The Truth About The Un

"How corrupt is the UN?" That's the question asked by Claudia Rossett in the current issue of Commentary magazine. If any reporter on earth can offer a definitive answer, it is Rossett. A former editor at the Wall Street Journal, Rossett has led the investigation of the oil-for-food scandals--and the broader issue of corruption at the United Nations.

The UN is a large and poorly understood institution. Although it declares a formal "core" budget of only US$1.9-billion per year, the UN and the various quasi-autonomous agencies under the direct control of the Secretary-General spend between US$8- and US$9-billion per year, or about the size of the Canadian defense budget. Semi-autonomous UN agencies like UNICEF and the UN Development Program spent US$8- to US$10-billion more, for a total of about US$18-billion.

The UN directly employs some 40,000 people. Local field staffs employ thousands more, among them the 20,000 Palestinians on the payroll of UNRWA, the agency created to serve Palestinian refugees. (Another agency, the UN High Commission on Refugees, serves all the rest of the planet's refugees.)

Rossett observes: "Little of this system is open to any real scrutiny even within the UN, and no single authority outside the UN has proved able to compel any genuine accounting."

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, however, has cast some unexpected light upon the UN.

In 1990, the UN Security Council had imposed sanctions upon Iraq. Those sanctions remained in place after the Gulf War left Saddam in power--and over time, they wrought great hardship upon the Iraqi people. In 1996, the Security Council created a humanitarian program, Oil for Food, that allowed Saddam to sell restricted quantities of oil to buy food and other necessities for the Iraqi people. The UN Secretary General accepted responsibility for overseeing and auditing the program to prevent abuse.

Over the next seven years, the Secretariat oversaw US$64-billion worth of transactions. The opening of the Iraqi archives after 2003 has revealed where this money went.

Between US$11-billion and US$17-billion was skimmed off by Saddam personally.

Money ostensibly spent for food was redirected to buy weapons. Thus, Saddam bought "milk" from a major Chinese weapons manufacturer. He purchased all of Iraq's supplies of "detergent" from the following list of countries: Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. He claimed to have imported Japanese cars from Russia.

The UN rarely questioned any of these transactions. Although the UN collected some US$1.4-billion over the life of the program in handling fees, the Oil-for-Food program spent less auditing Saddam's contracts than it did redecorating its own offices.

Why so uncurious? The head of the program received at least US$1.2-million in kickbacks from Saddam. Kofi Annan's son was paid US$195,000 by an oil-for-food contractor. And, Rossett reports, the UN's own inquiry into the scandal discovered that Canada's "Maurice Strong, a long-time UN Undersecretary-General, accepted in 1997 a check bankrolled by Saddam in the amount of US$988,885. Strong (who has denied knowing where the money came from) was then serving as chief co-ordinator of UN reform, no less."

Neither Annan nor the UN seem to feel much remorse over the Oil-for-Food scandal, or much urgency for reform. The disgraced head of the program continues to collect a UN pension.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated scandal, two senior UN officials--including the head of the UN budget oversight committee--have stepped down for allegedly accepting bribes in cases involving close to US$1-billion of procurement contracts. They were caught not by the UN, but by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Undeterred, UN officials continue to strike moral attitudes against the developed and democratic world. Remember how the UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, blasted the U.S. as "stingy" after the December 2004 tsunami--and then demanded that all aid donations flow through the UN and only the UN?

After examining the UN's customarily cryptic accounts, the Financial Times reported last year (as Rossett reminds us) that the organization ended up spending three times as much on overhead as private charities.

The UN could and should be a powerful force for good -- a place where democratic countries can work together to speak out on behalf of the conscience of mankind. Canadians have believed in the UN with special intensity. Too often, however, Canadians have tried to support their idealistic beliefs by refusing to acknowledge the truth about the UN--by championing the UN-as-we-wish-it-were and not the UN as it actually is: corrupt, systematically biased against democracy, and often actively dangerous to world peace.

Those who still cherish the UN-as-we-wish-it-were need to stop making excuses for it--and start working to change it.