As heads of states and government leaders descended on New York for the UN’s 60th anniversary summit this week, Secretary-General Kofi Annan sounded peeved when his reform project for the organization stalled.
“We have not yet achieved the sweeping and fundamental reform that I and many others believe is required,” he said.
His reform proposals are to be found in the UN document released last year, titled “A more secure world: Our shared responsibility.” As a document summarizing challenges confronting the world community, it is worth reading.
But the problem facing Annan is not the strength or weakness of the reform program presented at the UN. He is like Claudius, uncle and stepfather of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, prince of Denmark, posturing on the stage when the ghost of Hamlet’s father is indicating irrefutably that there is something rotten in the state where Claudius presides.
The rot inside the UN—more precisely with the administration provided by Annan—was revealed further by the latest report of Paul Volcker’s independent inquiry committee into the Oil-for-Food scandal.
The Volcker report, investigating the work of the Office of Iraq Program under the direct authority of the secretary-general’s office, is a massive indictment of the ineptness and corruption of its director, Benon Sevan, who ran “a $100-billion program with very little oversight from the supervisory authority that created his position.”
The Wall Street Journal summarized the report’s findings in the following words: “Oil for Food is not about some isolated incidents of perceived or actual wrongdoing during the course of a seven-year effort to maintain sanctions on Iraq, monitor its oil flows and feed its people. Oil for Food is a story about what the UN is. And our conclusion from reading the 847-page report is that the UN is Oil for Food.”
What we have learned this far is not surprising. Annan has presided over an administration in New York that seems to have conceived its task as that of a public relations front for dictators and serial violators of human rights, while squeezing the UN’s principal donor, the United States taxpayers, with inflated rhetoric of global responsibility to eliminate poverty in an interdependent world.
Claudia Rosett, of the Washington-based Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, has been singularly responsible over the past couple of years for meticulously researching and documenting the UN’s failure under Annan’s leadership.
Incompetence and theft
In a recent essay she writes: “Scandals at the UN have proliferated to where they need cross-indexing simply to keep track of them, from incompetence to theft to bribery to money-laundering to rape—in (mix and match) New York, Geneva, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, and West Africa, to name just the short list of recent examples.”
It now seems clear why some Security Council members (China, France and Russia) were unwilling to support regime change in Iraq. They were beneficiaries of Saddam Hussein’s brazen manipulation of what became the Oil for Fraud program. More of this is waiting to be revealed in future reports of the IIC. The question Canadians need to ask is whether anyone in Ottawa is willing to demand accountability from Annan.
He failed in Iraq and has apparently learned nothing from genocide in Rwanda or the Balkan crisis as murder and rape in Darfur proceeds unchecked. UN bureaucrats under him have been indicted for taking bribes or dismissed for ethical lapses and sexual impropriety.
Kofi Annan can best demonstrate his seriousness about UN reform by taking his leave and departing New York.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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