cables nor the other documents accuse Mr. Gautier of committing a crime, and efforts by The New York Sun to reach him were unsuccessful.
The cables recount allegations that the would-be contractor, Swedish firm ABB, had been told by Mr. Gautier that if ABB did not include the proscribed computer plus a 10% kickback fee to be collected by the Iraqi government, UNDP would not award the contract to ABB. The source of these allegations, whose name has been deleted from the declassified copy of the document, is described as directly charging the UNDP with deliberately requiring international companies to violate U.S. export regulations in order to be considered for lucrative contracts in Iraq.
A UNDP spokesman, William Orme, says these allegations never came to the attention of Mr. Malloch Brown and were in any event satisfactorily disposed of after U.S. Mission staffers relayed them to UNDP officials, who were satisfied with Mr. Gautier's explanation. The U.S. Mission cable traffic released by Congress concludes, somewhat inconclusively, that the U.S. Mission to the United Nations has succeeded in putting UNDP on notice not to deviate from authorized practice, especially with regard to contract applications for goods destined to Iraq.
Mr. Gautier is still working for the United Nations on Iraq, at the offices in Amman, Jordan, of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. U.N. policies of confidentiality make it difficult even to as certain such details as his nationality.
The documents released at Tuesday's hearing also chronicle an episode in which Mr. Annan's handpicked director of oil for food, Benon Sevan, is described in a cable dated October 4, 2002, as having acted not on behalf of the United Nations, but of the Iraqi government. This act, which took place just as debate was waxing hot at the U.N. Security Council over invading Iraq, involved items deemed high risk for possible diversion to military use, in this case, oil-field trucks. The cable recounts that since the Iraqi Ministry of Oil was seeking an impact evaluation - meaning an assessment of the cost of not receiving the equipment - oil for food's Executive Director Benon Sevan had decided to request such an evaluation, along with a petition to ask the Security Council's sanctions committee to reconsider.
The cable notes that Mr. Sevan should not have taken it upon himself to act at the behest of Saddam's regime.
Another document relays concerns about Saddam's shipping supplies to the Palestinians, although the oil-for-food program was advertised as allowing exceptions to U.N. sanctions solely to ensure the people of Iraq received relief. And yet another communication involves an e-mail describing Iraqi cheating on contracts ..., dated March 2, 2001.This e-mail refers to a gift-giving individual whose name has been struck out of the declassified document, which says that Iraq has been giving this nameless individual oil-for-food contracts, which he then sells to traders at a nice profit. The cable continues: He apparently just put up for sale a contract for 25,000 tons of rice. At current rice prices, he'll pocket about $625,000 from this contract alone.
In written testimony at Tuesday's hearing, the chief of staff to the U.S. Mission, Thomas Schweich, recounted yet another problem touched upon in these documents: that American protests about Saddam's oil smuggling through Syria were opposed by Syria itself - at the time, one of the rotating members of the Security Council, which oversaw sanctions on Iraq.
Such instances are just samples of the oil-for-food saga, as seen from close up. Repeatedly, America raised concerns about abuses, corruption, and U.N. collaboration with Saddam's regime. Repeatedly, in the climate of secrecy and consensus decision-making imposed by the United Nations, they were brushed aside or muffled by France, Russia, China, and the U.N. Secretariat. Above all, these documents highlight the perils of U.N. policies of secrecy, which enabled the corruption to go forward even as Security Council members wrestled over specific allegations. These documents raise questions as to why the American State Department failed to place this information in the public domain earlier.