IN its 869 pages, the seventh and penultimate report of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the Iraq oil-for-food program does not make good reading for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
However, as the report makes clear, Annan’s responsibility for the fraud and corruption with which the $64 billion seven-year program was riven is by no means exclusively his. The Security Council and the General Assembly embarked upon a program of unprecedented complexity for which it never had the proper methods of control. Time and again political considerations impeded both the clear responsibilities of the two main committees charged with overseeing the program. Turf wars between individual UN agencies added further confusion. Countless opportunities were created for malfeasance which the corrupt and cynical Saddam regime was quick to spot and exploit.
It is a matter for regret that, as noted by the inquiry committee, full cooperation was not extended to its investigators by certain US agencies as well as other authorities including those in Russia and China. This difficulty however characterizes the extent to which, almost from the start, different national agendas undermined the united front that the UN ought to have been presenting to the cunning Saddam regime.
As a result of this latest damning evidence of ineptitude and payola, the call for radical UN reform, will undoubtedly be heard most loudly from American right-wingers. For once, however, wiser counsel is prevailing in the Bush White House, from which no demand for Annan’s head has come. This undoubtedly mostly reflects the president’s long-term need for the UN to help pull himself out of the Iraqi hole he has dug for himself.
The UN will always be pulled this way and that by the conflicting views of members. However now the opportunity has arisen to insert sound management and impartial accounting into its life. Every official at every level should be appointed on professional merit. Further, the entire proceedings of secretariat should be submitted to penetrating oversight by an independent monitoring body, also free from outside political interference.
Governments can still pursue their own agendas in the UN debating chambers and in its corridors but the executive of the organization must be raised to the level of an impartial and incorruptible civil service, with its own strict discipline code and penalties for those who transgress its rules. It will be imperfect of course. As with any civil service, there will be political pressures and sometimes divided loyalties. Inevitably there will also be fresh scandals. But such revelations must not be allowed to damage the reputation of the UN itself.
And that reputation is not entirely soiled by this latest report, because the document makes clear that however corrupt the food for oil program may have been, in its primary aim of stopping Iraqis from starving, it succeeded and that was because of the devoted work of ordinary UN employees.
