International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2005
Oil-for-food: Far from a failure
by Benon V. Sevan
After nearly a year and a half and more than $35 million spent, the
Independent Inquiry Committee Into the United Nations Oil-for-Food
Program (IIC), led by the former Federal Reserve chairman Paul
Volcker, has faulted the management of the program, which I ran for
six years. It is easy to apply formal management and audit criteria
after the fact to a massive multibillion-dollar humanitarian program,
but as the recent crisis in New Orleans shows, what is critical when
people are dying is to bring food and medicine to affected
populations as quickly as possible. This we accomplished. There are
many thousands of people alive today because of the oil-for-food
plan.
There is a misconception, reinforced by the familiar echo chamber of
the Murdoch press, The Wall Street Journal, the UN bashers in the
U.S. Congress, and neocon think tanks, that the program was a failure
of epic proportions, riddled with corruption and pliant to Saddam
Hussein’s every manipulation. The reality is that the oil-for-food
program was highly successful in its fundamental mission of
addressing the acute humanitarian crisis caused by sanctions imposed
on Iraq, in channeling all but a very small percentage of Iraqi oil
revenues into food, medicine, and other approved humanitarian
supplies, and in helping to maintain international support for
sanctions, which in turn prevented Iraq from developing weapons of
mass destruction during the course of the program.
Volcker’s ‘public’ and other political constituencies are
nevertheless demanding heads on a platter, and the latest IIC report,
sadly, appears to capitulate to that pressure by unfairly targeting
the Secretariat, including the Office of the Iraq Program (OIP) and
me, for problems that were essentially inherent in the design of the
program and in the inevitable reality of politics among member
states.
The program was created by a series of Security Council resolutions
that carefully defined – and limited – the role of the Secretariat.
In particular, the Office of the Iraq Program did not have
responsibility for monitoring, policing or investigating sanctions
violations. That role was specifically reserved to the Security
Council; its so-called 661 Committee, which monitored the overall
sanctions regime and oil-for-food; and member states. The IIC knows
or should know this. Yet the IIC insists repeatedly on blaming the
OIP for functions, such as investigating sanctions violations, that
lay beyond its mandate.
The IIC also faults the secretary general, the deputy secretary
general and me for failing to provide information regarding Iraqi
demands for illicit kickbacks and surcharges to the Security Council
through formal rather than informal channels. But in setting forth
its charges, the IIC seems to confuse the decision not to convey
information through official channels with a decision not to convey
the information at all. On no occasion did OIP or I personally
withhold material information from the Security Council members, the
secretary general and his deputy. OIP informed the 661 Committee not
only on surcharges but also on at least 70 occasions of contracts
reflecting suspicious pricing (and hence possible kickbacks), yet the
committee declined in every instance to act. Similarly, I informed
the U.S. government, effectively the policeman for sanctions
violations in the Gulf, of maritime smuggling on a massive scale that
was occurring, to no avail.
It is now known that the United States and other member states
purposefully allowed this smuggling to occur, in addition to the
massive daily shipment of oil by land routes, putting billions of
dollars directly into Saddam’s pockets in violation of sanctions in
order to support Iraq’s trading partners, Turkey and Jordan, which
are also U.S. allies. It smacks of hypocrisy to criticize OIP for a
political compromise made to help the economies of American allies.
The IIC also engages in a lot of second-guessing as to whether I
delegated too much authority to senior managers on the ground in Iraq
instead of to bureaucrats in New York. I disagree with these
criticisms. Micromanagement from 8,000 miles away would have been a
recipe for disaster in an immense and complex program like
oil-for-food.
It is important to consider what those, including Security Council
members, who were observing our performance in real time had to say
about its management. Among others, in October 2003, Ambassador John
Negroponte of the United States, the president of the Security
Council (and now President George W. Bush’s director of national
intelligence), speaking in his national capacity, commended “the
outstanding work” that we had “done both in New York and in the
region over the years in the implementation of the program, as well
as the “exceptional professionalism and thoroughness” of OIP staff
“despite the obstacles and challenges that they face daily.”
The program was not perfect, nor was it ever expected to be. It was
implemented within the context of a very rigorous sanctions regime,
carried out in six-month extensions (and hence always on the verge of
closing down), beset by conflicting political pressures, situated in
a country in crisis and hindered by fundamental design problems –
most notably, the Security Council’s decision to allow Saddam to
select his own contractors for oil exports and imports of
humanitarian supplies, as well as to implement the program in the 15
governorates in the center and south of Iraq, which all but
guaranteed political manipulation.
At the same time, my colleagues and I were faced with the grave
responsibility of providing basic life necessities to a highly
vulnerable population. We took that responsibility both seriously and
personally. As the recent tragedy in New Orleans demonstrated, there
is a cost to overly bureaucratizing a crisis relief effort that the
IIC chooses to ignore. The people of Iraq desperately needed
humanitarian relief in real time. Thanks to the oil-for-food program,
they received it. That is the essential purpose of a humanitarian
program, and we accomplished that purpose, in nearly impossible
circumstances. Despite its shortcomings, the program made a major
difference in the lives of the Iraqi people.
(Benon V. Sevan is former director of the oil-for-food program for
Iraq.)