March 31, 2005
Some Question Annan's Viability at U.N.
By WARREN HOGE 

UNITED NATIONS, March 30 - Secretary General Kofi Annan has left no doubt that he feels he should remain in charge despite new findings of failures in the oil-for-food program in Iraq. Hell, no, he responded emphatically when asked Tuesday if he might step down. 
But doubts were raised Wednesday after a mixed review on his stewardship from the commission investigating the program. Some people, including supporters of Mr. Annan, questioned whether the report, from a panel led by Paul A. Volcker, was the clear exoneration of him that Mr. Annan claimed it to be, and how effectively he could lead in his wounded state during the 21 months left in his tenure.
Of course Volcker himself didn't use that word, and Kofi Annan certainly wasn't exonerated in terms of managerial acumen, said Edward Luck, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former president of the United Nations Association of the United States of America. It was pretty disappointing reading for those of us who believe in the U.N.
The Volcker committee cleared Mr. Annan of using any influence in the awarding of an oil-for-food contract to the company that employed his son Kojo Annan, but it faulted him for conducting only a superficial inquiry into the company's relationship with the United Nations once conflict of interest concerns arose.
The report also accused Mr. Annan's longtime chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, of shredding three years of office files covering the period when the program was in place and a second aide, Dileep Nair, head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, for filling a high-level post in the program with someone who devoted virtually all his time to other matters.
Mr. Annan said that he accepted the panel's findings and that in his case they amounted to exoneration.
Disputing that, Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said, My sense is that the report cleared him of direct culpability in the oil-for-food scandal but leaves him guilty as charged for a number of types of inappropriate activity under his watch.
He said the conclusions should worry Mr. Annan, because while it explicitly said it did not find enough evidence to hold him culpable, it did not say it found enough evidence to exonerate him. 
The cloud that has been following him around may be slightly lighter, Mr. Kupchan said, but it is still there.
Susan E. Rice, a senior fellow for foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said: In a sense he moves forward with the thousand cuts he has sustained through the public process that has accompanied these accusations. But he has no mortal wounds, and as his comment yesterday suggested, he will be fighting back with a vengeance.
Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, on Tuesday reiterated his call on Mr. Annan to quit - one of many such calls to have come from Congress - saying the Volcker report further justified the need for Mr. Annan's resignation.
But David E. Birenbaum, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and a former deputy United States ambassador at the United Nations, said he thought Mr. Annan was secure in his job and suggested that the accumulation of scandals could prod the United Nations to intensify the pace of change.
I think he'll survive, because the member states want him to, including at this point the Bush administration, Mr. Birenbaum said. This is a time of real opportunity, and frankly one that all these crises heighten. It requires a secretary general who is committed to reform. Many secretaries general in the past have not been, and he is.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, said she thought the Volcker report was much less about Kofi Annan than about the culture of the U.N. 
Kofi Annan has already recognized that that has to change, she said, and the question of how damaged he is by this report turns on how much people are willing to focus on the needed fix as a result of the report and how much people want to point fingers and root around in the past. He is not going to get the U.S. on board playing anything like an active role unless the culture and the kinds of practices that allowed oil-for-food to happen is not addressed.
Mr. Annan has emphasized his commitment to reforming the United Nations and earlier this month proposed sweeping changes including the restructuring of the 15-nation Security Council and the scrapping of the Geneva-based Human Rights Commission, which has shamed the organization by allowing rights violators onto the panel. 
There have also been a number of departures of longtime Annan associates as Mark Malloch Brown, the new chief of staff, puts a more aggressive stamp on senior management.
But Mr. Luck said the changes that were being made did not adequately take on the management problems turned up by the oil-for-food scandal and in general seemed to have no rational purpose. Typical of the U.N. is that the reform proposals are as opaque as the scandal was, he said. We see people leaving, but we don't know why these things are being done.