UN - Annan Guilty

While most main stream media are trumpeting Volcker's exoneration of Annan, it's nice to see some reporting the truth.

In his interim report on corruption in the United Nations' oil-for-food program, Paul Volcker found there wasn't enough evidence to prove U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan steered contracts to a Swiss firm that employed his son. That was enough for Annan to declare Volcker "has cleared me of any wrongdoing."

That view isn't universally shared.

"We did not exonerate Kofi Annan," Swiss organized crime expert Mark Pieth, one of Volcker's three investigators, told The Associated Press.

The Scotsman newspaper noted that Volcker faulted Annan for an "inadequate" inquiry when the oil-for-food scandal first broke.

"Under Mr. Annan, the U.N. allowed the food-for-oil program to degenerate into a corrupt empire in which Saddam Hussein bribed numerous U.N. and other diplomats to turn their backs while he looted his country and starved its people," the Scotsman said in an editorial.

In an editorial headlined: "Report Spells the End of Kofi Annan," the Montreal Gazette noted that Annan's then executive assistant destroyed three years worth of files on Oil for Food the day after the Security Council passed a resolution authorizing Volcker's inquiry.

"Just connect the dots," the newspaper said. "What a damning picture it is. Its reputation already in tatters, the U.N. stands today weaker than it ever was. Only major governance reforms can save the world body now, and the first order of reform business needs to be finding a credible replacement for Annan."

Volcker did his level best not to connect the dots.

Can you say "cover up"?

The report goes on to note other UN scandals.

Oil-for-food is surely one of the largest financial scandals in the history of the world, but it is hardly the United Nations' only problem. There are the sex scandals involving U.N. peacekeepers in the Congo and elsewhere, and the United Nations' inability or unwillingness to put a halt to genocide in Darfur. The United Nations came late and brought little to the aid of victims of last December's tsunami.

None of this has stopped the UK's Claire Short from pronouncing the UN as the world's moral authority.

The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.

But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.

“I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said.

“Only really the UN can do that job,” she told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme. [Then why did it fail so miserably?]

“It is the only body that has the moral authority. But it can only do it well if it is backed up by the authority of the great powers.”

The UN lost that a long time ago.

Roger Simon has a lot more evidence that Volcker ignored.
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