The Senator vs. the U.N.
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Robert Novak
WASHINGTON -- "The extent of the corruption is
staggering," Sen. Norm Coleman told me. He is a
freshman Republican from Minnesota completing his
second year in Washington, and he was talking about
the United Nations and its pious secretary general,
Kofi Annan. Coleman's comments are not the mere
musings of an insignificant rookie senator, but the
considered judgment of a committee chairman whose
careful investigation reached the hearing stage
Monday.
After winning his Senate seat against former Vice
President Walter F. Mondale in 2002, Coleman was
rewarded with the chairmanship of the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations (made infamous a
half-century ago during Joe McCarthy's tenure). He now
is conducting what could be the most explosive
congressional investigation in years, probing the UN's
fraudulent oil-for-food program in Iraq and Annan's
obstruction of the senatorial inquiry.
Coleman said this week's hearings will show that "the
scope of the rip-off" at the UN is "substantially
more" than the widely reported $10 billion to $11
billion in graft. But more than money is involved.
These hearings also should expose the arrogance of the
secretary general and his bureaucracy. At the same
time that he has refused to honor the Senate
committee's request for documents, Annan has inveighed
against the Fallujah offensive sanctioned by the new
Iraqi government while ignoring the terrorism of
insurgents. This is an unprecedented showdown between
a branch of the U.S. government and the United
Nations.
The scandal is not complicated. Money from Iraqi oil
sales permitted by the Saddam Hussein regime under UN
auspices, supposedly to provide food for Iraqis, was
siphoned off to middlemen. Billions intended to
purchase food wound up in Saddam Hussein's hands for
the purpose of buying conventional weapons. The
complicity of UN member states France and Russia is
pointed to by the Senate investigation. The web of
corruption deepened when it was revealed that Annan's
son, Kojo, was on the payroll of a contractor in the
oil-for-food program.
As the pressure built on Annan, on April 16 he named
former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to
conduct an "independent" investigation. This has been
construed on Capitol Hill as a ploy to stave off any
serious congressional inquiry. Nobody questions
Volcker's integrity, but his political skills have
always been suspect. His Independent Inquiry
Committee, off to a slow start because of inadequate
funding, in the absence of subpoena powers looks like
a sham.
Coleman is not pursuing a right-wing vendetta against
the world organization. The senator was a born and
bred liberal Democrat from Brooklyn before the
claustrophobic liberalism of Minnesota's Democratic
Farmer Labor Party compelled him to become a
Republican in 1996 as the elected Democratic mayor of
St. Paul. He had no anti-UN mindset when he embarked
on his investigation.
What's more, Coleman has been joined in rare
bipartisan cooperation by the subcommittee's fiercely
liberal ranking Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan.
Coleman sent Levin a draft of a tough letter to Annan,
and Levin -- after making a few edits -- signed it.
The bipartisan letter demanded access to UN internal
audits and key UN personnel. It also accused the
Volcker committee of "affirmatively preventing the
subcommittee" from investigating the scandal. A major
point of dispute is the UN's flat refusal to permit
Lloyd's Register, hired by the UN to inspect Iraq's
oil-for-food transactions, to provide any documents to
the Senate.
The reaction by the UN bureaucracy has been an
intransigent defense of its stone wall. Edward
Mortimer, the secretary general's director of
communications (and a British national), publicly
sneered at the Coleman-Levin letter as "very awkward
and troubling." Privately, Annan's aides told
reporters that they were not about to hand over
confidential documents to the Russian Duma and every
other parliamentary body in the world.
But the U.S. Senate is not the Russian Duma. These are
not just a few right-wing voices in the wilderness who
are confronting Kofi Annan. "In seeing what is
happening at the UN," Coleman told me, "I am more
troubled today than ever. I see a sinkhole of
corruption." The United Nations and its secretary
general are in a world of trouble.
November 15, 2004
