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Oil for food: A hell of a
scandal
By Ian Williams
"Hell no!" said United Nations Secretary
General Kofi Annan when asked whether he would
resign after the Volcker Report in effect cleared
him of using any influence on behalf of Cotecna,
the company that had employed his son Kojo. It was
good to see him in fighting mode instead of the
usual UN posture of Job suffering assorted
plagues, conservatives and deranged ambassadors
because the White House is trying his faith.
Even so, hell hath no fury like an
American conservative cheated of his prey, and not
until hell freezes over will the right-wing media
in the United States admit that Paul Volcker's
"there is no evidence of wrongdoing" means "not
guilty", or "innocent".
Apart from turning
the other cheek, the other besetting sin of the UN
is assuming, at least in public, that its
interlocutors on the right of US politics are
susceptible to rational arguments, evidence, and
similar foreign logical tropes. Indeed, many of
Annan's persecutors have already insulated
themselves from reality by preemptively calling
the Volcker Inquiry a "whitewash", and condemning
the use of residual oil-for-food funds to pay for
it. I sympathize, but not for the same reason as
the shedders of crocodile tears who complain that
its costs come from funds that should have gone to
starving children in Iraq.
I may lend them
a handkerchief to dab at their wet eyelids if I
hear any of them complain about the US$30 billion
or so that was sequestrated in reparations from
the oil-for-food fund to pay compensation for the
first Gulf War, the 5% of revenue that is still
being deducted from all Iraqi oil sales to pay
compensation, mostly to Kuwait, for reparations,
the $8 billion plus left over from the
oil-for-food fund that was handed over to the
Coalition Provisional Authority after the
invasion, and which the US administration admits
(quietly) has never been accounted for properly,
but a lot of which we know ended up in
Halliburton's coffers on no-bid contracts.
However, my handkerchief will stay dry and in my
pocket, since to the best of my knowledge not one
of these critics has raised a peep at this looting
of the Iraqi people's patrimony.
In my
opinion, Annan should have given the whole baying
crowd the finger from the beginning, instead of
constructing this massive Volcker apparatus to
scour lint from the UN's own navel.
With a
multimillion-dollar budget, the Volcker panel has
so far found that former oil-for-food chief Benon
Sevan received $160,000 that he cannot prove came
from his deceased aunt, that Dileep Nair of the
Office of Internal Oversight Services, which most
UN insiders know makes the Keystone Cops look
professional, used some $200,000 in oil-for-food
funds to pay for a compatriot he wanted to employ,
and that Kojo Annan earned $200,000 more than he
declared from Cotecna.
And of course that
Iqbal Riza, Annan's secretary, let his secretary
shred three years of files. It is indeed an
amazing coincidence that his secretary should make
such a request just as the Security Council was
asking all documents to be kept. But Riza was not
a big fan of transparency, and this would not be
the first time his generation of UN staff assumed
that secrecy was the best way to deal with media
scrutiny - even when there was nothing to hide.
All of these findings suggest
improprieties - but there is nothing illegal about
any of them according to Volcker, and according to
me, almost nothing that justifies this egregious
waste of resources on an inquiry whose results so
far have been like the Federal Bureau of
Investigation handing Al Capone a parking ticket
after a two-year stakeout in Chicago.
On
the other hand, now comes the good bit, which
promises to make the otherwise wasted money well
spent.
At the press conference at which he
declared there was no evidence against Annan on
the most substantial allegations made so far,
Volcker promised that the final report in this
will deal with the broader issues of the UN Oil
for Food Program and the involvement of the
Sanctions Committee, the Security Council and the
governments of the member states.
This
will be interesting. On the positive side, he may
actually point out that the Oil for Food Program,
which is now irredeemably tainted as "inefficient"
or "corrupt" or "scandal-ridden", was actually so
successful in its two major aims - feeding Iraqis
while starving Saddam Hussein's war machine - that
the American invaders asked it to continue well
into the occupation - and could find no weapons of
mass destruction. In fact, allowing for the usual
inefficiencies of any international bureaucracy,
it was a very successful program.
Back in
the US, Volcker will almost certainly report that
Republican and Democratic administrations alike
were complicit in Iraqi oil trading with Turkey
and Jordan. (It was trading, not smuggling, since
both the Security Council and the US Congress knew
about it and condoned it.)
Almost as his
parting words, former US ambassador John Danforth
had warned, or threatened, the UN not to try to
implicate his diplomatic colleagues. However, US
bullying apart, the Sanctions Committee was warned
about Saddam Hussein's double pricing and did
little about it, even though every contract went
to Washington and was minutely scrutinized by a
welter of committees there.
Each year the
US secretary of state moved an exemption for Iraq
and Turkey to exempt them from US repercussions
for buying oil from Iraq - and the turkeys in
Congress said "Aye."
After all these yelps
from Americans concerned about UN accountability
and transparency, it will be really interesting to
see how much access the Volcker Inquiry is allowed
to US government documents and personnel to study
this question.
This would be a good
opportunity for the UN Secretariat to get some
payback for the way those governments really
responsible for billions of dollars of revenue
going to Saddam have left Annan and the UN
swinging in the wind. Sadly, the UN is still too
polite to the No 1 Member State to really come out
swinging at it. The UN is temperamentally unsuited
to defending itself, as shown by its volte-face
over paying Sevan's legal bills.
Kofi
Annan's reply to the commission on the matter of
whether or not he should have held a deeper
inquiry in 1999 when the first hint of Cotecna
employing his son was drafted by an expensive firm
of Washington lawyers, Williams and Connolly.
Their reply was quite convincing: Annan had after
all asked the advice of the former head of
PriceWaterhouse, Joseph Connor, the head of UN
management in effect nominated by the US, and Hans
Corell, who was then his undersecretary general
for legal affairs and then the head of the Office
of Internal Oversight Services, for their advice,
and they told him not to bother.
I hope he
did not have to pay from his own pocket to defend
himself for carrying out his official duties.
It is only fair that the same courtesy
should have been extended to Sevan, who was after
all being pursued because of his official position
as head of the Oil for Food Program, and who had
been a chief target of the witch-hunt from the
beginning.
In civilized countries, people
are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and
even those who are eventually found guilty are
allowed proper legal representation.
The
Secretariat should have stood its ground.
The secretary general has offered to lift
diplomatic immunity from anyone who is wanted for
prosecution. Sevan is in the US, where under the
current climate of opinion the prosecutors just
have to say "Iraq" and the "United Nations" often
enough for a jury to find the poor guy guilty of
masterminding September 11, 2001.
The UN
did the right thing by offering to pay legal
expenses for Sevan, and the wrong thing by
succumbing to a media lynch mob and reneging on
the deal. We can only hope that, heartened by the
Volcker verdict, they go on the counterattack and
suggest that there was another son of an
influential father, who used his paternal name to
cover his rear in numerous dicey business
undertakings, and who went on to greater things.
Yes, you really would expect more forbearance from
supporters of George W Bush for Kojo's
shenanigans.
However, even the new
invigorated Chef de Cabinet, Mark Malloch Brown,
although he is more likely to post his personal
files on the press floor than shred them, is
unlikely to tweak the clown's nose this way.
It's up to us, the people, really, not to
let a bunch of faith-based conservatives determine
or divert the agenda of a body that belongs to the
world, not La Verkin, Utah, the capital of flakey UN
haters, which currently seems over-represented
in the media and Washington.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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