UN to Defund OIOS Watchdog

It all sounded so good. Get a high-powered investigative team together to look into the activities of the UN. Sadly, the Office of Internal Oversight Services [OIOS] did just that. It found “multiple instances of fraud, corruption, waste and mismanagement at UN headquarters and peacekeeping missions, including ten significant instances of fraud and corruption with aggregate value in excess of $610 million.” In gratitude, the UN General Assembly will defund it in the coming year.

According to the Washington Post, “UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged the General Assembly to fund the task force for another year to pursue a backlog of cases, but a bloc of developing countries has refused to approve the request, calling for more debate. A UN budget committee, responding to pressure from the developing countries, will probably finance the task force for six months -- a move that officials warn could undermine efforts to retain the investigators.”

The crooked nations who fear the spotlight are led by crypto-fascist Singapore. The Post also reported, “Singapore has also criticized the task force for allegedly trampling the rights of one of its nationals, Andrew Toh, a senior UN official who said he was denied access to legal counsel. ‘What bothers us is the task force itself seems to think it can be exempted from the same standard that it wants to apply to other people,’ said Singapore’s UN ambassador, Vanu Gopala Menon.” Bullshit. Mr. Toh is suspected of taking bribes in a case where Peruvian generals and a Canadian helicopter company made a deal for choppers for East Timor. Without subpoena power, the OIOS can’t prove anything, and that's more protection than anyone gets from their own national government.

The Post further says, “In Congo, the task force reached far back into UN archives to put together its case against [Abdul Karim] Masri , who began working for the organization in the mid-1980s in Damascus, Syria. Masri's colleagues accused him at the time of falsifying receipts for several vendors, including a cement company, which allowed them to get full payment even though they delivered only a portion of contracted shipments.” One is prepared to accept that the statute of limitations applies here, but the truth still matters even if no one is going to jail.

And “In Haiti, the United Nations charged five employees with misconduct after the task force established that they had steered a $10 million-a-year fuel contract to a Haitian company, Distributeurs Nationaux S.A., according to U.N. officials and confidential documents. The task force has been unable to prove that the five profited from the scheme, citing its lack of authority to subpoena bank records, but it recommended that the case be referred for criminal prosecution by authorities in Haiti or the United States.” The Haitians and the Yanks appear unwilling to act.

Corruption is serious at the UN. So is the reputation of those accused. One would like to believe that Messrs. Toh, Masri and the others are innocent. Defunding the investigation won’t help them clear their names, and indeed, it looks like things are being fixed. There is a segment of American political thought that says this is the very reason not to remain a part of the UN. It reflects badly on the UN not that there are corrupt individuals so much as there appears to be a cover-up.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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