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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.
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 organization that has been at the forefront of opposition to the war in Iraq. The White House spoke on Wednesday 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 symbolize 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 on Wednesday, we must mend, not end, the UN. Not out of misplaced internationalism but out of hard-headed realism. There is no alternative to an organization 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.?Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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 organization that has been at the forefront of opposition to the war in Iraq. The White House spoke on Wednesday 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 symbolize 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 on Wednesday, we must mend, not end, the UN. Not out of misplaced internationalism but out of hard-headed realism. There is no alternative to an organization 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.?Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
