Iconoclasm Dept.: UN-accountability

This column from the Telegraph is both funny and appalling:

At tough times in my life, with the landlord tossing my clothes and record collection out on to the street, I could have used an aunt like Benon Sevan's. Asked to account for the appearance in his bank account of a certain $160,000, Mr Sevan, executive director of the UN Oil-for-Food programme, said it was a gift from his aunt. Lucky Sevan, eh? None of my aunts ever had that much of the folding stuff on tap.

And nor, it seems, did Mr Sevan's. She lived in a modest two-room flat back in Cyprus and her own bank accounts gave no indication of spare six-figure sums. Nonetheless, if a respected UN diplomat says he got 160,000 bucks from Auntie, we'll just have to take his word for it. Paul Volcker's committee of investigation did plan to ask the old lady to confirm her nephew's version of events, but, before they could, she fell down an elevator shaft and died.

If you're a UN bigshot, or the son of Kofi Annan, or the cousin of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, or any of the other well-connected guys on the Oil-for-Fraud payroll, $160,000 is pretty small beer. But, if you're a starving kid in Ramadi or Nasariyah, it would go quite a long way. Instead, the starving-kid money went a long way in the opposite direction, to the Swiss bank accounts of Saddam's apologists. "The Secretary-General is shocked by what the report has to say about Mr Sevan," declared Kofi Annan's chief of staff, Britain's own Mark Malloch Brown.

That's how bad things are at the UN: even the Brits sound like Claude Rains. Of course, the Secretary-General isn't "shocked" at all. And nor are the media, which is why the major news organisations can barely contain their boredom with the biggest financial scam of all time – bigger than Enron, Worldcom and all the rest rolled into one. If ever there were a dog-bites-man story, "UN Stinkingly Corrupt Shock!" is it.