Fixing the UN

September 13, 2005
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2005/09/13/fixing_the_un/

THE PAINSTAKING report on the United Nations Oil for Food program in Iraq issued by the independent committee headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker should not be viewed simply as a negative verdict on the leadership of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The report's true value lies in its unsparing portrait of the UN as an organization riddled with structural flaws and desperately in need of reform.
The report does chastise Annan for blatant failures as an administrator, but the portion of the report presented Wednesday to the Security Council found no evidence he knew about the role of his son in procuring a UN contract for the Swiss firm, Cotecna, to monitor sales of humanitarian goods to Saddam Hussein's regime. Even though the committee found that Kojo Annan lied to investigators when he denied involvement in obtaining the Cotecna contract -- and that his father initially lied when he denied meeting with Cotecna's chairman -- these ethical lapses are sidelights to the principal causes of corruption and mismanagement in the UN's Oil for Food program.
The Volcker commission's central critique is of ''a pervasive culture resistant to accountability and prone to escaping responsibility. From this culture flowed the weaknesses that made possible the egregious corruption of the Oil for Food program. These weaknesses included ''a grievous absence of effective controls and audits, insufficient planning, inadequate funding and manpower, and ''a palpable absence of authority and clear, if any, reporting lines, especially to the Secretariat's senior management.
As a consequence of these managerial defects, Saddam Hussein was able to rake in billions of dollars from surcharges on sales of Iraqi oil and from kickbacks extorted from the companies that were authorized to sell humanitarian goods to Iraq. And the dictator was able to bribe UN officials and other influential figures from several countries with cut-rate oil contracts.
Two of the report's reform recommendations deserve particular attention during this week's UN summit meeting in New York: creation of the post of a chief operating officer for the UN and a new Independent Oversight Board. Both these reforms are badly needed. The world body and its secretary general will both benefit if the duties of the UN's political leader are separated from those of its chief administrator. A board of independent auditors and overseers is necessary to cauterize the UN's culture of cronyism and unaccountability.
Therapeutic as these reforms may be, they cannot be expected to obviate the need for political wisdom in the man or woman who becomes Annan's successor. After all, if Annan had not struck a deal with Saddam allowing the despot to choose the buyers of Iraq's oil and the sellers of humanitarian goods to Iraq, there would have been no Oil for Food scandal to investigate.