The United Nations-"Mend it, don't end it"

from:http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1448590,00.html

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Leader
Thursday March 31, 2005
The Guardian

Those who had fervently hoped that the sins of the son would be visited on the father, have found their prayers ignored. One of the most thorough investigations into the United Nations oil-for-food programme in Iraq cleared Kofi Annan of corruption in awarding a contract to a Swiss company that employed his son, Kojo. The second interim report from the panel headed by Paul Volcker had damaging things to say about the behaviour of 31-year-old, English public school-educated Kojo, who had lied repeatedly to his father about the monthly payments he received from a Geneva-based company, Cotecna Inspection Services, up to six years after he was meant to have left it. Cotecna was found to have made false statements to the public, the United Nations, and to Mr Volcker's investigators.

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But a 12 month, $3m inquiry by some of the sharpest investigative brains available to the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, found no evidence that Mr Annan had intervened in the bidding process for the Cotecna contract and no conclusive evidence that he knew Cotecna was in the running for it. The secretary-general did not emerge unscathed. The in-house investigation he initiated, which lasted all of one day, was rightly deemed woefully inadequate. Two of Kofi Annan's closest advisers, his former chief of staff Iqbal Riza and Dileep Nair, former head of the UN watchdog group, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, were carpeted, one for ordering the shredding of files (albeit copies of original documents that were kept) and the other for appointing a person who did almost no work on overseeing the oil-for-food programme. But the centrepiece of the allegations, that the secretary-general had put $10m worth of business to a company where his son worked, was dismissed.
There exists, of course, a clear neo-conservative motive in seeking to discredit the head of an organisation that has been at the forefront of opposition to the war in Iraq. The White House spoke yesterday through gritted teeth. Mr Volcker himself is unimpeachable. He was the man called in to investigate the WorldCom and Enron corporate scandals. So if Mr Volcker says Mr Annan is clean, there could be no clearer endorsement of the general secretary's integrity. In its reaction, the White House balanced professed support for the work of the secretary general with a statement that the whole story about the oil-for-food saga had yet to be told. Much could still emerge when the final report comes out in the summer to discredit Mr Annan's stewardship of the programme, which came to symbolise all this Bush administration hated about the soft, dovish approach to Iraq's brutal dictator. A programme intended to minimise the impact of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, by allowing them to sell oil for food, ended up allowing Saddam to corruptly run rings around the UN. The affair is at the heart of the neo-conservative contempt for weak-kneed liberalism and for the international community's inability to face down dictators. The UN's critics live to fight another day.

But while it is evident that the UN is in dire need of reform, it is equally clear that a strong, credible UN is needed as never before. As Jan Egeland, the UN's emergency relief co-ordinator wrote in the Financial Times yesterday, we must mend, not end, the UN. Not out of misplaced internationalism but out of hard-headed realism.There is no alternative to an organisation that can coordinate the responses of 60 different donor countries, the military assets of 26 countries, and the efforts of hundreds of aid agencies days after the tsunami disaster struck the Indian Ocean. While the second Bush administration gropes for international legitimacy, the battered, creaky leviathan of the UN already has it, and must be allowed to keep it.


Documents
Volcker commission report on UN oil-for-food

Useful links
UN website
Wikipedia: Kofi Annan

Annan wins support after damaging oil-for-food report

By David Usborne in New York
31 March 2005


Britain and other European governments were preparing to voice unified support for Kofi Annan last night amid concerns that a report on ties between his son and a firm contracted by the United Nations to work in Iraq may have left him more seriously damaged than expected.

Mr Annan "enjoys the continuing strong support of the British Government," said Sir Emyr Jones Parry, the British ambassador. Tony Blair telephoned Mr Annan on Tuesday night to offer support, as the European Union moved to focus on the secretary general's proposals for fundamental reforms of the UN to be considered at a summit in September.

But some diplomats acknowledged privately that the need to shore up the secretary general had become urgent following the release of the report, prepared by the former US Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker. "He looks worse now than he did before it came out," a senior Western source commented. "A lot of this looks circumstantially very bad."

Making matters worse yesterday were leaks from yet another report, this time by an independent consulting firm, into personnel problems at the UN office for election assistance around the world. It allegedly found evidence of humiliation of staff, sexual harassment and misuse of agency funds.

The consultants said they had concluded that "constant sexual innuendo is part of the 'fabric' of the division". Fred Eckhard, the UN spokesman, said there had not been any decision on possible disciplinary action against the division's managers and its head, Carina Perelli of Uruguay.

Mr Volcker's report, published on Tuesday, forms part of his investigation into corruption in the oil-for-food programme. It focused on Kojo Annan's employment by the Swiss company, Cotecna, which was chosen in late 1998 to inspect humanitarian goods going to Iraq. The report concluded that there was no evidence that the secretary general had influenced the awarding of the contract. But the 94-page document chastised the secretary general for not taking stronger steps to query his son's activities. It included a revelation that his former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, had ordered significant documents to be shredded.

* The UN Security Council is expected to vote today on a resolution authorising the referral of suspects accused of war crimes in Darfur to the International Criminal Court.

from http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=624999

So Funny I needed to Post it!--Why Americans Hate the UN...

May 14 — OK, so now it’s official: The world really does hate us. Implicit in last week’s votes to boot the United States from United Nations commissions on human rights and drug trafficking is the now-undeniable fact that we are the most-reviled country on Earth.

AMERICANS ARE RIGHTFULLY annoyed. I mean, it’s one thing to put slave-owning Sudan on a human-rights commission, but how dare they kick us off that drug panel! We’re the world’s largest consumer of narcotics, for Pete’s sake! Shouldn’t we have the largest say in how they’re distributed?
Of course, the U.N. does seem to want the U.S. represented on at least one commission, namely the High Commission to Soak Rich Countries. After all, wasn’t that General Secretary Kofi Annan asking our president the other day to cough up $200 million to fight AIDS in Africa?



Clearly, I am on the brink of a bitter, though entertaining, anti-U.N. tirade. But before launching into it, I am obligated by professional integrity to point out that perhaps the U.N. has a good reason to hate us. After all, we’ve been throwing around our considerable weight in bizarre ways lately.
At the human rights commission’s recent meetings in Geneva, for instance, we actually voted against a resolution banning torture, claiming (if you can believe this) that we do object to torture, but did not want to limit the “production of torture equipment.” (Who knew that the production of torture equipment is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy afloat right now?)
And when the commission passed a resolution objecting to the death penalty, we voted “no” along with our “friends” in Algeria, Burundi, China, Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland, Syria and Vietnam. (Now there’s a list of forward-thinking democracies!)
But my favorite vote from the last session was on a resolution declaring it “intolerable that 826 million people throughout the world [do] not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs.” We were the only country in the world to vote against the declaration (where are our Libyan allies when we need them?!).



So, OK, they hate us. But let’s now turn our attention to something far more important than them hating us—namely us hating them.
Here in New York—the epicenter of anti-U.N. sentiment (sorry, Sen. Helms, but you’ve got nothing on us)—we can’t stand the U.N. In fact, we’ve been waging a decade-long war to get the United Nations to pack up its bags and leave. (We’ve done this non-violently, of course, preferring the New York method of simply nudging them to death.)
You can’t say we aren’t justified. U.N. diplomats possess that magical “Get out of jail free” card called diplomatic immunity, which allows them to flout local and national laws without ever having to answer for it.
And here in New York, it’s never business, it’s personal. We couldn’t care less about being kicked off those U.N. commissions. We’re much more bothered by the local U.N. missions’ profligate use of our most precious resource: East Side parking spaces.
In 1994, it came to light that the Russian mission had racked up 6,228 parking tickets in just six months (that’s 34 tickets a day). From that point, it didn’t take much to fuel our rage (which I’m going to list with bullets because I’ve found that people take stories with bullets much more seriously):

Jan. 1997: Russian diplomat Boris Obnossov (from whose name is derived the American word “obnoxious”) took a few vodka-fueled punches at a cop who was writing him a ticket for parking at a fire hydrant. It was the Russians’s 386 ticket of the year (and it was still January!).

Jan. 1997: A group of Russian “diplo-brats” were arrested for public urination, graffiti, harassing seniors, breaking car windows and, cops said, wearing unattractive jogging suits. The teens were let go when their status as sons and daughters of diplomats (henceforward known in the tabloids as “diplo-brats”) was confirmed.





April 1997: A drunken South Korean diplomat crashed his car but was released after playing the immunity card.

1998: Two cheapskate South African diplomats stiffed a cabby of a $3.50 fare and one of them allegedly yelled at the turban-wearing cabby, “Go back to India.” Although bothered by the $3.50 rip-off, New Yorkers seemed most upset that diplomats can hurl racist expletives at cabbies with impunity while the rest of us have to mumble our invectives under our breath.

Dec. 1999: The missions of Guinea-Bissau and Liberia had their electricity turned off for non-payment of bills (which pissed off their landlord but, no doubt, earned them a seat on the U.N.’s Economic Development panel).

The ongoing situation made our contentious mayor, Rudy Giuliani, so angry that he said he didn’t even care if the city were to lose the estimated $3 billion that the U.N. pumps into the city economy (he gets that way sometimes).
“If they’d like to leave New York,” the mayor said, “then we can find another use for that area of town.”
A lot has calmed down since those days—the Russians only got 372 tickets in 1999 (down from the record-setting 32,350 in 1996)—but now comes this latest U.N. affront.
Granted, New Yorkers hold grudges like terrorists hold hostages, but this time, most New Yorkers are treating the U.N. like we treat everyone else: By looking down our noses and ignoring them.
“People in Washington care about the U.N., but New Yorkers see it for what it really is: an elaborate eating club for the world’s over-educated elite,” said New York University urban affairs professor—and every city reporter’s best friend—Mitchell Moss.
“Let’s face it, the U.N. is a great way for these guys to escape their lousy home countries and get a good meal. For them, New York is as close to heaven as they’ll ever get.”
So, consider this a threat: Kick us off any more commissions and that’s it, we’re closing Le Cirque.



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Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post and the author of “HAIR! Mankind’s Historic Quest to End Baldness” (Random House, April 2001). Visit him at http://www.gersh.tv/

© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.

from http://gershkuntzman.homestead.com/files/UN_Commission.htm

The United Nations -"Mend it, don't end it"

from The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1448590,00.html

---

Leader
Thursday March 31, 2005
The Guardian

Those who had fervently hoped that the sins of the son would be visited on the father, have found their prayers ignored. One of the most thorough investigations into the United Nations oil-for-food programme in Iraq cleared Kofi Annan of corruption in awarding a contract to a Swiss company that employed his son, Kojo. The second interim report from the panel headed by Paul Volcker had damaging things to say about the behaviour of 31-year-old, English public school-educated Kojo, who had lied repeatedly to his father about the monthly payments he received from a Geneva-based company, Cotecna Inspection Services, up to six years after he was meant to have left it. Cotecna was found to have made false statements to the public, the United Nations, and to Mr Volcker's investigators.

Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But a 12 month, $3m inquiry by some of the sharpest investigative brains available to the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, found no evidence that Mr Annan had intervened in the bidding process for the Cotecna contract and no conclusive evidence that he knew Cotecna was in the running for it. The secretary-general did not emerge unscathed. The in-house investigation he initiated, which lasted all of one day, was rightly deemed woefully inadequate. Two of Kofi Annan's closest advisers, his former chief of staff Iqbal Riza and Dileep Nair, former head of the UN watchdog group, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, were carpeted, one for ordering the shredding of files (albeit copies of original documents that were kept) and the other for appointing a person who did almost no work on overseeing the oil-for-food programme. But the centrepiece of the allegations, that the secretary-general had put $10m worth of business to a company where his son worked, was dismissed.

There exists, of course, a clear neo-conservative motive in seeking to discredit the head of an organisation that has been at the forefront of opposition to the war in Iraq. The White House spoke yesterday through gritted teeth. Mr Volcker himself is unimpeachable. He was the man called in to investigate the WorldCom and Enron corporate scandals. So if Mr Volcker says Mr Annan is clean, there could be no clearer endorsement of the general secretary's integrity. In its reaction, the White House balanced professed support for the work of the secretary general with a statement that the whole story about the oil-for-food saga had yet to be told. Much could still emerge when the final report comes out in the summer to discredit Mr Annan's stewardship of the programme, which came to symbolise all this Bush administration hated about the soft, dovish approach to Iraq's brutal dictator. A programme intended to minimise the impact of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, by allowing them to sell oil for food, ended up allowing Saddam to corruptly run rings around the UN. The affair is at the heart of the neo-conservative contempt for weak-kneed liberalism and for the international community's inability to face down dictators. The UN's critics live to fight another day.

But while it is evident that the UN is in dire need of reform, it is equally clear that a strong, credible UN is needed as never before. As Jan Egeland, the UN's emergency relief co-ordinator wrote in the Financial Times yesterday, we must mend, not end, the UN. Not out of misplaced internationalism but out of hard-headed realism.There is no alternative to an organisation that can coordinate the responses of 60 different donor countries, the military assets of 26 countries, and the efforts of hundreds of aid agencies days after the tsunami disaster struck the Indian Ocean. While the second Bush administration gropes for international legitimacy, the battered, creaky leviathan of the UN already has it, and must be allowed to keep it.


Documents
Volcker commission report on UN oil-for-food

Useful links
UN website
Wikipedia: Kofi Annan

Coming very soon...

everything the world needs to know -- well almost -- about why we need the UN