Oil-for-food is just the tip of the iceberg

September 08, 2005
National Post
Original Source: http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/editorialsletters/story.html?id=ac14f3ed-2c33-4c38-8273-34e18c565543
The fourth and final report of the Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) on corruption and mismanagement in the United Nations' oil-for-food program was released yesterday. The so-called Volcker commission (named after its chairman, Paul Volcker, former head of the United States Federal Reserve bank) is a scathing condemnation of the UN from top to bottom.
The 860-page, four-volume document portrays an organization that suffers from endemic corruption and lacks both the expertise to run large-scale operations and the backbone to face down brutal dictators. The report concludes that as a result of oil-for-food, serious questions have emerged about the United Nations' ability to live up to its ideals. Based on the information contained therein, that seems almost an understatement.
Although the IIC holds out hope that the UN can be reformed, its investigations revealed an institution infused with cronyism, political correctness and egotism, where incompetence, corruption and gross mismanagement are rewarded rather than punished. The pervasive administrative difficulties exposed by the UN's outrageous mishandling of oil-for-food, the report states, were not only, or even primarily, related to personal malfeasance -- more an indictment than a saving grace, since it indicated that the UN's problems go way beyond a few bad-apple administrators too clueless or too criminally co-opted to halt the massive corruption in the largest humanitarian program in history.
From 1996 through 2002, oil-for-food permitted Iraq to sell oil worth US$64-billion. During the same period, it bought just US$37-billion in food, medicines and other humanitarian essentials. The remaining US$28-billion disappeared into Saddam's palaces, Iraq's conventional weapons purchases, the pockets of corrupt officials inside both Iraq and the UN and the numbered accounts of shady operators worldwide.
The Security Council knew about the pervasive violations of its economic and military sanctions by Iraq, according to the IIC. Yet the UN's senior assembly did nothing to stop the rule-breaking because the majority of council members viewed the restrictions as an American-British plot to keep Saddam down -- despite the majority of the council having voted to impose them on Iraq following the first Gulf War in 1991.
There is much more. The Secretary-General's office warred with the Security Council over who was in charge of the program, which in the end meant no one had an adequate handle on contract-awarding or accounting. UN bureaucrats with underwhelming executive skills were easy marks for corrupt Iraqi officials or for international operators who saw an opportunity for fast money. Too much attention was paid to ensuring diversity in race and homeland among oil-for-food senior managers, and too little to whether any of them had the skills-sets to handle their tasks.
The problems with oil-for-food are all too common in most UN projects. It is only because of the enormous scale of the program that the body's everyday shortcomings were placed in the spotlight.
Next week, world leaders will gather at UN headquarters to discuss reform. Unfortunately, their template will be Secretary-General Kofi Annan's anemic template, which fails to address the fundamental problem plaguing the UN -- the dysfunctional administrative and social cultures laid bare by the Volcker commission.
The new American ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, has begun to confront that culture. Certain that the UN will approve as its first reform a multi-billion-dollar renovation of its New York site and leave other, crucial reforms until later, Mr. Bolton has suggested a test of the organization's sincerity: Hold off on the head offices' refit until after other major recommendations have been implemented.
Not surprisingly, his idea has been met with little enthusiasm. And his other proposal -- to have the reform resolutions drafted in plain language so real-world people can understand them, rather than getting by on flowery words that mean next to nothing -- has also encountered resistance.
It is far from a sure thing that the UN can be saved from itself. But if it is to have a fighting chance, it will need to spend more time on John Bolton's recommendations and less on Kofi Annan's.