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Iraq: the real sanctions scandal
The recent interim report by the independent commission investigating the United Nations oil-for-food programme accuses UN officials of favouritism, violation of competitive bidding rules, and a dangerous lack of auditing. But the truth may be far more complicated.
By Joy Gordon
Le Monde diplomatique
ANOTHER Iraq scandal emerged last spring, quite different from the Abu Ghraib prison torture allegations, complete with photographs, that were then embarrassing the Bush adminstration in the United States. The Iraqi newspaper Al Mada focused attention on charges that the United Nations-run oil-for-food programme had been corrupt. In April the US general accounting office published a report claiming that Saddam Hussein had accumulated over $10bn in funds from illicit oil sales and kickbacks on import contracts (1). Later a 900-page CIA report found there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but noted that the Iraqi government had none the less engaged in smuggling and fraud to raise money for weapons of mass destruction.
The rightwing press in the US has been eager to follow up on the accusations, and histrionically. William Safire proclaimed it “the worst financial scandal in human history” (2), although the recent Enron company scandal involving Kenneth Lay, a long-time friend of President George Bush, resulted in similar losses, including billions of dollars of employee pension funds. Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal described the UN programme as marked by “privilege and secrecy”, suggesting this put the UN in the same category as dictatorships (3). Congressman Christopher Shays, who presided over two of the nine congressional hearings that investigated the accusations, claimed that the programme had “trust[ed] Saddam Hussein to exercise sovereign control over billions of dollars of oil sales and commodity purchases” (4).
The Facts Behind the Volcker Commission’s Interim Report
By Joy Gordon
No 5. February 2005
UNA-USA Policy Brief
Introduction
The media and the critics of the United Nations have made much of the interim report of the Independent Inquiry Committee’s (the “Volcker Commission”) finding that the UN’s Oil-for-Food Programme was “tainted,” going as far as to conclude that the program as a whole—and perhaps the UN itself—is corrupt. In fact, the Commission’s findings are much more limited than that. The interim report does not have much to say about the “big ticket” accusations: that Saddam Hussein was able to get $10 billion (or $21 billion, depending on whose numbers you look at) through illicit means. It does say one thing very clearly about the multi-billion dollar accusations: that they largely have nothing to do with the UN or the Oil-for-Food Programme at all.
