U.N. High Tech for Kim

July 20, 2007
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118489608933972576.html

The United Nations' Cash for Kim Jong Il scandal is now six months old, so it's a good time to assess progress, if that's the right word. The evidence of misdeeds at the U.N. Development Program in North Korea continues to mount, but there's still no urgent and external inquiry, as ordered by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in January.
Now the U.S. has uncovered evidence that in addition to transferring millions of dollars in cash that may have gone to help prop up Kim's grotesque regime, the UNDP also transferred dual-use technology. It did so without bothering to secure a U.S. export license and despite the fact that the Commerce Department had denied an earlier application for a license for technology for the same project. Our Melanie Kirkpatrick lays out the details nearby.
One of the striking features of Cash for Kim has been the response of the UNDP, which has obfuscated, denied and dissembled its way through the past half year. When the U.N. Board of Auditors issued a report confirming violations of U.N. rules at the UNDP's operations in North Korea, the agency brushed it off with an everyone-does-it defense. The technology transfers have been variously denied, minimized or deflected to others' shoulders.
The same modus operandi was on display in response to U.S. inquiries about the UNDP's operations in another Asian dictatorship -- Burma, where the agency appears to be following the same practices that got it into trouble in North Korea. Inspection of projects is limited by the government and a percentage of U.N. outlays is required to be in foreign currency. Given what we've learned about North Korea, the U.S. is right to worry that UNDP aid -- $107 million from 2002 to 2006 -- may have been diverted to the regime.
The UNDP has responded with its usual transparency. While deigning to release the information that it has conducted two internal audits of the Burma program in the past decade, it won't give the U.S. access to the audits or let it review the line-by-line details of the budgets. This is the equivalent of a CEO refusing to let a member of his board of directors see the company's financials -- and is hardly the way to treat the country that has donated $1.2 billion to the agency over the past decade. In addition, there has been no external audit of the Burma program for more than 10 years.
Meanwhile, the Board of Auditors' examination of the UNDP's North Korea operations is about to enter a new phase. Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro wrote to the General Assembly's budget committee on June 19, announcing that it is the wish of the Secretary-General for the Board of Auditors to undertake the necessary visit to North Korea.
Good luck. Pyongyang has already refused once to let in the auditors, so it'll be interesting to see how it welcomes any new request. In any event, Philippe Seguin, the French chairman of the Board of Auditors, says the board cannot serve in an investigatory capacity, as he put it in a June 29 letter to the budget committee.
As we learned from the multibillion-dollar Oil for Food scandal, the U.N. is not good at policing itself. The only way to get to the bottom of Cash for Kim is through an independent investigatory panel along the lines of the one run by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker that opened up Oil for Food. The U.S. has been pressing for this for months. It's past time.