Turkey turns on UN

How much longer can Kofi Annan remain in charge at the UN? Now, even the Turkish Press are turning on Annan.

Corruption allegations over the monitoring of oil sales by Saddam Hussein's Iraq have put the "oil-for-food" programme under fire, and a US senator said there is evidence its director, handpicked by Annan, got payoffs from Saddam.

Annan's credibility took another blow when an airplane flight recorder sent from Rwanda turned up in the offices of UN peacekeeping -- the branch Annan headed 10 years ago when 800,000 people died in the Rwandan genocide.

The existence of the device, at first denied, was admitted two days after a French newspaper reported it, but the UN said no evidence was found linking it to the plane crash that played a pivotal role in unleashing the killing.

Earlier in the year, deadly inter-ethnic violence caught UN peacekeepers on the back foot in Kosovo, while Annan had to apologise publicly for sex abuse by peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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