Blame an American First 
By Benny Avni 
January 22, 2007
The New York Sun
Original Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/47118
The first clue that the U.N. Development Program in Pyongyang needs to be looked at came from someone in the American intelligence community, which is more interested in this dangerous weapons-proliferating corner of the axis of evil than in other far-flung countries where the United Nations's good offices operate, a source has told me.
On Friday, UNDP officials reacted with their typical defense: shooting in all directions. As a former American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, told me yesterday, They always blame an American first.
American-controlled agencies do it, too, UNDP officials said. Their board of directors, which includes America, approved it, they said. America wants them there but scapegoats them when they do what they need to do to stay, they said. And, yes, Mr. Bolton hates them, they said, and is trying to get back at a former deputy secretary-general, Mark Malloch Brown.
An American ambassador, Mark Wallace, started writing to the UNDP's associate administrator Ad Melkert in mid-November, as Mr. Bolton was already busily defending his seat against Senate detractors.
The UNDP has been funneling at least $2.3 million a year in cash, with little oversight. The benefactor was the Kim Jong Il regime, rather than the people of North Korea, Mr. Wallace wrote last week, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal's Melanie Kirkpatrick and Fox News's George Russell.
Nevertheless, several UNDP sources told me that this is all Mr. Bolton's attempt at revenge against Mr. Malloch Brown, who was the agency's administrator during the relevant years.
The UNDP is the agency that famously kept telling the world that it was so honest and transparent that its administrator needed to apply its success to save the Kofi Annan regime from itself.
As Mr. Annan's deputy, Mr. Malloch Brown often drew on his years at the UNDP, arguing that his leadership there proved that the bloated, inefficient, and uncontrolled U.N. bureaucracy similarly can be cured.
Mr. Annan has perfected the scandal-deflection technique. As the head of U.N. peacekeeping, he bore no responsibility for Rwanda and Srebrenica, which he blamed on his superiors. Scandals that plagued his second term as chief were always the fault of his underlings, member states, or his wayward son, Kojo.
Similarly, Mr. Melkert noted Friday that other U.N. agencies, like the American-controlled U.N. Children Fund and World Food Program, also operate in North Korea like the UNDP.
According to its Web site, the UNDP is an organization advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience, and resources to help people build a better life. Whereas the food agency, as the saying goes, is charged with handing a hungry man a fish, the UNDP claims to teach men and women how to fish. Giving Mr. Kim's henchmen cash to play with hardly fits that model.
Deflecting the allegations against his agency, Mr. Melkert claims that the UNDP has always acted according to its board's directions. But according to Mr. Wallace, over the years, the United States and Japan have voiced this concern at UNDP board meetings and called upon UNDP to improve its management and monitoring of the DPRK programs.
In a recent press conference, Mr. Dervis told reporters that he has no plan to make internal audits of the UNDP's worldwide activity — which amounts to $45 billion a year — available to the public on its Web site.
The agency also fought against allowing American officials to look at its Pyongyang program's audits. Only after constant pleas did it allow Mr. Wallace a peek — but no photocopying — at audits conducted in 1999, 2001, and 2004. American officials tell me that they are not sure whether these were the only audits conducted.
During his Washington visit last week, Mr. Annan's heir, Secretary-General Ban, heard a mouthful from legislators who want the United Nations to work with America, rather than act as a competing world power. Many of them raised Turtle Bay's poor oversight practices as top concerns.
Reacting on Friday to the first major scandal to hit his administration, Mr. Ban announced that all U.N. agencies now would be subjected to outside auditors. Such extensive audits are easier to promise than to conduct. They will take many years, cost a lot of money, and — as demonstrated in the case of the Volcker oil-forfood investigation — their results will not necessarily lead to significant changes.
But Mr. Ban's reaction was far better than that of Turtle Bay traditionalists at the UNDP, who jumped to blame an American first.