A Poor Line of Defense At the United Nations
BY BENNY AVNI
February 7, 2005
Some American foreign-policy thinkers are horrified at President Bush's preference for mission-specific coalitions of the willing over permanent, globe-encompassing institutions. Senator under my plan Kerry's election pitch, for example, was to turn most of Iraq's problems over to the United Nations.
Paul Volcker's findings last week were bad news for those who hope the pendulum in Washington will one day swing back to Turtle Bay's side. Moreover, the line of defense taken by Secretary-General Annan's aides, once they stopped mimicking Casablanca Claude Rains's I'm shocked, shocked routine, was self-defeating.
Chief-of-Staff Mark Malloch Brown, considered the brightest star on the U.N.'s horizon, stressed that illegal oil smuggling enriched Saddam Hussein much more than the bribes and corruption under the legal, U.N.-run oil-for-food program. Smuggling was winked at and ignored by member states because of national interests. In the future, Mr. Malloch Brown said, member states should back off and let a politics-free U.N. secretariat do its job properly.
Here is the story:
In the mid-1990s, Saddam discovered a great tool in his war against the West. Parading sick and hungry Iraqis in front of willing TV cameras, he shamed the world over sanctions. An image-conscious Clinton administration decided to solve that problem by dumping it in the U.N.'s lap.
In 1996, Washington agreed to a U.N. scheme hatched under Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to allow Iraq to sell oil and deposit the proceeds in a U.N.-supervised bank account. The money would allow Iraq to purchase necessities like food and medicine.
The day-to-day operation of the program was turned over to the secretariat. Under Mr. Boutros-Ghali's successor, Mr. Annan, the oil-for-food program mushroomed over seven years into a behemoth that managed $64 billion in oil revenues. The operation was supposed to be supervised by members of the Security Council through what was known as the 661 Committee, named after the council's sanctions resolution.
It was at that forum, U.N. advocates say, that member states catered to their national interests and allowed most of the transgressions in the oil-for-food program to occur. America, for instance, allowed smuggling of Iraqi oil through its allies, Jordan and Turkey.
Decisions are hard to come by at the Security Council because each of its five most powerful members have veto power and their interests need to be balanced out. Just imagine how much harder it was at the 661 Committee, where every decision had to be approved by all 15 members, effectively giving each of them veto power.
Stopping the shenanigans in the oil-for-food program was almost impossible. Whenever questions were raised about, say, a Moscow-based contractor, the Russian representative would threaten to reopen other issues, rendering any supervision useless. When Britain wanted to shut Saddam's oil smuggling through Syria, America was concerned about its agreements with Jordan and Turkey. Everybody soon gave up, and America and Britain concentrated only on suspected weapons related items disguised as humanitarian goods.
Aside from allowing oil smuggling to continue, this mutually assured veto threat was responsible for the below market oil pricing that created the margins Saddam used to allot oil allocations as bribes to politicians and U.N. officials. The interest of the bribed was to preserve this mechanism. Rather than the politics of member states, what allowed all of this, in other words, was a U.N.-peculiar environment where the lowest common denominator is king.
Note also an observation by the representative of the people who, (against their wishes, incidentally), finance the Volcker investigation. The brilliant Iraqi U.N. ambassador, Samir Sumaidaie, on Friday accused the secretariat under Mr.Boutros-Ghali, whose background as an Egyptian Nasserite pan-Arabist resembles Iraqi Baathists, of a possible political motivation to aid Saddam's regime - not to mention a possible financial interest to enrich his family.
Over the weekend, a lawyer for Tariq Aziz told the news agency AFP in Baghdad that the former Saddam right-hand man was contacted by the Volcker team and that he is ready to cooperate and name names, as long as he could go outside of Iraq to do so (France, anyone?) Mr. Sumaidaie said in his Friday press conference, however, that Iraqi investigators are uncovering a lot of information on their own, and that Mr. Volcker's revelations are only the tip of the iceberg.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press quoted Mr. Volcker, who said that his investigators are poring over Mr. Annan's documents, e-mails, and phone records in an attempt to document how the Swiss-based shipping inspection company Cotecna, which had his son Kojo on its payroll, secured a contract under the oil-for-food program. Late information, Mr. Volcker told the AP, was the reason Cotecna and Kojo Annan were not even mentioned in his interim report. There were things that came along that threw us back, he said.
Those allegations will be further explored by the committee and most likely in American and Iraqi courts as well. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is reportedly exploring indictments against U.N. officials named in Mr. Volcker's report.
What is clear is that the U.N. secretariat - any secretariat - is far from the ideal of politics-free group of competent and incorruptible technocrats portrayed by Mr. Malloch-Brown.
But even if they were, the U.N. is essentially a creature of its member states. Rather than a lesson to back off, last week's findings should make any American administration think very hard before turning even the most marginal global task to the U.N. and its related institutions.
Mr. Avni covers the United Nations for The New York Sun.