UN forced to confront painful truths

By Mark Turner 
October 28, 2005 
Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f885d1d4-474e-11da-b8e5-00000e2511c8.html

The final Volcker report closes a chapter in one of the most painful sagas in recent United Nations history, with its managerial elite placed under unprecedented scrutiny and its reputation under extraordinary strain.
When Iraq's Al-Mada newspaper in January 2004 first published a list of alleged secret oil voucher recipients, unveiling a widespread scheme by Saddam Hussein to buy influence and raise illicit revenues, many dismissed it as a forgery propagated by rightwing UN critics.
But as suspicions turned to allegations and then became facts, shocked UN officials have had to question the most basic assumptions about their organisation and how its ideals are put into practice.
Violations occurred shortly after the oil-for-food programme was launched in 1997 to alleviate the effect of UN sanctions and continued right up to when the scheme ended with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The UN secretariat hopes yesterday's findings, which switch the focus towards the actions of more than 2,000 companies in 66 countries, will finally place its role in a broader context.
While some of its most senior officials and their associates were tested and found wanting, they played only one part in a hugely complex theatre between dictators, traders, financiers, politicians and government officials around the world.
The names of Benon Sevan, the UN official who ran the oil-for-food programme, and Kojo Annan, the secretary-general's son, made headlines around the world in previous findings by the Volcker commission.
But alongside them stands a cast of less-publicised Russian, Italian, and French officials and politicians, American businessmen, Swiss bankers, Middle Eastern traders, and others. Never before has the shadowy world of oil traders and the politicians they court faced such public scrutiny.
The UN's own trials are not over either. National investigations, including by the US attorney for the southern district of New York, continue to examine whether UN officials have committed criminal acts in their jurisdiction. More revelations are likely to emerge. Those probes have uncovered mounting evidence of widespread wrongdoing in the UN procurement department, which services peacekeeping operations.
Meanwhile, the UN has embarked upon a significant internal reform process, bringing in a new top-level team and appealing to the General Assembly to reduce its political interference in UN work, in return for tighter scrutiny of theworld body's record on the ground.
Many smaller countries in the General Assembly, however, are loath to sacrifice that political control, setting the stage for a power struggle over coming months.
More broadly, the oil-for-food scandal has prompted a serious rethink of one of the UN's most important levers of influence, international sanctions.
Mark Malloch Brown, the UN chief of staff, says that Iraq's oil-for-food programme was a half-baked sanction system. How else was Saddam going to run his country without manipulating oil sales, he asks. Given the demand for oil, it was almost inevitable thatshortcuts would would be taken.
How, next time, do you get a more logical regime for sanctions and tougher enforcement mechanisms? he asks.