UN has no regrets over Oil-for-Food scandal
Claudia Rosett writes that the United Nations has tossed the subject of their notorious Oil-for-Food scandal into oblivion. She also reminds that:
Plenty of blame goes to the UN Secretariat, run during all but the first month of Oil-for-Food by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan — whose hand-picked head of the program, Benon Sevan, was later alleged by a UN-authorized inquiry to have “corruptly” derived “personal pecuniary benefit from the Oil-for-Food Programme” via “cash proceeds” from lucrative Oil-for-Food contracts. The UN-authorized inquiry, led by Paul Volcker, devoted hundreds of pages to the mismanagement, derelictions and abuses that went on in the Secretariat, which had the hands-on responsibility for dealing with most of Oil-for-Food’s dirty details.The UN owes an apology for this atrocity, which FOX News, who reported about much of this case 5 ago, sadly doesn't even mention now either. And unfortunately, it's clear that the UN won't ever apologize for the damage they caused.
But the Security Council, which doubled as the Iraq sanctions committee, also bears plenty of blame. The Security Council authorized the program, approved contracts and — as we now know, after many post-mortem investigations and congressional hearings — had its own internal wrangles, in which the U.K. and U.S. made private protests over the obvious corruption, but failed to stop the fiesta of graft — in which Saddam was ordering up such stuff as milk from Russian oil companies and Chinese weapons manufacturers.
Labels: Iraq, oil-for-food scandal, UN corruption
