Kofi Annan Can Beat The U.N. Blues
BY BENNY AVNI
March 28, 2005

Kofi Annan, said to be depressed by unnamed sources quoted in London's Sunday Times and the Australian this weekend, will find it hard to beat his blues and positively influence the United Nations as long as he does not break away from advisers such as Iqbal Riza.
Mr. Riza is an architect of - and a product of - a secretive, unaccountable mindset at Turtle Bay, marked by a web of smarmy friendships and business associations. Mr. Annan claims to be rooting out this culture as part of his vast reform program. But is he? The more changes are announced at the U.N., the more the organization remains the same.
The Volcker report, which is expected to be released tomorrow, will accuse Mr. Annan of management lapses and an inability to fix systematic failures in the oil-for-food program, according to the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Annan's defenders are likely to lay blame with his son Kojo Annan. And they will remind us of last week's reform report and the radical measures that Mr. Annan has already taken to overhaul the system.
These measures, they are sure to posit, demonstrate that Mr. Annan is aware of the depth and breadth of the U.N.'s problems. Depressed or not, he is hard at work revitalizing the organization he leads. For example, last December Mr. Annan pushed out his longtime chief of staff and friend, the Pakistani Mr. Riza, and, in a bold management shift, brought in the Briton Mark Malloch Brown, hailed for his ability to weed out corruption and his press-relations skills.
The official announcement of Mr. Riza's departure from one of the most powerful positions at Turtle Bay stated that at the age of 70, he felt it was time to retire. But at the U.N., retirement does not necessarily mean fishing with the grandchildren. As one staff member said, a day after the announcement that age finally got the better of Mr. Riza, he miraculously became young again.
Spokesman Fred Eckhard confirmed last week that Mr. Riza is still at work. He joined a team that promotes something called dialogue among civilizations, a program launched with much fanfare by Iranian President Khatami in the late 1990s. Mr.Riza has fallen into one of those Turtle Bay black holes where officials get paid for rendering services useful to no one and can continue to exert influence over Mr. Annan.
Until this month Mr. Riza also continued to receive a full salary of an undersecretary-general. On March 1, he joined the ever-growing ranks of advisers and former officials who receive a symbolic annual salary of $1. No official numbers of those who are employed under such contracts - allowing them to remain in America and enjoy diplomatic immunity - is publicly available. I am told that, like oil-for-food, the arrangement was born in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.
Ismat Kittani, who passed away in 2001, was a veteran of Iraqi diplomacy and a longtime U.N. ambassador for Saddam Hussein's regime. Kittani had also served as the president of the General Assembly in 1981-82. He was a retiree in Baghdad when Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali called on him to be his special adviser - on a $1 salary - drawing on his connections with Saddam at the crucial time when the oil-for-food scheme began to take shape.
Last week, the U.N. admitted it had agreed to cover the legal fees of Benon Sevan, another veteran of that era who eventually headed the oil-for-food program. Mr. Sevan is also still on the books with a $1 a year salary. Last week, Mr. Malloch Brown attributed to Mr. Riza the decision to add legal fees to that payment, much to the professed discomfort of the former.
When the story first broke, reporters demanded proof that it was not hush money, intended to ensure that an angry Mr. Sevan would not rat out former colleagues. The U.N. strongly denied that interpretation. But it could not dispel the impression that Mr. Annan's reform ideas, described only last week as bold and far reaching, are simply cosmetic. After all, the man the U.N. itself now disowns is having his expenses paid by the same fund he was accused of misusing.
Reading some of the findings leaked from tomorrow's Volcker report, depression and other inner demons seem the least of Mr. Annan's problems. As the Riza affair demonstrates, he is but a prisoner of a U.N. culture he has grown in, cultivated, and cannot escape - let alone reform.