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Home » Posts » Benon Sevan A Scapegoat For Protomaga

Benon Sevan A scapegoat for protoMAGA!

Mon, 10/05/2026 - 8:12pm

It is sad news about Benon Sevan who died yesterday  after spending his last years in exile in his native Cyprus as a pillar of the local Armenian community. A life long UN staffer with extensive experience, he was impatient with bullshit and bureaucracy (do I repeat myself?). I butted heads with him a few times as President of the UN Correspondents Association but never doubted his sincere support for the UN nor his willingness to speak his mind. In Afghanistan he sheltered the former President Najibullah from murder by a US backed war lord.

When the world realized  that, despite Madeline Albright, starving millions Iraqis was not "worth the pice," he was commissioned to run  the Oil For Food Programme, from 1995,  in which the UN used the proceeds of hitherto sanctioned Iraqi oil exports to buy food and medicine. It was a huge and complex operation but was successful, not least because Benon bulldozed through the UN bureaucrats. 

Many of us who observed the operation suspected that without his brusque shortcutting of procedures the  hungry Iraqis would never have got the supplies. His occasionally abrupt delivery probably told against him when he was confronted by the witch-hunt that was the now-forgotten "Oil For Food." This charade was concocted by the Conservative Right to get at Kofi Annan, when the Secretary General admitted that the Blair/ Bush war on Iraq was illegal. 

The now forgotten "Oil for Food Scandal" was essentially concocted by the Fox/right WSJ  chamber and as I have shown in the articles below even if all of the exaggerated or false allegations were true, the US plundering of the funds after the war was far worse. It was an early success for the right Lynch Mob. Once the conservative media had written the headlines, the rest of the complaisant media followed down the Fox-hole, baying for Kofi Annan's blood.

The UN was panicked into an inquiry which found little fire underneath all the smoke. Benon  was unable (or unwilling) to explain some minor property transactions, and at the time I suspected that there was possibly some fiscal sleight of hand. But it was all the witch-hunters had to show  so when he was indicted, went back home to Cyprus which would not extradite him. If he had stayed  "do the right thing" and returned to Manhattan to face trial, it would have been suicidal with the Lynch mob atmosphere at the time.

 

https://deadlinepundit.blogspot.com/2007/03/let-him-who-is-without-sin-get-his-hand.html

WORLD POLICY JOURNAL ï WINTER 2006/07 

 

Ian Williams is a journalist who has covered the United Nations since 1989. He is the author of four books and the editor of the forthcoming CQ Press Guide to the UN. 

 

 

The True UN Scandal

Who Pocketed the $10 Billion for Iraq?

Ian Williams 

 

In December 2006, Kofi Annan finished 

his two-term tenure as secretary general of 

the United Nations. Among his greatest 

achievements was undoubtedly shepherding 

the principle of "The Responsibility to Protect" 

through to adoption by the Heads of 

State Summit in the General Assembly in 

September 2005. By beginning to put some 

teeth in the Universal Declaration of Human 

Rights and overturning the traditional 

concept of absolute national sovereignty, 

this prefigured a huge change in international 

law, even if, as the ongoing conflict in 

Darfur demonstrates, its implementation 

leaves much to be desired. 

 

Sadly, however, in the United States 

at least, many commentators tied Annan's 

name to the alleged "Oil for Food" (OFF) 

scandal. It is perhaps timely to take a retrospective 

look at this, not least since the 

miasma it raised at the time still lingers 

around both him and the organization. 

Perhaps no molehill has ever been made 

into such a mighty mountain. 

 

Following attacks by the conservative 

UN-hating media in the United States, and 

to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom, 

Secretary General Kofi Annan convened an 

Independent Inquiry Committee into the 

OFF program to be headed by the former 

Federal Reserve chair, Paul Volcker. His 

committee had unprecedented access to documents, 

emails, and phone and financial 

records across the world. Annan's act was 

not that of a man who had anything to hide. 

 

In October 2005, and with the investigation 

costing almost $50 million dollars, 

the report1 came out, and in summer 2006 

 

it was followed with a précis "Good Intentions 

Corrupted: The Oil for Food Scandal 

and the threat to the UN."2 Paul Volcker 

wrote the introduction but two of the investigators, 

Jeffrey A. Meyer and Mark G. 

Califano, authored the content. In contrast 

to the enthusiastic coverage from the conservative 

media about the so-called scandal, 

the report did not garner much media 

attention, perhaps because, in general, it 

exonerated the United Nations from the 

hyperbolic accusations made against it. Its 

conclusions are relatively sober, unexceptional, 

and essentially repeat those of many 

previous reports on the failings of UN 

management. 

 

The book recounts examples of the five 

ambassadors holding permanent seats on 

the Security Council bypassing UN procurement 

procedures, and of U.S. naval cover 

occasionally being provided for oil smuggling 

operations, which, in total, amounted 

to $8.4 billion of revenue for Iraq in defiance 

of sanctions. It notes the general apathy 

of Security Council members to reports 

of smuggling, kickbacks, and surcharges, 

which netted the regime another $1.8 billion. 

It also points out that the Security 

Council gave the UN Secretariat and the 

 

Oil for Food program the mandate and 

framework that made it possible for Iraq- 

and many companies and governments-to 

manipulate the program. 

 

In the précis to the report, Volcker 

writes, "I did not, and do not today, believe 

that the evidence developed by the committee 

justifies a sweeping allegation that 

financial corruption is or was characteristic 

 

© 2007 World Policy Institute 

 

of the institution as a whole. Rather...there 

is a ‘culture of inaction,' of a strong tendency 

to evade administrative responsibility. 

That culture is rooted both in the character 

of the UN organization and in broadly political 

considerations." 

 

It is, however, that political context that 

is mostly missing from "Good Intentions 

Corrupted," just as it was from the Volcker 

report. There were good reasons why the 

Iraq program was not robust in its enforcement 

of sanctions, no matter how much 

shock the report expresses about inattention 

to such details. It is unlikely that the Security 

Council, cognizant of the hardship that 

Iraqi sanctions caused, will ever again agree 

to impose such comprehensive and draconian 

economic sanctions. Indeed, another 

lesson from the affair may be that, in a 

globalized world, any attempt to micromanage 

the foreign trade of an entire country's 

economy is not only futile, but risks 

disastrous socio-economic consequences. 

Since, the Security Council has limited 

subsequent sanctions to rogue regimes or 

against strictly military trade. 

 

The Background to OFF 

 

In a vindictive mood at the end of the 

original Gulf War in 1991, the Americans, 

with British and (at the time) French support, 

instituted a crushing package of economic 

sanctions, reparations, and monitoring 

against Iraq. Not since Versailles had 

victors imposed such measures on the defeated. 

The sanctions did not have a "sunset 

clause." A positive vote of the Security 

Council was necessary to lift them. It was 

only possible because, at that immediate 

juncture, the Soviet Union, and then Russia, 

cooperated. Later, other members asked for 

"light at the end of the tunnel"-a demonstration 

that Iraqi compliance with Security 

Council resolutions would lead to lifting 

the sanctions-but the United States 

made it plain that it would veto any such 

attempt while Saddam Hussein remained 

in power. 

 

The original sin was the rush of enthusiasm 

in the aftermath of the Gulf War and 

the Cold War, when the UN looked likely 

to become the executor of Washington's foreign 

policy. A more independent secretariat 

might have warned of the pitfalls of the policy 

the Security Council adopted, although, 

to be fair, at the time few foresaw that sanctions 

would still be in effect a decade later. 

 

As the economy imploded and public 

services collapsed, it soon became apparent 

that the sanctions' primary victims were 

ordinary Iraqis. Indeed, Secretary of State 

Madeleine Albright ruminated on CBS's 60 

Minutes in 1996: "We have heard that a half 

million children have died. I mean, that's 

more children than died in Hiroshima.... Is 

the price worth it?... I think this is a very 

hard choice, but the price-we think the 

price is worth it." She has since regretted 

the statement, but at least it had the benefit 

of candor. Clearly, Washington did think 

that the political and strategic benefits outweighed 

the costs paid by Iraqi civilians, 

otherwise it could have relaxed the sanctions. 

 

 

Sadly, it was the United Nations that 

tallied those casualty figures, though staff 

members saw their job as developing 

economies, not destroying them; saving 

children, not starving them. They tended to 

see the sanctions as an American-enforced 

aberration from the true mission of the UN 

system. High-profile officials-such as Assistant 

Secretary General Denis Halliday, in 

September 1998, and Hans Von Sponeck, in 

March 2000-resigned in protest against 

complicity in what Halliday called genocide. 

It did not help that the resolutions 

earmarked 30 percent of the proceeds of oil 

sales to war reparations, which went mostly 

to Kuwait and major oil companies and 

which provided an additional pretext for 

Baghdad's defiance. 

 

Without firm opposition within the 

United Nations, for a few years during and 

after the Gulf War, Washington and its junior 

partner in London promulgated instruc-

tions inside the UN as if it were an extension 

of their own foreign policy apparatus. 

It was a brave staff member who resisted 

their wishes-as indeed Egypt's Boutros 

Boutros-Ghali himself discovered when his 

term as secretary general was not renewed, 

in part because he was insufficiently cooperative 

with Madeleine Albright. 

 

In the Arab and Muslim world, and 

even in Western Europe, the palpable suffering 

of Iraqi citizens eroded support for sanctions 

and diminished the moral standing of 

the world organization. The stark contrast 

between the relentless application of pressure 

on Iraq, and the free diplomatic pass 

given to Israel in enforcing compliance with 

Security Council resolutions, also exacerbated 

disaffection. While legally significant, 

the contrast between resolutions censuring 

Iraq, which contained their own means of 

enforcement, and those against Israel, which 

did not, merely reinforced the perceived disparity. 

Even Saddam Hussein's cavalier disregard 

for, and defiance of, UN disarmament 

resolutions found defenders in the 

face of Washington's relentless antipathy. 

As the sanctions wore on and American officials 

began to call for regime change, UN 

members chafed at what seemed a blatant 

attempt to flout the bedrock principle of 

national sovereignty. (No UN resolutions 

ever mentioned overthrowing Saddam- 

indeed George H. W. Bush had deliberately 

avoided that option at the end of Operation 

Desert Storm in order to preserve the international 

coalition.) Clearly, if the sanctions 

had needed a reauthorization vote-as 

peacekeeping operations do-it is unlikely 

there would have been a Security Council 

majority to re-impose them, apart from the 

potential veto that the Russians, Chinese, 

and later the French might have wielded. 

 

Besides the moral considerations, Iraq 

represented potential oil concessions and 

trade with Russia, China, and France. By 

1997, sanctions were losing support and 

were about to crumble completely. For the 

majority of the council, and for much of the 

 

The True UN Scandal 

 

secretariat, since the U.S. veto was an insuperable 

obstacle to lifting sanctions, the Oil 

for Food program was seen primarily as a 

way to mitigate the effect of the sanctions 

on ordinary Iraqis by providing food supplies. 

In contrast, for Washington, whose 

basic assumptions the Volcker report reflects, 

the purpose of the Oil for Food program 

(to which it reluctantly agreed) was to 

maintain sanctions in the face of growing 

worldwide reluctance to cooperate. 

 

Smuggling Condoned 

 

Though a hostile conservative press has accused 

the Oil for Food program of providing 

billions of dollars to the Iraqi regime, most 

of the smuggling was already under way before 

the program was established. This was 

known to Western intelligence services and 

the media-or indeed anyone who wanted 

to know. The Americans and the British 

kept sending mixed messages-not officially 

condoning, but never overtly condemning 

Iraq's oil trade with Western allies. Under 

Article 50 of the charter, Iraq's neighbors, 

like Turkey and Jordan, were entitled to 

compensation for costs they incurred in 

maintaining sanctions. However, no one really 

wanted to pay up, least of all a U.S. administration 

that had for years found it difficult 

to obtain congressional approval of 

UN dues. So from the outset there was massive 

oil-trading, referred to as "smuggling" 

in the press and committee reports, across 

the borders to Jordan and Turkey, which the 

Volcker report confirms was well established 

by the time Oil for Food had begun. 

 

The American-allied Kurds in the north 

siphoned a significant percentage from oil 

sales to Turkey that passed through their 

territory, and the Jordanian economy would 

have collapsed without the oil trade across 

the border-for which Amman did ask permission 

of the Sanctions Committee, which 

"noted" the request without delivering 

an opinion. It was the diplomatic equivalent 

of a wink and a nudge. The Western 

powers only began to be irritated about the 

 

 

"smuggling" in 1997, when Damascus negotiated 

a rapprochement with Iraq and later 

re-opened the Syrian pipeline. The flurry 

of indignation from the British and others 

was hard to sustain, as they could not explain 

why this was in any way more censorious 

than the leakage to Turkey and Jordan. 

 

The Matter of Sovereignty 

 

Anomalously, Iraq was formally a sovereign 

member state of the UN even as it was being 

treated as a defeated nation. For example, 

to respect the letter of international law, 

the UN applied for Iraqi visas for its personnel 

in the Kurdish areas where Baghdad had 

no practical authority whatsoever, and allowed 

the regime to veto personnel. 

 

The United Nations Special Commission, 

the nominally UN weapons inspectors 

team, had proven to be an extension of U.S. 

intelligence, which played directly to Iraqi 

Ba'athists' paranoia. The Iraqis did not want 

a fresh team of weapons inspectors using the 

cover of the Oil for Food program serving 

on behalf of a state threatening military 

action against them. When the Security 

Council agreed to the Oil for Food program 

after initial American resistance, Saddam's 

regime showed that it could be equally opportunistic 

in its feigned principles, and 

initially cited national honor in resisting 

inspections. 

 

To get the food to the population, UN 

officials-who cared more about the Iraqi 

citizenry than either Baghdad or Washington-

in effect had to compromise with the 

Ba'athists' pretenses about "national honor" 

to get the program running. As a result, 

while the United Nations managed the escrow 

fund into which all oil sale revenue 

went, and which paid for the food, the program 

had no say about which companies or 

countries Baghdad chose to sell oil to, or to 

buy food and supplies from. 

 

Unsurprisingly, given hostility in Washington 

and London, Baghdad did not award 

many contracts to American or British companies, 

and used commerce to reward and 

 

influence countries like France, Russia, and 

China, whose votes they coveted in the Security 

Council. It would be naÔve to assume 

that those contracts had no influence in determining 

their votes. Certainly France's position 

changed considerably over this period. 

At least Baghdad's ill will towards Washington 

had the effect of sparing most American 

companies from the temptation to join 

in the kickback scheme. 

 

Taking all this into account, while the 

Volcker report spreads the blame among 

the member states, the Security Council, 

and the secretariat for the program's failure 

to enforce sanctions on Iraq, it misses the 

point in reprimanding the UN staff. To 

many, and very possibly a majority, while 

the Iraqi sanctions may have been legal under 

the UN Charter-they were illegitimate, 

and arguably immoral. Hence the 

contrast in outlook between the United 

States, as reflected in the Volcker committee's 

report, and much of the world. For 

most of the UN staff, the OFF program was 

about feeding Iraqis. For Washington it was 

about starving the regime of funds for rearmament. 

It needs reiteration that in both 

contexts it was hugely successful. By the 

end, the program was providing essential 

food and medical supplies for over 80 percent 

of the Iraqi population, and, as was 

subsequently proved by both Hans Blix's 

UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection 

Commission inspectors and their American 

successors, it was also successful in stopping 

Iraqi rearmament. 

 

Indeed, it was so successful that the 

 

U.S. occupation authorities asked the UN 

to continue the program after the 2003 invasion 

and then praised its performance 

after it ended. A surplus of more than $10 

billion dollars was handed over to the Occupation's 

"Iraq Development Fund" to be disbursed 

under the scrutiny of an international 

monitoring board. Such was the context 

when Kofi Annan asked Paul Volcker to 

establish and head the Independent Inquiry 

Committee. Yet surprisingly, the committee 

WORLD POLICY JOURNAL ï WINTER 2006/07 

 

 

did not take into account the very political 

circumstances of its own creation. 

 

How Success Turned to Scandal 

 

Within a year of the Iraq invasion, the anti-

UN media in the United States began to 

trumpet the "UN Oil for Food Scandal," 

which was, according to the neo-conservative 

columnist Charles Krauthammer, "the 

biggest financial scandal in the history of 

the world." Some of the wilder pundits 

claimed it involved the mismanagement of 

"hundreds of billions of dollars." The real 

target of the attacks was the United Nations 

itself, and, especially, the reputation of the 

secretary general. When, in December 

2004, Republican senator Norm Coleman 

of Minnesota called for Kofi Annan's resignation, 

the Minneapolis Star-Tribune provided 

a succinct explanation of what lay 

behind the attacks. Describing Coleman's 

call as a "sordid move," a December 4, 

2004, editorial explained, "For months before 

the election, the right-wing constellation 

of blogs and talk radio was alive with 

incendiary rhetoric about Annan and the 

oil-for-food scandal.... This is really all 

about Annan's refusal to toe the Bush line 

on Iraq and the administration's generally 

unilateral approach to foreign affairs. The 

right-wingers hate Annan and saw in the 

food-for-oil program a possible chink in his 

armor. They went after it with a venomous 

fury." 

 

The story of how Oil for Food mushroomed 

into a UN scandal begins with 

Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal 

writer who is now journalist-in-residence at 

the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. 

In a 2002 New York Times op-ed, just 

after Bush went to the UN to seek authorization 

for an invasion of Iraq, she called the 

Oil for Food program "an invitation to kickbacks, 

political back-scratching and smuggling 

done under cover of relief operations.... 

If the oil-for-food operation is extended, 

however, it will have a tremendous 

influence on shaping the new Iraq. Before 

 

that is allowed to happen, let's see the 

books." 

 

The idea that the UN had failed by not 

backing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and that 

Saddam Hussein's continued malfeasance 

could be blamed on the UN, was very much 

part of the house philosophy of the Foundation 

for the Defense of Democracies. Its 

board included such GOP eminences as Steve 

Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, 

Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich, and 

James Woolsey, as well as Richard Perle 

and Charles Krauthammer. Its own website 

advertised its connections with the Iraqi 

National Council and Ahmed Chalabi, its 

leader-in-exile. Chalabi's position was crucial. 

He disliked, in particular, Annan's 

special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, 

who was assembling an interim government 

in Baghdad and had correctly assessed the 

lack of indigenous support for Chalabi 

in Iraq. At one point, Chalabi had called 

the secretary general's office in New York 

to pressure Annan to appoint him to a position 

commensurate with his self-perceived 

importance. When Annan's office resisted, 

Chalabi and his team carried out their 

threat to propagate the claim that Benon 

Sevan, the retiring Oil for Food chief, was 

on a list of 267 people for whom Saddam 

Hussein had authorized commissions on 

oil trades. This claim provoked a rash 

of stories focusing on the alleged UN 

connection. 

 

With so much smoke, the media 

seemed to assume that there had to be a 

fire. Interestingly, these stories were mostly 

in the op-ed pages. The Wall Street Journal 

news section undertook some sterling investigative 

work that did not point at corruption 

in the UN, but rather at collaboration 

between private companies and member 

states in providing revenue for Baghdad. 

 

In March 2004, Annan, backed by the 

Security Council, appointed former Federal 

Reserve bank chair Paul Volcker to head 

an inquiry. Soon, however, the same people 

who had demanded the inquiry began to 

accuse Annan of under-funding it. When he 

then obtained $30 million from residual OFF 

funds set aside for administration, he was 

immediately accused of taking bread from 

Iraqi children's mouths. 

 

The New York Post denounced the inquiry 

as a cover-up, and New York Times 

columnist William Safire referred to Annan's 

"manipulative abuse of Paul Volcker," whose 

reputation for integrity was "being shredded 

by a web of sticky-fingered officials and see-

no-evil bureaucrats desperate to protect the 

man on top who hired him to substitute 

for-and thereby to abort-prompt and 

truly independent investigation." 

 

The chorus grew louder following the 

leak of a letter in which Annan cautioned 

the U.S.-led coalition against a frontal assault 

on Fallujah. Fox television's Bill 

O'Reilly declared that "it's becoming increasingly 

clear that UN chief Kofi Annan 

is hurting the USA." On November 24, 

2004, the National Review declared "Annan 

should either resign, if he is honorable, or 

be removed, if he is not." And, on December 

1, 2004, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Norm Coleman called for An-

nan's resignation. When asked, President 

Bush did not repudiate Coleman's call with 

any expression of confidence in Annan, but 

called simply for the investigation to take 

its course. A week later, Prime Minister 

Tony Blair joined much of the world in expressing 

support for Annan, to whom delegates 

in the General Assembly gave a standing 

ovation. 

 

By this time, the Volcker committee 

had won over the conservative press, albeit 

inadvertently. The interim reports publicized 

many allegations from the UN's own, 

widely derided Office of Internal Oversight 

Services, without publishing rebuttals from 

UN staff. The hostile press also welcomed 

the Volcker inquiry's censure of Annan over 

his son's involvement with Cotecna, a company 

contracted to inspect food deliveries. 

Kojo Annan had lied to his father in declaring 

that he had severed his relationship with 

 

the company, and it was discovered that he 

had concealed continuing payments from 

Cotecna. 

 

Volcker's team found no evidence that 

the Secretary General had in anyway been 

involved in the procurement scandal but 

held that he had not treated these allegations 

seriously enough. Annan had asked for 

the advice of his (U.S.-appointed) undersecretary 

general for management, and of his 

undersecretary general for legal affairs, who 

told him that since he had no contact with 

the procurement process, he did not need to 

take further action. And, though Volcker 

countered that he should not have believed 

his son and authorized a major inquiry, the 

published report effectively cleared Annan 

and the UN of the vast majority of the corruption 

charges leveled by the conservative 

media. Apart from Annan's involvement, 

this was a lesser matter than the ever-

growing billions that the critics alleged 

the UN had squandered. 

 

About Benon Sevan 

 

In the face of allegations of tens of billions 

floating from the gulf, the sole finding of 

direct UN corruption was leveled at Benon 

Sevan, the Cypriot head of the $100 billion 

program, who declared $147,000 in gifts 

over four years from an aunt, which the 

committee decided had come as commission 

on otherwise legitimate oil trades from a 

company run by his friends. If true-and 

the evidence the committee adduced was 

circumstantial-this was clearly unethical, 

but not necessarily illegal. They also took 

Sevan to task for his style of management. 

Sevan did run the program at arms' length 

from the secretariat, but his colleagues, 

while admitting that he could be stubborn 

and idiosyncratic, also pointed out that 

secretariat interference in OFF would have 

slowed down its work. By insulating it from 

bureaucratic interference, many believe the 

Cypriot abetted the program. 

 

Sevan returned to Cyprus in 2005 and 

has not been in New York since, which does 

not necessarily imply an admission of guilt. 

In New York, he faced a politically motivated 

prosecution in an atmosphere poisoned 

by media allegations. In January 2007, a 

 

U.S. district attorney filed charges against 

him. He denies guilt and cannot be extradited. 

Indeed, one suspects that the Volcker 

team's report devotes a chapter to him because, 

in the end, this was the only substantial 

accusation of serious impropriety against 

any UN official directly related to the program. 

For all the time, money, and effort put 

into the Volcker report, there are several 

significant omissions that obscure an accurate 

overall judgment of the Oil for Food 

program. For example, the inquiry does not 

look into what happened to the $10 billion 

in OFF surpluses that were handed to the 

American occupation authorities for the Development 

Fund for Iraq, for which no accounting 

has been provided either to Congress 

or to the International Advisory and 

Monitoring Board. It was not in his committee's 

mandate, said Volcker, to determine 

how much money was handed out, much of 

it in no-bid contracts, to companies close to 

the White House. Stuart W. Bowen, the 

 

U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction 

since October 2004, has also been 

unsuccessfully trying to find out what happened 

to the $10 billion, which had been 

augmented by a matching amount from 

frozen Iraq reserves. Notably, the press that 

had fulminated against the United Nations 

has been silent on this matter. 

Similarly, little attention has been paid 

to the fact that the Oil for Food program 

funneled $20 billion of Iraqi oil revenues to 

the largest reparations scheme since Versailles. 

Even at current reduced rates, 5 percent 

of Iraqi oil money will be diverted indefinitely 

to pay the balance of $30 billion 

in accepted claims. Kuwait has refused to 

discuss dropping these reparation demands. 

These figures clearly overshadow Sevan's alleged 

$147,000 in payoffs-both in quantity 

and their effect-but have not had one-

hundredth of the media coverage. The Security 

Council voted for both handovers of 

cash, which perhaps makes a much stronger 

case for political reform of the organization 

than the Volcker report makes for the long 

accepted need for managerial reforms. 

 

Neither the United Nations nor any 

other organization should be allowed to excuse 

incompetence or corruption by pointing 

the finger at other organizations and 

countries. There were serious faults in the 

OFF program, inherent in the mixture of political 

controls and motives behind it, and, 

as Annan himself said, it was far too ambitious 

a program for the UN to undertake. 

 

But, it is legitimate to contrast the froth 

and indignation over OFF with the relative 

silence from the same critics over the missing 

funds provided to Iraq. What was immediately 

apparent was that the UN reconstruction 

effort proved incapable of defending 

itself against a politically motivated assault 

on its integrity. Though there is a big 

constituency for the United Nations within 

the United States, it is essentially passive: 

with a few honorable exceptions, no leading 

figures stood up to defend the organization. 

Even as Kofi Annan retired, the stains lingered 

on both him and the organization. 

 

Among the obvious lessons are that the 

international community should never impose 

such draconian economic sanctions on a 

nation, and that such resolutions should, in 

any case, contain a sunset clause to prevent 

veto holders maintaining penalties in pursuit 

of selfish national interests. The biggest 

lesson, however, is the need for an independent 

and strong international civil service in 

the secretariat. This has not been helped by 

the failure of successive U.S. administrations 

to pay UN assessments on time and their 

tacit connivance in slander campaigns. In an 

interview with Kofi Annan just before he 

resigned, he put it with typical understatement: 

"There have been times when it has 

been tough, particularly when some people 

on the Hill or the right wing begin attacking 

the UN and the secretary general, and

no one pulls them back even though that's 

the same organization that you are going to 

turn to tomorrow. If you undermine the organization 

to that extent, your own population 

may ask you ‘Why are you going to 

this organization that you've discredited so 

much?'" Why, indeed? 

 

Notes 

 

1. The Volcker reports are available online at 

www.iic-offp.org. 

2. Jeffrey A. Meyer and Mark G. Califrano, Good 

Intentions Corrupted: The Oil-for-Food Scandal and the 

Threat to the U.N., introduction by Paul A. Volcker 

(New York: PublicAffairs, 2006). 

 

 

WORLD POLICY JOURNAL ï WINTER 2006/07 

Benon Sevan
Oil for Food
Kofi Annan
Cyprus
Fox News
Iraq
Afghanistan
Albright
Armenia
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