>> KOFI BURNS HIMSELF...


Kojo & Kofi
Unbelievable U.N. stories.

By Claudia Rosett

In the growing scandal over the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, which from 1996-2003 supervised relief to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and his staff have excused themselves from any responsibility for the massive corruption involving billions in bribes and kickbacks that went on via more than $100 billion in U.N.-approved contracts for Saddam to sell oil and buy humanitarian supplies. U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop, or that they even had time to notice it was out there. They were too busy making the world a better place.

That's fascinating, not least given the ties of Annan's own son, Kojo Annan, to the Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna, which from 1999 onward worked on contract for the U.N. monitoring the shipments of Oil-for-food supplies into Iraq. These were the same supplies sent in under terms of those tens of billions of dollars worth of U.N.-approved contracts in which the U.N. says it failed to notice Saddam Hussein's widespread arrangements to overpay contractors who then shipped overpriced goods to the impoverished people of Iraq and kicked back part of their profits to Saddam's regime.

Cotecna was hired by the U.N. on December 31, 1998. Shortly afterward, press reports surfaced that Kojo was a partner in a private consulting firm doing work for Cotecna, and that just 13 months previously he had occupied a senior slot on Cotecna's own staff. Asked about this in 1999 by the London Telegraph, a U.N. spokesman, John Mills, replied that the U.N. had not been aware of the connection, and that "The tender by Cotecna was the lowest by a significant margin."

It seems there's a lot the U.N. managed not to be aware of. But the information that Cotecna -- while employing Kofi's son in any capacity -- put in the lowest bid by far for the job of authenticating Saddam's Oil-for-Food imports, is not necessarily reassuring. Cotecna, which got paid roughly $6 million for its services during that first year (the U.N. will not release figures on Cotecna's fees over the following years) was bidding on work that empowered its staff to inspect tens of billions worth of supplies inbound to a regime much interested in smuggling, and evidently accustomed to dealing in bribes and kickbacks as a routine part of business. The issue was never solely whether the monitors were cheap, but whether they were trustworthy.

The whole setup raises disturbing questions. But this is a subject on which neither the U.N. nor Cotecna has been willing to offer illumination. Asked for details, both have stonewalled. The U.N. spokesman Mills, who fielded the question in 1999, is now deceased. A query to the U.N. Oil-for-Food elicits from a spokesman only the information that the five-year-old response by the late Mills "stands, as provided by the U.N." A recent query to Cotecna, asking for at least some detail on ties to Kojo Annan, elicits nothing beyond the reply that: "There is nothing else to add."

It is possible of course, that Kojo Annan had nothing to do with the Iraq program per se, as he told the Telegraph back in 1999: "I would never play any role in anything that involves the United Nations for obvious reasons." Though at the same time, in a comment that suggested at least nodding acquaintance with the Oil-for-Food program, Kojo added: "The decision is made by the contracts committee, not by Kofi Annan."

Then why the reluctance from the U.N., or Cotecna, for that matter, to provide any further details whatsoever? Beyond that, it is disingenuous to suggest Annan had no responsibility for the contracts. Oil-for-Food was run out of the U.N. Secretariat, reporting directly to Annan, who regularly signed off on the six-month phases of the program. Without his approval, the contracts would not have gone forward.

Even if we assume that everyone on the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food staff, as well as Kofi Annan himself, was indeed ignorant of Kojo Annan's involvement with Cotecna, it is hard to buy the argument that Kofi, while signing off regularly on the program's workings, was simply oblivious to the details. Not only was Kofi Annan the boss, but he was directly involved from the beginning. Kofi Annan's official U.N. biography notes that shortly before his promotion to Secretary-General "he led the first United Nations team negotiating with Iraq on the sale of oil to fund purchases of humanitarian aid."

It was Annan, who in October 1997 brought in as Oil-for-Food's executive director Benon Sevan, reporting directly to the Secretary-General, to consolidate Oil-for-Food's operations into the Office of Iraq Program. And it was shortly after Sevan took charge that Oil-for-Food, set up by Kofi Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, with at least some transparency on individual deals, began treating as confidential such vital information as the names of specific contractors, quantities of goods, and prices paid.

U.N. staff, such as Under-Secretary General Shashi Tharoor in a letter last month to the Wall Street Journal, have argued that the U.N. was not responsible for Saddam's misdeeds, and that U.N. staff were not concerned with such kickback-relevant matters as business terms of Saddam's contracts. The disturbing implication is that the U.N. -- while collecting a commission of more than $1 billion on Saddam's oil sales to cover its own overhead in administering Oil-for-Food -- was indifferent to Saddam's short-changing the Iraqi people, whose relief was supposed to be the entire point of the program.

Beyond that, the U.N., during the final months of Oil-for-Food, gave every indication of knowing just where the problems lay. Last May, shortly after the fall of Saddam's regime, the U.N. Security Council voted to end the Oil-for-Food program and gave the U.N. Secretariat six months to tie-up loose ends before handing over any outstanding import contracts to the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority. With Saddam's regime gone as a contracting party, the U.N. began a frenzied process of "renegotiating" billions in contracts, basically winnowing out the graft component that Oil-for-Food had previously approved.

By the end of this sudden housecleaning, the U.N. had scrapped more than 25 percent of the contracts for which, under Saddam, it had already agreed to release funding from the U.N.-controlled Oil-for-Food bank accounts. Uncharacteristically, the U.N. on its website has posted explanatory notes next to some of the dropped contracts. These do not suggest a U.N. that was living in ignorance of Saddam's 10-percent-overpricing-and-kickback scheme.

For instance, in the U.N.'s own footnotes, there is reference to the welding-machine contractor from Lebanon, "unwilling to accept the 10% deduction"; likewise the Belgian and Jordanian suppliers of medicine, both refusing a "10% reduction." In other cases there is a vaguer note, such as the Russian backhoe supplier, who "refused to accept extra fee deduction." Or the supplier of "fork lift and spares" from Belarus who "stated that the supply of remaining parts cannot be cost effective under the current circumstances." Asked to further explain these notations, an Oil-for-Food spokesman offers no comment except that all available information is already posted on the U.N. website.

Altogether, according to U.N. records, 728 previously approved and funded deals were "removed from the list of amendable contracts," a few because the supplies had already been delivered, but many because the contractors appear to have run for the hills. For instance, there's the Jordanian supplier of school furniture, whose contract was dropped during the U.N.'s post-Saddam frenzy of "prioritization" because the "Company does not exist and the person in charge moved to Egypt." Or the Russian supplier of "vehicle spare parts," who "could not be contacted despite all efforts." Or the Algerian seller of "adult milk" who "has no interest in renegotiation"; the Egyptian seller of "generator" for educational purposes, who "is not enthusiastic about proceeding with the amendment"; the Syrian seller of "laboratory equipment" who is "not possible to contact."

Another 762 contracts set aside indefinitely by the U.N., post-Saddam because of their "questionable utility" were deals for goods that sound handy and humanitarian enough on the generic U.N. face of it. These include medicine from China; sugar and ambulances from Egypt; laboratory materials and medical equipment from France; educational materials from Pakistan; wheat, medical equipment, and ambulances from Russia; and yet more wheat, from Saudi Arabia. One has to wonder if the revised assessment of utility lay in the nature of the goods described, or in the actual terms of the contracts previously blessed by the U.N.

It's commendable that the U.N., facing imminent handover of the program, tried to clean up the remaining contracts. It is plausible, perhaps, that no one at the U.N. knew of the links between Kofi Annan's son, Kojo, and the firm monitoring Iraq's U.N.-approved imports, Cotecna, and that these ties had no bearing on a massively corrupt program. It is possible that only after Saddam fell did anyone among the 1,000 or so U.N. international staff administering Oil-for-Food, or Sevan, or Kofi Annan, notice that they'd been approving Saddam's deals with suppliers that were, in various combinations, paying kickbacks, hard to contact, or even, as in the case of the Jordanian school-furniture contractor, nonexistent.

But what has to be clear by now is that the U.N. itself was either corrupt, or so stunningly incompetent as to require total overhaul. There are by now enough questions, there has been enough secrecy, stonewalling, and rising evidence of graft all around the U.N. program in Iraq, so that it is surely worth an independent investigation into the U.N. itself -- and Annan's role in supervising this program. If Kofi Annan will not exercise his authority to set a truly independent inquiry in motion, it is way past time for the U.S., whose taxpayers supply about a quarter of the U.N. budget, to call the U.N. itself to account for Oil-for-Food -- in dollar terms the biggest relief operation it has ever run, and by many signs, one of the dirtiest.

-- Claudia Rosett is a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/rosett200403101819.asp

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>> WHERE IS CONGRESS WHEN YOU NEED IT?

AFTER THE WAR

The Oil-for-Food Scandal
The program was corrupt. The U.N. owes the Iraqis--and Congress--an explanation.

BY THERESE RAPHAEL
Thursday, March 11, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

"If there is evidence, we would investigate it very seriously," Kofi Annan insisted last month when presented with allegations that U.N. officials knew about and may have benefited from Saddam Hussein's corruption of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Program. Fortunately, Saddam appears to have been a stickler for record-keeping.

A letter has come to The Wall Street Journal supporting allegations that among those favored by Saddam with gifts of oil was Benon Sevan, director of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Program. As detailed on this page on Feb. 9, Mr. Sevan's name appears on a list of individuals, companies and organizations that allegedly received oil allocations or vouchers from Saddam that could then be sold via middlemen for a significant markup. The list, compiled in Arabic from documents uncovered in Iraq's oil ministry, included many of Saddam's nearest and dearest from some 50 countries, including the PLO, pro-Saddam British MP George Galloway, and French politician Charles Pasqua. (Messrs. Galloway and Pasqua have denied receiving anything from Saddam.) According to the list, first published by the Iraqi daily Al Mada in January, Mr. Sevan was another beneficiary, via a company in Panama known as Africa Middle East Petroleum, Co. Ltd. (AMEP), about which we have learned quite a bit.

Mr. Sevan, through a U.N. spokesperson, has also denied the allegation. But the letter, which two separate sources familiar with its origins say was recovered from Iraqi Oil Ministry files, raises new questions about Mr. Sevan's relationship with Iraqi authorities.

The letter is dated Aug. 10, 1998, and addressed to Iraq's oil minister. It states: "Mr. Muwafaq Ayoub of the Iraqi mission in New York informed us by telephone that the above-mentioned company has been recommended by his excellency Mr. Sevan, director of the Iraqi program at the U.N., during his recent trip to Baghdad." The matter is then recommended "for your consideration and proportioning" and the letter is signed Saddam Zain Hassan, executive manager of the State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), the Iraqi state-owned company responsible for negotiating oil sales with foreign buyers. A handwritten note below the signature confirms the request was granted "by his excellency the Vice President of the Republic [presumably Taha Yassin Ramadan, now in U.S. custody] in a meeting of the Command Council on the morning of Aug. 15, 1998." Scrawled below that to one side is another note stating that 1.8 million barrels were allocated to the company two days later, on Aug. 17.
A second document shown to the Journal is a chart in Arabic with the heading "Quantity of Oil Allocated and Given to Mr. Benon Sevan." The Oil-for-Food program was divided into 13 phases in all, representing roughly six-month periods from December 1996 through June 2003. Under phase four (during which the letter was written), the chart shows 1.8 million barrels as having been allocated to Mr. Sevan and 1,826 million barrels "executed." In some phases the chart indicates that an oil allocation was approved but no contract was executed for some reason, so that the total allocation awarded to Mr. Sevan in phases four through 13 is 14.2 million barrels, of which 7.291 million were actually disbursed, according to the document.

Mr. Sevan could not be reached for comment on the letter, but did issue a denial in response to our Feb. 9 article. "There is absolutely no substance to the allegations . . . that I had received oil or oil monies from the former Iraqi regime," he said through a spokesman. "Those making the allegations should come forward and provide the necessary documentary evidence." The denial notwithstanding, the documents raise enough questions to warrant an investigation by the U.N., as well as by outside investigators, including the U.S. Congress. (A U.N. spokesman said yesterday that Mr. Sevan is on extended vacation until late April, after which he retires at the month's end.)

Africa Middle East Petroleum Co. Ltd., which is cited in the letter, is registered in Panama and was also approved by the U.N. to buy Iraqi oil under Oil-for-Food. While Panama registration documents list only Panamanian nominees as directors, the Journal has established that AMEP is owned and managed by Fakhry Abdelnour, a Geneva-based oil trader with superb connections in Egypt. The company was registered in the U.K. in the '80s and dissolved in 1992. Mr. Abdelnour's name does not appear on British registration documents, but his brother's and mother's, Munir Abdelnour and Ehtedal Amin Ghali, do.
In a phone conversation, Munir Abdelnour, leader of the Wafd opposition party in Egypt's parliament and a prominent businessman, said he has nothing to do with the company, despite his name appearing as a director of the now-defunct U.K.-registered company. "Africa Middle East Petroleum is a company owned and managed by my brother. He might have used my name, but I have absolutely no clue."

Fakhry Abelnour (whose wife is Panamanian and related to Panama's president) has close ties to Egypt's oil minister. He comes from a prominent Coptic family that is related to that of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Mr. Annan's immediate predecessor, and Mr. Sevan's former boss when the latter was U.N. envoy in Afghanistan.

Mr. Abdelnour played a key role in the early '90s in helping South Africa circumvent U.N. sanctions to buy Egyptian crude, through AMEP and a subsidiary, now dissolved, called Interstate Petroleum Company. In 1999, South Africa conducted an investigation into allegations of impropriety surrounding margins paid by South Africa's state-run purchaser, the Strategic Fuel Fund Association (whose job was to find suppliers willing to sell crude oil to South Africa) to Mr. Abdelnour's company for his services in sanctions-busting. The 255-page report submitted to parliament in December 1999 by an independent official appointed to investigate the complaint details Mr. Abdelnour's high-level connections in Egypt and the meetings arranged by him between SFF officials and Egyptian oil ministers and officials from the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC), responsible for negotiating sales of Egyptian oil. "Mr Fakhry Abdelnour and his companies' involvement directly or indirectly in the South African oil procurement scenario is a fact that need not be debated. . . . I have already accepted earlier on that AMEP, Interstate and Mr. Abdelnour refer to one and the same person," states the report.

Mr. Abdelnour confirmed he owns the Panama-registered AMEP. "We have been very active in the Middle East for 25 years. We were almost the extended arm of the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation; we were controlling most of the exports in Egypt," he says. He confirmed that AMEP purchased oil from Iraq through Oil-for-Food, beginning around 1998, and said he made semi-annual trips to Baghdad to meet SOMO officials to keep contracts coming. Asked about his relations with Mr. Sevan, he says he met him only once, at an OPEC conference in Vienna, where a relative of Mr. Abdelnour who was also a friend of Mr. Sevan introduced them. They had dinner together at the InterContinental. "It was interesting to know Benon Sevan as he ran the oil-for-food program," says Mr. Abdelnour. But he insists there was no further contact and says he has no idea why a letter showing Mr. Sevan recommended his company to SOMO would be in the files.

Mr. Abdelnour confirms the many reports now in the public domain that SOMO demanded that surcharges on Iraqi oil be paid into Iraqi accounts. "I paid once," he acknowledges. "I was given an account in Jordan and the name of the lady who was in charge of this account." He says the surcharge amounted to 25 cents a barrel. Was it possible that all this happened unbeknownst to the U.N.? "Impossible," he says. "Everybody knew it. The U.N. knew about it. They [SOMO] contacted you over the phone. . . .The call was over a satellite phone, which was tapped, and the head of SOMO talked to me very openly, not through a disguised language."

AMEP still exists on registry documents in Monaco, but Mr. Abdelnour confirmed that the office there on Boulevard Princesse Charlotte closed two years ago. Intriguingly, the same building in Monaco houses another oil company, Toro Energy SAM, whose owner and a key business partner both figure prominently on the Al Mada list: oil industry specialist Cabecadas Rui de Sousa and Frenchman Patrick Maugein. (Mr. Abdelnour says he does not know either man).
Mr. Maugein, a billionaire with close ties to Jacques Chirac, is a longtime associate of the trader and former fugitive Marc Rich, who fled to Europe in 1983 to avoid answering charges of racketeering, illegal trading and dodging a tax-bill of $48 million. (Mr. Rich was pardoned by Bill Clinton in his final hours in the White House). Mr. Maugein was also a close contact of Tariq Aziz, with whom he met regularly. He is the non-executive chairman of Soco International PLC, a publicly listed London-based petroleum exploration/production company, which goes into markets the majors tend to skip--Mongolia, Vietnam, North Korea, Libya and Yemen.

Messrs. Maugein and Rui de Sousa acquired their interest in Soco through an entity called Torobex, whose shares were held by Tobex Holdings Ltd. According to Al Mada, Mr. Maugein allegedly received 25 million barrels of Iraqi crude allocations. Mr. de Sousa is also on the allocation list, down for 11 million barrels.

In a statement provided to the Journal, Mr. Maugein says "there is no truth whatever" to any allegation of impropriety and that his dealings in Iraq "were conducted in a perfectly legal manner and in strict accordance" with U.N. rules. His dealings in Iraq, he suggests, were through his 10% stake in Italiana Energia e Servizi, a Mantua-based oil refinery, which is majority-owned by Mario Contini and purchased crude from Iraq under Oil-for-Food.

On the Al Mada list, Mr. Maugein's name appears next to the name of Dutch-based oil trading company Trafigura (Beheer BV), which has the bulk of its operations in London. In his statement, Mr. Maugein says that "Trafigura's activities in Iraq are completely independent of that of Mr. Maugein and there is no connection at all between Mr. Maugein and the incident in 2001 involving Trafigura." The incident is the Essex oil smuggling scandal, on which the Journal carried an investigative story in May 2002. In a smuggling practice known as top-loading, 1.8 million barrels approved for sale under a U.N. contract was topped off with an additional 272,000 barrels in the summer of 2001, according to the captain of the Essex oil-tanker, who blew the whistle on the smuggling by advising U.S. and U.N. authorities. It was the second time in less than four months that the Essex had been chartered to carry top-loaded crude.

Trafigura purchased the oil from oil equipment supplier Ibex Energy France, which in turn bought it from SOMO in Iraq. Ibex said the scheme had been cooked up by Trafigura; Trafigura claimed Ibex fooled it into believing that it had U.N. permission to purchase all of the oil. A French government investigation into Ibex's involvement in the Essex incident appears to have been dropped in late 2002. Ibex was struck from the U.N.'s list of approved companies to deal in Iraq after the Essex incident and the Security Council's 661 Sanctions Committee, responsible for overseeing oil-for-food, asked eight governments (including the U.S., France, the U.K. and the Netherlands) to investigate, but had not heard back by the time oil-for-food was shut down last November.
Ibex's rise from modest beginnings as a regional company with non-oil commercial dealings to a major petroleum broker is something of a mystery. Its office is at 77 boulevard Champs Elysee in Paris. The building's concierge told us that Ibex and Toro occupy the same penthouse office. A receptionist readily fielded inquiries about both companies, though referred questions on Toro to Mr. de Sousa in Monaco.

"I don't share an office with Ibex. I have nothing to do with them and neither does Mr. Maugein," said Mr. de Sousa in a phone interview. "We know Ibex as we know Shell [Oil]. So they gave you my number. Don't you have the number of the Daily Mail?"

Jos? Antonio Jim?nez, a former friend and business partner who has known Mr. Maugein since 1972, sees it differently. "Ibex is a microscopic company used as a screen by Mr. Maugein. He uses Ibex and Toro Energy as screen companies to manage his oil traffic," says Mr. Jimenez. Mr. Jimenez was a minority partner in Compagnie Francaise Internationale de Distribution, which was controlled by Mr. Maugein, but the two had a falling out in the mid '90s over money. "Maugein specialized in outlaw countries--Libya, Algeria, Iraq--using his political contacts," says Mr. Jimenez. "Chirac used to call Patrick Maugein 'my cousin' and recommended him to Saddam Hussein . . . Maugein used to go every year to Baghdad to see Tariq Aziz, but after a while he would just send his brother Philippe [now a consultant for Trafigura] and de Sousa." Mr. Jimenez believes that Ibex's contracts in Iraq came via Mr. Maugein.

Mr. de Sousa says he and Mr. Maugein know Jean-Paul Cayre, the former Rich trader who is Ibex's managing director, but that they have nothing to do with his business in Iraq or elsewhere. Asked if he has any relationship with AMEP, which once shared a building in Monaco, Mr. de Sousa said "I probably did some business with them buying Egyptian crude at the end of the '80s and early '90s. I don't know [Fakhry Abdelnour], but I talked with him on the phone."

Mr. de Sousa believes the Al Mada list "has something to do with the competition between different groups sharing power in Iraq. People are now adjusting accounts between former people linked to the oil business, people who went there. I went [to Iraq] to discuss potential investments. Who didn't go?" The complaints about Saddam's corruption of Oil-for-Food "is a big hypocrisy," he says. If corruption occurred, "in my opinion it was because whoever was sitting at the U.N. Security Council was not doing their job . . . In my view, the whole thing was accepted, admitted by major countries."

As further details of Oil-for-Food unfold, it becomes clearer than ever that the inspectors employed by the U.N. were, at best, lax in monitoring Saddam's get-rich-quick scheme. This is another area begging for investigation.
Inspections under Oil-for-Food, as former U.N. program-officer Michael Soussan indicated in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, amounted to little more than rubber-stamping whatever contract Saddam's regime initialed. On the export side, top-loading of the Essex and other vessels happened on the watch of inspectors from Dutch-based company Saybolt International BV, though no one has alleged publicly that Saybolt's inspectors knew what was going on. Saybolt's name appears on the Al Mada list too. Saybolt has denied it received anything from Saddam.

The import side too was rife with corruption, including kickbacks demanded by Iraq on imported goods, and shameful lack of quality controls on much of the food and medicine entering Iraq. The job of inspecting those goods fell mostly to a Geneva-based company called Cotecna Inspection, SA. In February 1999, the U.N. terminated a five-year contract with Lloyd's Register, which had set up an innovative system in Jordan for inspecting shipments of goods going into Iraq to ensure against sanctions-busting. The contract was put to tender and Cotecna won with the lowest bid. It has had the contract ever since and it was renewed by the Coalition Provisional Authority in November.

And yet the choice of Cotecna should have raised a few eyebrows. The firm's founder and president is the octogenarian Elie Georges Massey, a Coptic emigr? who transformed his company from salt-extraction in Iran in the early '70s into one of a handful of players in the rough-and-tumble business of pre-shipment inspection (or PSI). PSI work mostly involves winning contracts in the developing world, where customs authorities are too corrupt or inept to be trusted, to monitor the flow of exports and imports.

Cotecna, known in the industry for the Massey family's superb contacts in the countries in which it does business, has won PSI deals in Iran, Nigeria, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Peru and other places. One prominent former employee of Cotecna is Kojo Annan, Kofi Annan's son by his first marriage. The young Mr. Annan was employed by Cotecna in the mid-1990s. He reportedly continued a consultancy relationship with Cotecna through his Nigerian-based company.

Philip Henebry, Cotecna's CFO, confirmed that Kojo Annan had been employed there, but would not confirm any dates. Asked how Cotecna was able to underbid competitors on the Iraq contract by as much as half, he replied that "We felt that the margins with competitors were very, very high. Originally the contract was for short periods and we worked on the assumption it would be renewed."

At the time of the U.N. inspection tender, Cotecna's reputation wasn't exactly stellar. Its CEO, Robert Massey, was indicted by a Swiss magistrate in a bribery and money laundering scandal involving Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, that rocked the PSI industry. Also indicted were a former employee of Swiss giant and the global PSI leader, Societ? G?n?rale de Surveillance (SGS)--which at the time owned a majority stake in Cotecna--and a Geneva-based Bhutto lawyer. Cotecna claimed it was a victim of Pakistani politics. SGS, which was suffering its own management and financial troubles, subsequently sold Cotecna back to the Massey family and itself came under new management which diversified the company away from its reliance on PSI contracts. Cotecna, meanwhile, dusted itself off and went on to win a lucrative U.N. deal. According to Yves Genier, a Swiss journalist from the newspaper l'Agefi who has been looking into Cotecna's role here, the prosecutor's case was dropped for lack of compelling public interest.

There is no doubt that the U.N. relief effort in Iraq has been a global scandal. A monstrous dictator was able to turn the Oil-for-Food program into a cash cow for himself and his inner circle, leaving Iraqis further deprived as he bought influence abroad and acquired the arms and munitions that coalition forces discovered when they invaded Iraq last spring.
A U.N. culture of unaccountability is certainly also to blame. And Security Council members share responsibility for lax oversight, no doubt one reason there is so little appetite for an investigation.

But Saddam's ability to reap billions for himself, his cronies and those who proved useful to him abroad depended on individuals who were his counterparties. These deserve a full investigation if the U.N.'s credibility is to be restored and its role in Iraq and elsewhere trusted. Especially now, with the U.N. taking a more active role in Iraq, it's time we knew more about how the oil-for-food scandal was allowed to happen.

Ms. Raphael is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.

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>> "..."

Red-Faced U.N. Finds Black Box of the 1994 Rwandan Air Crash
By WARREN HOGE
UNITED NATIONS, March 11 -- Embarrassed officials disclosed Thursday that the United Nations was unknowingly holding an airplane black box shipped here from Africa after the 1994 crash that killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and set off the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans.
Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, who earlier this week had denied knowledge of the box, said Thursday that a search provoked by journalists' questions had turned it up in a locked file drawer in the office of the United Nations' air safety coordinator, across the street from headquarters.
Mr. Eckhard said diary entries showed that the officials who received the black box a few months after the crash concluded from the recorder's "pristine condition" that it could not have been in the wreck. He said it had never been opened nor had its tape been played.
He said that it was being given to outside experts to determine whether it was the black box from the 1994 wreck and that Mr. Annan had ordered the United Nations inspector general to investigate how it had gone unaccounted for. "The secretary general wants to know exactly what went on 10 years ago that this matter wasn't reported up the chain," Mr. Eckhard said.
Mr. Annan, speaking to reporters after his monthly lunch with Security Council members, said he was "incredulous," and called the situation "a real foul-up, a first-class foul-up."
Thursday's announcement followed a report in Le Monde, a French daily, about an unpublished French investigation that accused the United Nations of withholding the downed aircraft's flight recorder.
Mr. Eckhard acknowledged that he had "ridiculed" the report when first asked about it on Tuesday, but that a subsequent inquiry showed that the black box had been sent to New York three months after the crash, in an official pouch from the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, by way of Nairobi, Kenya.
The index numbers and details on an accompanying tag had been circulated in aviation circles, but there had been no confirmation of the black box's origins, he said.
The air-safety officials, after concluding that it was not the right black box, apparently decided to store it in a file cabinet but never notified anyone in the secretary general's office, Mr. Eckhard said.
Mr. Annan was head of the United Nations peacekeepers when the massacre occurred. He has often cited the failure to stop the mass killings as one of the lowest points in the history of the international community, and some reports have singled out the United Nations for criticism.
The Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, both of the dominant Hutu tribe, died on April 6, 1994, when their Falcon 50 aircraft was brought down by two ground-to-air missiles as it approached the airport in Kigali.
Their deaths triggered a 100-day wave of killings in Rwanda of an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsi and moderate Hutu by extremist Hutu.
It has never been certain who shot down the plane, with suspicion alternating between Tutsi rebels and hard-liners in the Habyarimana government worried that Mr. Habyarimana was yielding to international pressure to bring Tutsi into the government.
Le Monde said the French investigation -- carried out by the antiterrorist division of the French judicial police -- concluded that it was Paul Kagame, Rwanda's current president, who ordered the plane shot down. At the time, Mr. Kagame was the leader of a rebel Tutsi movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front.



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