UN - oil for food scandal revelations

Fox News reports on new revelations about the UN oil for food program and shows why Annan should resign.

The United Nation’s auditors, in a lengthy post-mortem done months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, record that during the final two years of the program, from July 31, 2001 on, Sevan abruptly stopped holding regular weekly staff meetings — basically leaving the program in chaos.

Apart from a small flurry of staff gatherings in late 2002, Sevan apparently closed his door to sessions with personnel charged with headquarters oversight of the activities and finances of the nine U.N. agencies, 900 international staff, 3,500 Iraqis, assorted contractors and various accounts involved in the program.

Sevan failed to approve procedures to monitor big chunks of his enormous budget, never got around to confirming vital work plans or defining some key areas of responsibility for his on-the-ground overseers, and often did not even answer written messages or policy papers from his staff. This, the auditors plaintively noted, ”exposes the executive director to the risk of not receiving appropriate advice from [the field overseers] and left the [project management] staff feeling ‘left out’ and de-motivated.”

And they lay ultimate blame, and rightfully so, on Annan.

But that in turn raises the biggest question of all: how did Secretary-General Kofi Annan (search) fail to notice that Sevan’s office, entrusted with the biggest relief program in U.N. history, had become such a site of managerial mayhem?

It was Annan who handpicked Sevan in 1997 to run Oil-for-Food. It was Annan whose office received many of these audit reports, had access to all of them and until last week refused to release any of them even to Congress. And it was Annan, who in closing out the United Nations role in Oil-for-Food in Nov. 2003 made a point of praising Sevan as a man who had served the world body “far beyond the call of duty.”

Did Annan simply not care? Or is he himself so inept that he truly had no clue about the many internal signs that Sevan’s office was an organizational disaster?

And all the while Annan kept quiet and let the US take the blame for thousands of starving Iraqis.
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