Annan faces criticism over oil-for-food failures
A sweeping year-long probe of the Iraq oil-for-food program has concluded that the United Nations allowed “illicit, unethical, and corrupt behaviour” to overwhelm the $64bn (€51.2bn) operation, and must adopt sweeping reforms to reclaim its credibility before taking on such tasks again.
Yet the Independent Inquiry Committee’s final report, to be released tomorrow, will say the program succeeded in providing minimal standards of nutrition and health care for millions of Iraqis trying to cope with tough UN sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
It also helped the international effort to deprive Saddam of weapons of mass destruction, it said.
“Those were real accomplishments. They were achieved despite uncertain, wavering direction from the Security Council, pressures from competing political forces in Iraq, and endemic corruption on the ground,” said a draft forward to the report. “Sadly, those successes fell under an increasingly dark shadow.”
While the forward doesn’t go into detail about UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, an official familiar with the committee’s final conclusions said it will criticise him, his predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the UN Security Council, especially Russia and France.
Annan’s failure to properly manage the program will be strongly criticised, but there is no new “smoking gun” linking him to an oil-for-food contract awarded to the Swiss company Cotecna that employed his son, the official said yesterday.
Even though the secretary-general denies any knowledge of Cotecna’s bid, a cloud will likely remain over his actions because of unanswered questions about an email suggesting he knew more than he said about his son’s involvement, the official said.
The author of the email, Michael Wilson, a Cotecna executive who is a friend of Kofi and Kojo Annan, denies ever talking to the secretary-general about the firm’s attempt to win a UN contract.
The new report will criticise Kojo Annan for trading on his father’s name in the purchase of a Mercedes-Benz car, for which he borrowed money from Wilson, the official said.
The final report is expected to detail the inner workings of oil-for-food over more than 700 pages.
The 1,800-word draft forward written by inquiry chief Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, speaks more broadly, focusing on the administrative failures of oil-for-food and the specific reforms the agency must adopt.
It assigns blame to nearly every branch of the United Nations, from Annan, to the UN agencies that did work in Iraq, to its member states and the 15-nation Security Council.
“As the years passed, reports spread of waste, inefficiency, and corruption even within the UN itself,” Volcker wrote. “Some was rumour and exaggeration, but much – too much – of it has turned out to be true.”
The reforms that Volcker recommends – chiefly in auditing and accountability - will not be surprising to Annan and the United Nations. They are similar to the management reforms he hopes world leaders will adopt at a UN summit that begins on September 14.
It says the United Nations is the only organisation in the world with the expertise and authority to handle work like oil-for-food, established in 1996 to help Iraqis suffering under the burden of tough UN sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
“At stake is the UN’s ability to respond promptly and effectively to the responsibilities thrust upon it by the realities of a turbulent and often violent world,” Volcker wrote.
Annan said he wished the United Nations had never been given the oil-for-food program “and I wish the UN will never be asked to undertake that kind of a program again".
Volcker’s work began after it came to light that Saddam had heavily manipulated the program, luring companies, favoured politicians, journalists and others with lucrative deals for oil in exchange for kickbacks that helped prop up his regime.
While the forward is critical of UN management, and by extension Annan, its overall tone toward him is not entirely critical. Volcker wrote UN secretary-generals are not chosen for management skills and they don’t have the tools for strong executive oversight.
Instead, the secretary-general becomes the world’s diplomat-in-chief who must navigate the demands and desires of 191 member states.
