The oil-for-food scandal keeps bringing up some interesting although by no means surprising evidence that the program was corrupt.
A letter has come to The Wall Street Journal supporting allegations that among those favored by Saddam with gifts of oil was Benon Sevan, director of the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food Program. As detailed on this page on Feb. 9, Mr. Sevan’s name appears on a list of individuals, companies and organizations that allegedly received oil allocations or vouchers from Saddam that could then be sold via middlemen for a significant markup. The list, compiled in Arabic from documents uncovered in Iraq’s oil ministry, included many of Saddam’s nearest and dearest from some 50 countries, including the PLO, pro-Saddam British MP George Galloway, and French politician Charles Pasqua. (Messrs. Galloway and Pasqua have denied receiving anything from Saddam.) According to the list, first published by the Iraqi daily Al Mada in January, Mr. Sevan was another beneficiary, via a company in Panama known as Africa Middle East Petroleum, Co. Ltd. (AMEP), about which we have learned quite a bit.
There is more and the evidence is mounting. As Claudia Rosett puts it in her NRO guest comment:
U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop, or that they even had time to notice it was out there. They were too busy making the world a better place.
Read the whole thing as they say. It appears that there is a positive side to totalitarian regimes… they are sticklers for bureaucracy and record-keeping.
Via Instapundit.
Your point about bureaucracy in totalitarian regimes is a good one. The main reason we know who died and when in Nazi death camps is the book-keeping. Partly it is the semblance of complying with the Nazi version of ‘due process’, partly also because the whole idea of ‘totalitarian’ includes keeping records of everything.
This aspect of totalitarianism was especially well discussed in Orwell’s 1984.
When Prof. Jeanne Kirkpatrick was the UN Ambassador during Reagan’s era, she created a huge whoop-de-doo by proposing that the UN investigate governmental corruption and its detrimental effects on the peoples of the world. As most of the governments represented in the UN are little more than Mafia families who have wrested control of the political extortion racket from the previous gang, their displays of outraged indignation were absolutely priceless.
The media, of course, criticized the Ambassador, and Reagan, for being so tactless as to suggest such a thing. As we all know, dictators and such like have very delicate feelings, and are easily hurt by such petty allegations.
It was reminiscent of Buckley’s famous story of the guy in the Inspector General’s office who actually took his job seriously. He sent out a survey of government employees which asked three questions. How much was your total worth when you were hired by the US government? How much is your total worth now? How long have you been in government service?
He was fired. Some questions cannot be asked.
Another ‘worthy’ cause that should be examined is the International Olympic Commitee.
The corrupton seems to have spread from the organizers to the particpants.
Why do these creeps always defile good and genuine ideas?
At least the corporate shysters are fairly open about their endeavours, and make no pretence of altruism. It is the bureaucrats that betray the trust of the populace in such a deviously nasty way, while all the while trumpeting the ‘virtue’ of public service.
The more ‘International’ the personality – the greater the hypocrisy.
At least with the corporate leech there is some limit to their greed, overstep the limit and their greed is revealed when their corporation goes bust, but with International NGO’s, there is no limit, and no punishment, even when they are discovered, they cover for each other, and just go on another fund raising drive, the purse is bottomless!. In their case – enough is never enough, and the greed becomes an end in itself.
The Annan family is just as corrupt and criminally inclined as any modern dictatorship, and the Left think that we should be more considerate of the UN, what a sick joke!…..
Kind of far-sighted when we protected the Oil Ministry, eh?