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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (130471)	5/2/2004 9:49:01 AM
From: Rascal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

No doubt you've heard of the still-emerging scandal over the UN oil-for-food program for Iraq. The fact that the program was a hotbed of corruption is not news. What has only emerged quite recently is that the Iraqi regime was apparently using contracts from the program as bribes and pay-offs to various western politicians, journalists and other dignitaries. You may not have heard a sidenote to this scandal -- the question of who will be in charge of the investigation and who controls the key documentary evidence upon which the investigation will be based. We'll be following up on this in some detail over the next few days. And Shaun Waterman of UPI has a piece out today which is a good place to start to get a handle on what's going on in this case. The crux of the matter, however, is whether the investigation will be conducted through some transparent process or whether it will be conducted by a team under the control of ... well, can you guess? Ahmed Chalabi. talkingpointsmemo.com Link to UPI upi.com Chalabi aide Entifadah Qanbar, visiting Washington, told UPI that there would have to be an accounting for the delay. "The Iraqi people are going to want to know why we didn't move more quickly." "There is one route to appointing the investigators," he said. "There is one set of funds. There will be one investigation." He added that it was "unclear" what role, if any, Hankes-Drielsma might play in that inquiry. For his part, Hankes-Drielsma said that the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit was a "very new idea" and that "no one knows much about it." He also said that $5 million would pay only for a "half-baked" investigation, arguing that the cost of a thorough probe would two to four times that. At the heart of the questions about who conducts the inquiry and who oversees it is the issue of access to the documentation underlying a list, published by an Iraqi newspaper, of the names of about 270 individuals, companies and organizations said to have received oil vouchers. The vouchers, which guaranteed the right to buy Iraqi oil at a certain low price, were used when sales under the oil-for-food program were made to middlemen or traders. They could be cashed in or traded and were worth between 5 and 50 or more cents on the barrel. Some of those on the list -- like the U.N. official who ran the program, Bevon Savan -- have no legitimate connection to the oil business and the paper accused them of accepting the vouchers as bribes. Savan has denied receiving "oil or monies from the former Iraqi regime." Allegations that Saddam was earning illicit cash by smuggling oil out of the country, or that his inner circle were profiting from kickbacks paid by companies keen to get the lucrative business are nothing new. But the publication of the list in January was the first time that charges were leveled at people outside the regime, including former ministers in France, political parties in Russia, Arab journalists, British politicians and dozens of companies domiciled in Switzerland, Liechtenstein or Cyprus. Republican lawmakers and administration officials in Washington (who have between them several of their own inquiries into the affair) have suggested that votes on the U.N. Security Council may have been influenced by the voucher scheme, and some have hinted darkly at a web of corruption that reaches all the way to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In an unusually aggressive response, Annan on Wednesday said some of the charges against the United Nations were "misinformation," and that some of the things said about the program were "outrageous and exaggerated." Indeed there is a sense among U.N. supporters -- palpable in a hearing this week -- that the launch of the United Nation's own inquiry draws a line under a period when leaked documents and anonymous sources provided a rich vein for the organization's critics. Rascal @PeopleWhoCan'tGoogleShouldStopLying.com