Claudia Rosett on the Oil-for-Food scandal:
Mr. Volcker’s latest report, released Monday, documents bribes Mr. Sevan took from Saddam, via an Oil for Food contractor who happens to be a cousin of former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, as well as what appears to be more garden-variety graft collected by a Russian staffer in the U.N. procurement department, Alexander Yakovlev, who among other matters was involved in the U.N. Secretariat’s hiring of Oil for Food inspectors. These tales, dramatic though they are, only begin to dabble in the river of graft that flowed through U.N.-administered deals under Oil for Food.
For the moment, however, the two cases presented by Volcker are instructive. Following the denials, stonewalling and outrage with which not only Mr. Sevan but Secretary-General Kofi Annan greeted allegations of graft in the program, the first lesson ought to be that at the U.N., protestations of honesty and promises of virtue are cheap. We don’t need more words. We need to see what, exactly, the U.N. does with its money–or, for that matter, with anyone else’s money. The funds grafted out of Oil for Food never belonged to the U.N.; they were by rights the property of the people of Iraq. Any ill-gotten gains spent by Mr. Sevan on New York restaurants and his Hamptons home were swiped from the same Iraqi children the U.N. was entrusted to care for. […]
[The] report, after more than a year of investigation, is the first from his team to document actual bribes. It covers a grand total of $1.1 million in graft and runs to 130 pages, annexes included. If that ratio holds for the billions grafted, skimmed and smuggled out of Iraq relief funds under the U.N. cover of Oil for Food, we can expect that the final two reports, promised in September and October, will run to well over 1.5 million pages combined. No one is seriously expecting anything that massive, but it does give some idea of the scale of corruption with which the U.N. under Oil for Food became complicit. And it perhaps gives a hint of the scope of reform that will truly be required to clean up the U.N.
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