Benon Sevan says he is being "sacrificed" for political expediency by Kofi Annan and the U.N. Secretariat, and while Sevan looks to be guilty of accepting illegal cash, he's also right on the mark about having been made Annan's fall guy. Claudia Rosett says the Volcker investigation has no interest in more than token criticism of Annan. The man who presided over the whole corrupt Oil-For-Food program and allowed the dictator it was set up to sanction to coopt it and profit from it, is arrogantly trying to avoid any responsibility for the mess he has made. So far, so good.
The Volcker Independent Inquiry, which was set up by, and is answerable only to Kofi Annan, is predictably running interference for him. According to Rosett, Volcker's committee...
...since last year has been choreographing the tone and timing of its reports in ways more attuned to managing the news than getting at the full truth. The result so far has been to spare U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan while fingering a handful of his subordinates, and to delay until just before the opening of the U.N. General Assembly in September a “main report,” which Volcker has already telegraphed as likely to divert blame from the U.N. Secretariat (which ran the program) to the U.S. (which at least did more than any other U.N. member to try to clean it up).Worst of all, Volcker has parked himself for more than a year atop U.N. records that might have helped outside investigators crack some of the Oil-for-Food schemes involving ties to terror, organized crime, arms rackets, and political bribery, all of which are salted among the more than $110 billion of Saddam Hussein’s deals administered by the U.N. under Oil-for-Food. It is welcome that Sevan is at last protesting in public the secrecy of these proceedings...
...the Volcker inquiry has applied a double standard. Sevan aside, the committee’s findings have imposed spit-shine discipline on a few obscure U.N. officials, while dismissing as merely “inadequate” Annan’s failure to inquire competently into conflicts of interest involving six-figure payments to his own son — and excusing Annan’s growing list of memory lapses along the way. Nor has the Volcker team displayed much interest in broadening its focus on the secretary-general from his paternal oversights to his abject failure to run an honest or even adequately audited multibillion-dollar-relief program in Saddam’s U.N.-sanctioned Iraq.
Please read the whole Rosett article. (How many times have I written those words in the last two years?)
Nile Gardiner is less restrained in his treatment of Kofi Annan in a very good piece in Capitalism Magazine. A sample:
While it was gratifying to see Mr. Annan make the arduous journey from Turtle Bay to Brussels in support of last week’s international conference on Iraqi reconstruction, it was hard to ignore his rank hypocrisy. The people of Iraq owe no debt of gratitude to Mr. Annan, who consistently ignored their suffering, opposed their liberation, and actively undermined Coalition efforts to establish security and rebuild the country. As Iraq’s interim defense minister Hazem Sha’alan remarked, “Where was Kofi Annan when Saddam Hussein was slaughtering the Iraqi people like sheep?”
Then Gardiner builds to his call for Annan's resignation:
Annan has made no effort to accept responsibility for his extraordinary lapses of judgment. He continues to claim that he is innocent of any wrongdoing over the Oil for Food scandal, even as the evidence mounts against him.Annan has never apologized to the victims of the Rwanda genocide, whose slaughter was the consequence of the U.N.’s failure to intervene, or to the families of Muslims massacred at Srebrenica while under the protection of U.N. soldiers. Annan’s lack of humility in the face of great human tragedy has been one of his greatest shortcomings as a U.N. leader. Nor has Annan ever apologized to the people of Iraq, whose former president he described as “a man I can do business with.”
Annan’s Washington Post op-ed is both an exercise in political vanity as well as a refusal to come to terms with his organization’s failure to stand up to the Hussein regime and the insurgency that has followed it.
Kofi Annan should resign not only over the Oil for Food scandal, and the massive human rights abuses committed by U.N. peacekeepers under his watch across the continent of Africa, but also because of his shameless appeasement of dictators such as Saddam Hussein. He has become a symbol of the U.N.’s culture of arrogance, mismanagement and weakness. It’s time for a new figure at the helm, a secretary-general who will seek real reform of the U.N. bureaucracy and aggressively stand up for democracy, human rights, and freedom.
The Secretary General's resignation might be hastened by some testimony from Benon Sevan, at least that's what Rosett has suggested:
...Congress wields direct leverage over the U.N. by way of funding. If Sevan is serious about opening up U.N. records, his best bet is to pay a call to congressional investigators, and start by opening up himself — not just in his own defense, but about the inner workings of the entire Oil-for-Food program, including the complicity of his boss, Kofi Annan.
It will be tough for Sevan to clear himself of the bribery charges, since the aunt he claimed gave him the $160,000 now under investigation by Volcker died last year in a fall down an elevator shaft. I won't spin any crazy theories about poor Aunt Berdjouchi, but Sevan may now find himself a potentially inconvenient witness against some extremely rich and powerful men. He may want to stay on the ground floor for a while himself.
Posted by dan at August 9, 2005 11:27 AM