Coleman continues crusade to reform U.N.
POLITICS: The senator's oil-for-food investigation has led to a bill that proposes large-scale changes.
BY CHARLES HOMANS
ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS
Monday August 1, 2005
WASHINGTON - Eight months after he called for United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's resignation, Sen. Norm Coleman's U.N. crusade is at a turning point. If the Minnesota Republican is successful, what was originally a Coleman-led investigation into abuses of the oil-for-food program that the U.N. maintained in Iraq from 1996 to 2003 will become something more concrete: a platform for serious reform at the international organization.
``The ideas I've had are already on the table -- I've discussed them with folks at the U.N., I've discussed them with State Department, and I've discussed them with (Bush's U.N. Ambassador nominee) John Bolton,'' Coleman said Thursday.
Coleman's reform measures will face considerable competition, however, both from elsewhere on Capitol Hill and from the U.N. itself, which will convene a summit on institutional reform in September. What happens will determine whether Coleman's oil-for-food investigation -- the signature issue of his first term in office and one that has garnered him ink and airtime rarely lavished on a freshman senator -- will lead to a more lasting legacy.
Since the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Coleman, began its investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food program in early 2004, it has scored some impressive findings. Earlier this summer, the committee presented evidence that French and British government officials had received multimillion-barrel oil allocations from Saddam Hussein's government, as did several Russian politicians and government officials.
In January 2003, not quite two weeks into his first term as a senator from Minnesota, Norm Coleman was made the chairman of the investigations subcommittee, a coup for the freshman lawmaker. Starting in early 2004, Coleman turned his resources on the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, which the Government Accountability Office reported in March of that year to be rife with abuses and corruption, by everyone from Saddam Hussein to American oil companies to U.N. officials.
With a single-minded focus that reminded supporters of Sam Spade and detractors of Captain Ahab, Coleman and his subcommittee staff spent the next 17 months hauling out one damning and high-profile report after another about the scope of the alleged abuses of the program.
But making news is one thing, and making real changes to the U.N. is another. To that end, Coleman and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., introduced legislation in July that would use the Minnesota senator's investigative work as the basis for significant reforms. The bill would call on the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. to seek a spate of institutional changes, not only in the management of future programs like oil-for-food but also in the organization's financial oversight and human rights monitoring. It also would give President Bush the ability to withhold half of the United States' U.N. dues if the reforms aren't implemented.
Haranguing the U.N. has been a pastime of Capitol Hill. Withholding dues and threatening to do so has been the source of much bad blood between Congress and the U.N. since the first proposal to do so surfaced on Capitol Hill in 1985. The tactic has a spotty track record at best -- the U.S.'s greatest successes in influencing reform at the U.N. historically have come at times when the nation was up-to-date on its payments to the organization.
But there are signs that the latest effort may be more productive. For one, many of the reforms that Coleman is seeking are also a priority for U.N. officials themselves, many of whom were deeply disturbed by the oil-for-food scandal.
``There were a number of big people in the U.N. who were badly shaken by the oil-for-food scandal,'' said Ann Florini, a senior fellow who studies the U.N. at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. ``What it did was reveal a lot of weaknesses in how the system was operated.''
Although spokespeople for the U.N. have declined to comment on the record about the specific recommendations of the bill, some U.N. officials have indicated that they consider much of Coleman and Lugar's legislation to be constructive, if redundant in light of the reforms the organization has undertaken of its own accord. The legislation also has gotten high marks from State Department officials, who are generally leery of congressional efforts to micromanage their U.N. dealings.
Bush administration and U.N. officials also consider the Coleman-Lugar legislation to be more workable than the version of the U.N. reform bill, sponsored by Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., that passed the House in June. The senators' proposed legislation recommends tweaks to the U.N.'s management structure and allows -- rather than mandates -- withholding U.S. dues if necessary. Hyde's bill, in contrast, contains a long list of desired policy changes, and would require the president to withhold U.S. dues to the organization if such changes weren't made.
If Coleman wants his stamp on the U.N. reform process that will begin in September, however, he may have to shout to be heard. The number of investigations into the oil-for-food scandal has considerably expanded and now includes five committees in the House of Representatives.
``With oil-for-food, there are so many different efforts under way in Washington, it's hard to tell where one ends and another begins,'' said Edward C. Luck, director of the United Nations studies program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, who has followed reform efforts at the U.N. for 35 years.
But if one aspect of Coleman's crusade remains unique, it's his continued insistence that, for true reform to happen at the U.N., Annan must resign. More than half a year after first calling for the world leader's head, Coleman remains adamant on the matter, and compares Annan to the CEO of a company that has been convicted of financial wrongdoing.
Critics say such a comparison is not fitting and shows a lack of understanding of the U.N. as an institution. But Coleman defends his call for Annan's resignation.
``I think it's impossible after (the scandal) for this administration -- not just Kofi, but Kofi's administration -- to be able to implement reform,'' he said. ``Nobody would think Ken Lay would be able to reform Enron. He had to go.''