A United Nations-appointed commission investigating charges of corruption in a program that allowed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to trade oil for food will begin interviewing State Department officials this week, part of a probe that already has accused UN officials of lax management in running the $64 billion program.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Monday that in addition to questioning State Department employees, the commission, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, also will receive thousands of pages of U.S. government documents regarding the program, which has become the focus of intense criticism by American conservatives suspicious of the UN.
Those documents detail what U.S. officials knew about problems in the program and what steps they might have taken to try to fix them, a State Department official said Monday.
The fact that the Volcker commission will question U.S. officials underscores the difficulty of assigning responsibility for allowing the widespread corruption that is alleged to have taken place during the seven-year life of the program. As the most powerful member of the UN Security Council, which started the oil-for-food program in 1996, the U.S. was one of the nations charged with overseeing the program.
That program, which is believed to have generated $1.7 billion in illegal kickbacks and surcharges for Hussein’s regime, is the subject of 11 investigations at the UN, in Congress and abroad.
While even UN supporters say the program had serious flaws, American critics of the UN have seized on the allegations to attack the world body and its chief, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Many UN member nations have been vocal critics of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 without the Security Council’s blessing, and Annan angered Republicans during last year’s presidential campaign when he described the war as “illegal.”
On Sunday, the three-member Volcker commission, appointed by Annan last year, released 58 UN audits of the oil-for-food program, plus a commission report that described the oversight as lax. The report stopped short of accusing officials of violating regulations.
The audits were properly done, but UN officials failed to heed the recommendations, said Volcker Commission spokesman Mike Holtzman.
“There’s a lack of response on the part of the people being audited, the people administering these programs,” he said.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the number of audits shows that the program was closely watched but conceded that there were “deficiencies” in how it was run.
“We ourselves are already focused on issues of management and accountability and engaged in a critical review of the way we work,” Dujarric said.
As an example, Dujarric noted that officials are implementing new procedures for greater accountability and transparency in handling the roughly $4 billion in aid that has been pledged for emergency relief in south Asia for victims of the Dec. 26 tsunami.
The Volcker group will issue a preliminary report on the investigation in late January, Holtzman said. That is expected to be a broader, and potentially more damning, examination of a program that was intended to ease the suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of the comprehensive UN sanctions that were imposed on the country after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Why program started
A blanket prohibition on trade with Iraq led to shortages of food and medicine for ordinary Iraqis while not seriously threatening Hussein’s grip on power.
So in 1995, the Security Council established a system that would allow Iraq to sell oil and use the proceeds to buy food and other essential supplies, theoretically under close supervision of UN officials, who were supposed to ensure none of the items Iraq bought could be used for military purposes.
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The program started the following year and lasted until the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
“Oil-for-food was useful to the U.S. and U.K. because it made sanctions more palatable,” said Simon Chesterman, executive director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University School of Law. “It was palatable to the UN because it gave the UN a role in Iraq and it helped the Iraqi people.”
The program had the effect of turning UN officials into import-export agents for a nation of 25 million, a role far outside the UN’s typical humanitarian work. But, as the first batch of audit reports demonstrates, oversight was often lax. And no one was held accountable for the widespread violations that were allowed to continue.
Along with other Security Council members, the U.S. was supposed to play a key role in setting parameters for the program and monitoring its functions through the Iraq Sanctions Committee.
Senior U.S. diplomats, including the Bush administration’s former ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, have said they encountered resistance from French, Russian and Chinese officials when they tried to correct problems in the program. All three nations are members of the Security Council and have veto powers, and French and Russian companies held the most oil-for-food contracts.
Little interest in `policing’
“No one had an interest in policing it closely,” said Chesterman, who formerly worked for the UN in Yugoslavia. “No one had an interest in lifting up rocks to see what crawled out from underneath.”
Critics charge the U.S. turned a blind eye to far greater abuses when those abuses benefited American allies.
While sanctions were in place from 1990 to 2003, Hussein is believed to have raked in $11 billion in illegal revenue, but the largest portion came not from the oil-for-food program but from illegal sales of oil and banned trade items.
For conservative critics on Capitol Hill, the oil-for-food controversy demonstrates that not only is the UN a stronghold of anti-American sentiment but also is a corrupt institution.
Last month, Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who heads a subcommittee investigating the oil-for-food program, called for Annan’s resignation. On Monday, the freshman senator said in a statement that the newly released records “do not answer even a fraction of the questions we have been asking or will be continuing to ask as our investigation moves ahead in the months to come.”
And Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said the audits seem to show “a systemic failure on the part of the UN to responsibly administer the oil-for-food program.”
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The oil-for-food program
Responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the UN imposed strong sanctions. In 1996 it began the oil-for-food program, which allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy food and medicine.
HOW IT WORKED
Iraq initially was allowed to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months, but that limit later was raised and then eliminated. About two-thirds of the oil revenue was to be used for humanitarian needs, with the rest going to war reparations and administrative costs.
ENDING THE PROGRAM
After Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003, the UN lifted its sanctions and ended the program. The UN reports that, as of the program’s termination, it had provided $31 billion in humanitarian supplies to Iraq, with $8.2 billion more in its delivery pipeline.
Source: United Nations
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