The U.N. Kicks Off Another Season Of Bedlam
Must we accept murk, sleaze and high times for tyrants as the norm?
 By Claudia Rosett 
August 20, 2009
Forbes
Original Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/19/united-nations-bribery-muammar-gaddafi-opinions-columnists-claudia-rosett.html

Next month brings the annual opening of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Even more than usual, it is shaping up as such a carnival of thugs that not only does Libya's Muammar Gaddafi look likely to make an unprecedented appearance, but jokes are circulating that he wants to bring his own tent.

Not that anything going on at the U.N. by now is likely to cause shock. The core scandal at the United Nations these days is that there have been so many scandals, with so few penalties paid, that sleaze, moral bankruptcy and high times for tyrants have again become accepted features of the landscape. It seems there are only so many times the public can hear about bribes, kickbacks, rapes committed by peacekeepers and sanctions-busters swanning around in the Delegates Dining Room before the tales all run together, and with glazed eyes, the audience nods off.

Back in 2003, it caused horror when the U.N. picked Libya to chair the Human Rights Commission. This September, it's business as usual that one of Gaddafi's longtime servants and former foreign ministers, Ali Abdessalam Treki, will take over the 2009-2010 presidency of the entire U.N. General Assembly.

Treki will take charge of an opening debate in which, as each of the U.N.'s 192 member states gets its 15 minutes to speak onstage, the provisional lineup for the first day, September 23, includes President Barack Obama, followed immediately by Libya's Gaddafi, and later in the day, Iran's reelected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Looking at a wide array of U.N. positions, meanwhile, one might almost suppose that being under sanctions by the U.N. is one of the prized criteria for member states to win important slots at the institution. The truth may be that sanctioned member states have more incentive to lobby behind the scenes for influence, and they apparently find highly effective ways to do so. Thus does it happen that the biggest single voting bloc in the General Assembly, the 130 member G-77, is presided over this year by Sudan. Iran sits on a slew of governing boards supervising various agencies, and chairs the governing board of both the U.N.'s New York-based flagship U.N. Development Program, and the U.N.'s Copenhagen-based Office for Project Services, or UNOPS.

To give just a sample of what else is simmering away largely unnoticed at Turtle Bay, both these U.N. agencies--the UNDP and UNOPS--have turned up recently in connection with questions about nepotism. There's no sign that the nepotism allegations have anything directly to do with Iran, but neither is it reassuring that Iran--ranked by the Berlin-based organization Transparency International as one of the most corrupt countries on the planet--currently chairs the governing boards which are supposed to provide both the UNDP and UNOPS with guidance and oversight.

The UNOPS nepotism questions center on Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon's son-in-law, Siddarth Chatterjee, who along with Ban's daughter, Ban Hyun Hee, was working for UNICEF out of Nairobi when Ban became the U.N.'s top administrator in January, 2007. Since then, Ban's son-in-law has been rapidly promoted, via a stint in Iraq, to a high-level post with UNOPS in Denmark. This may be entirely reasonable, but there is no way to know. U.N. correspondent Matthew Russell Lee, of Inner City Press, has been asking questions about the specifics of Chatterjee's rise and terms of employment. He's been getting no clear answers.

Slightly more excitement has attended upon allegations of nepotism on the part of Ban's special representative to the Congo, Alan Doss, whose daughter recently landed a job at the UNDP. But the main focus has been not on any questions of nepotism itself, but on the accompanying frisson of the arrest in Manhattan of the previous occupant of the position, Nicola Baroncini--who was forcibly removed from the premises, and during the scuffle allegedly bit a U.N. security guard (all parties claim they are innocent).

Other disturbing insights into the U.N. continue to riffle across the back pages, or turn up on the Internet--but get no traction. Two years ago, when stories broke about the UNDP in North Korea funneling cash to the regime of Kim Jong Il, the resulting Cash-for-Kim scandal made headlines and drew enough attention to warrant a U.S. Senate subcommittee inquiry. 

But just last month, George Russell of Fox News (with whom, in years past, I have co-authored articles that helped expose U.N. scandals which led to convictions in U.S. federal court) wrote a well-documented piece for the Fox Web site, nothing that the U.N.'s World Food Program has been paying outrageous fees for the privilege of shipping free food to North Korea. Russell pointed to signs that a big portion of these fees might be flowing to the government of North Korea and asked if that was the case. Good question; but there's no sign yet that anyone in officialdom cares.

In years past, the job of policing the U.N. has fallen largely to the U.S. Congress, which, courtesy of taxpayers, provides more funds to the U.N. system than any other member state--some 22% of total annual country dues, plus additional contributions, which bring the U.S. yearly grand total to more than $5 billion. But Congress these days shares the Obama ethos, in which the solution to problems at the U.N. is not to try to clean it up, but to hand it more authority and shovel in more money.

Obama's cabinet-level ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, gave a long speech Aug. 12 at New York University, in which she stressed Obama's vision that the U.N. is imperfect; but it is also indispensable.

Just how imperfect, however, is a question that no longer seems to attract any serious official scrutiny. A few years ago, the Southern District of New York had a team of prosecutors who pulled in a 100% success rate of convictions and guilty pleas in a series of U.N.-related bribery, money-laundering and fraud cases. That team has moved on. Congress had staffers and even lawmakers who had taken the trouble to learn enough about the U.N. to be appalled, and call for remedies. With a few exceptions, such as Sen. Tom Coburn and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, they are gone. The anti-corruption task force set up at the U.N. itself to delve into procurement corruption has been dissolved.

The U.N. Ethics Office, set up with much fanfare almost three years ago to enforce honesty and protect whistle blowers, has proved impotent. It is less a help to whistleblowers than a danger to those trusting enough to go there. The promised review of the U.N. clutter of more than 9,000 mandates, meant to help prune the bureaucratic jungle, never got around to eliminating anything. The personal financial disclosure by high U.N. officials, promised by the Secretariat, has turned out to be a farce in which officials have the option of not going public at all. Those who choose to disclose anything now file a one-page document, once a year, on which they either list a few generic and unrevealing items, such as assets consisting of bank savings accounts. Or they can tick a box disclosing to the public that they choose to disclose nothing at all.

Were the U.N. in the habit of holding public confirmation hearings, or open town- hall-style meetings, there might be at least some mechanism to help check abuse. But information is so tightly held these days that even the usual noon press briefing by Ban's office has been cut back this month from five days per week to three.

Not that the noon briefings cover the entire U.N. system. Fanning out around the Secretariat is a sprawling empire of U.N. funds, agencies, departments and programs, some of which answer only to their own member-state assemblies, some to the General Assembly, and some, in effect, to no one at all. This global U.N. system is so tangled and opaque that it is a nearly impossible project to try to get a clear handle on its total budget. 

Three years ago, Kofi Annan put it at $20 billion. Currently, the U.N. web site says it is $15 billion. Even taking into account some of the exceptions the U.N. attaches to this figure, that still seems a wild under-estimate--not least because the U.N. keeps growing, not shrinking. The annual core budget for the Secretariat alone is about $2 billion, parts of which are then entwined with a peacekeeping budget now close to $8 billion, plus there was $5 billion in 2007 for the UNDP alone. That already adds up to $15 billion even before factoring in such massive agencies as UNICEF, or the U.N.'s rapidly expanding web of eco-entities and public-private partnerships.

A U.N. spokesman for the secretary-general, reached by phone, confirmed that there is no answer readily available to the question of the real, system-wide budget: It's not something that we keep track of in any systematic way.

That's quite a contrast to the care with which U.N. officials keep track of money they want to collect. Recall Ban's description in March of the U.S. as a deadbeat--despite America's sugar-daddy role as biggest single donor.

Of course, for many things in life, there are cycles. So it may be with the U.N., now in a phase in which less oversight, more money, and seats at the high table for the likes of Libya, Sudan and Iran are all accepted as mere imperfections attached to an institution which Ambassador Rice describes as vital to our efforts to craft a better, safer world. My advice, as the Obama administration's rubber meets the road at Turtle Bay, is brace for impact.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the FoU.N.dation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.