After diplomatic pratfalls in Iraq, with everyone insisting that the UN must now step in, Bush and his cohorts are desperate for a whistle-blower, someone who can squeal on the UN and discredit
“Ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses ... (ye) grind the faces of the poor” — Old Testament
His son, Kojo, is the cause. Kofi, the dad, running the United Nations as the first black to become the 7th Secretary-General — thrashing through a 40-year UN thicket infested with hobbits and orcs — is normally a cool cat, known not to shrink from trouble but grow “calmer as a crisis mounts.”
But this crisis is monumental, personal and a grist for the American gossip mills.
Fishier still is his colleague and crony, Benon Sevan. Appointed by Annan to oversee the $100 billion Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq, Sevan is now said to have sliced millions for himself while giving the wink to Saddam Hussein to do business with French, Russian and Chinese contractors, funnelling the kickbacks offered in return to his own accounts.
Smacked hard in the face by the two-headed monster — nepotism and cronyism — Annan, 64, has been emasculated into promising an independent commission to investigate the theft, cataclysming American hacks with catcalls against the UN and the Congress abusing Annan for “an open bazaar of payoffs, favouritism and kickbacks.”
Saddam was supposed to sell oil (Iraq being the second-largest producer) to earn money to buy food and medicine; to remove land mines and to build hospitals, schools and water-treatment plants for his citizens. Instead, he bilked billions and the UN let him.
Iraqi oil pumped under Sevan’s direct supervision for seven full years was openly sold to whoever lined Saddam and Sevan’s pockets — 75 per cent being Americans themselves — and the revenues deposited in a UN-controlled escrow account (French bank, BNP Paribas) for Iraq to purchase the necessities of life denied by America and the world under punishing economic sanctions.
Sweetheart deals among the French, Russians, Chinese and Iraqis bastard many a thief of Baghdad, with UN as the midwife.
Waking up now, the former Iraqi oil minister claims that the UN “was stealing money from the Iraqi people,” alleging that as many as 300 UN bureaucrats were employed to administer the programme. “We were not pumping oil to feed Iraqis, but to feed (300) UN bureaucrats in New York.” What the oily minister conveniently left out were the billions his boss, the big bad wolf, Saddam, himself had sleazed away from such deals (but I digress).
Before Sevan’s recent mysterious disappearance into the nether world, facilitated by boss Annan, who shrewdly packed him off on long leave before retirement, Sevan nonchalantly admitted that “as much as 10 per cent” of the programme’s revenues may have been “ripped off,” telling a TV channel: “Even if 10 per cent of the revenue was stolen, 90 per cent got to the people it was intended for. Why does nobody report that?” he asked peevishly. (A UN insider says that Sevan would “easily get infuriated ... he had a short fuse!”
Whatever ... he is still Annan’s Mr 10 Per cent.
Ding-dong! Remember someone in Pakistan with the same title? Eerier still is the name Cotecna Inspection SA.
What you’re about to read is a true story, not fictive. So here it is: the peripatetic Kojo, 30, born from Annan’s first wife in Ghana, worked for the Swiss-based Cotecna which, having won a pivotal contract from the UN to inspect all Oil-For-Food shipments in Iraq, operated for three years until the termination of the programme last year. The same depraved and convicted Cotecna that our charming “Mr 10 Per cent” Asif Ali Zardari hired as Pre-Shipment Inspectors (PSI) in Pakistan when his Mrs was Prime Minister!
Third-World leaders — corrupt to their teeth like Mobutu, Suharto, Marcos, Mugabe and the current crop of autocrats in Uzbekistan and Kazahkstan — have done business with this tight-knit group of five global companies, generating more than $800 million a year of revenue and $150-$200 million in profit from inspection contracts with 44 of these desperately poor countries. “These companies’ owners include some of the richest people on the planet, who dwell in premier capitals such as Geneva, London, Paris and Milan.”
A Swiss court convicted Cotecna and SGS for bribing Benazir Bhutto and leading members of her family, all through the 1990s, with the help of major Swiss, American, UK and French banks and a coterie of Swiss lawyers. No prizes here for second-guessing BB and AZ’s high jinks to Zurich (money-laundering haven) with a-hundred-honcho ‘delegation’ in tow that traipsed with the power couple on state visits at the cost of our financial well-being.
“In effect, all these Western institutions helped to undermine Pakistani democracy and its chances for providing a democratic alternative to Islamic fundamentalism and military dictatorship,” says James Henry, author of Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy.
Despite such dubious credentials, while the World Bank and the IMF failed to police Cotecna and its ilk, Kofi Annan quietly handed on a platter the Oil-for-Food programme to them, to have and to hold and to squeeze as they pleased. “In Pakistan’s case, it shows how vulnerable democratic development can be to corruption — encouraged and facilitated by a coterie of unscrupulous First-World bankers, lawyers and inspection companies,” Henry says.
The Nobel Peace laureate Kofi, which means ‘Friday’ because that’s the day he was born on, with his M.A. in Management from MIT, egregiously allowed his son and crony to smear his good name.
Kojo’s bizarre trail of shady deals has gotten tongues wagging. Four years ago, the contract for the $75million airport in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, involved a nephew of its president, Robert Mugabe, the son of a former Saudi oil minister and the son of the UN chief!
After diplomatic pratfalls in Iraq, with everyone insisting that the UN must now step in, Bush and his cohorts are desperate for a whistle-blower, someone who can squeal on the UN and discredit it.
And guess who is their choice? A Pakistani ex-foreign office type, for long with the UN in New York.
Serenading Shaukat Fareed, New York Times columnist, William Safire, ended his March 29 column with: “All of us need an embittered whistle-blower. If an ex-UN type named Shaukat Fareed reads this — call me.”
Safire is baying under the wrong tree. Shaukat Fareed is not an ‘ex-UN’.
“I am unhappy that Safire got all the facts wrong,” Shaukat tells me without a hint of malice in him. Ouch, but didn’t that hurt? Shouldn’t Shaukat take Safire to the cleaners for slandering him? His response carried in the NYT letters’ column, six days too late, was as tepid as his response over the phone to me.
How did Safire pick Shaukat’s name from the 15,000 UN employees? Is there something that one is missing here?
“Well, I am the person who originally put the Oil-for-Food structure together. Later, it was taken away from me and given to Sevan.”
Shaukat’s sentence looks more like a lover’s quarrel where the typical kiss-and-tell didn’t happen, setting off a piqued Safire to label him as the ‘whistle-blower’? “That’s so naive,” Shaukat snaps back at me.
Pulling rank, the opinionated William Safire will not say sorry each time he’s horribly wrong or making false assertions (frequently). And his “Newspaper of Record” will not tell Safire to correct them either.
“An opinion may be wrong-headed,” Safire fired back at Daniel Okrent, the NYT Public Editor, “but it is never wrong. A belief or a conviction, no matter how illogical, crackbrained or infuriating, is an idea subject to vigorous dispute but is not an assertion subject to editorial or legal correction.” No wonder Shaukat Fareed wants the Safire story to be put to bed. A wise move, don’t you think?
After diplomatic pratfalls in Iraq, with everyone insisting that the UN must now step in, Bush and his cohorts are desperate for a whistle-blower, someone who can squeal on the UN and discredit 
