AZG Armenian Daily #170, 23/09/2005

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BENON V. SEVAN OFFERS EXPLANATION

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.

>From International Herald Tribune (Benon V. Sevan is former director of the
oil-for-food program for Iraq.)