Interventions (45 page)

Dear Kofi:

Your BBC statement insures you of: A. a permanent place in history as the most courageous, truthful and independent U.N. Secretary-General, and B. No third term. Congratulations!

Relations with Washington were about to get even worse, however. In October 2004, I received information about an impending assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah by U.S. forces. My concerns were about the inevitable collateral damage to civilians, the risk of violations of international humanitarian law, and the likely inflammatory effect on the insurgency. I decided to send a letter to Bush, Blair, and Iraqi prime minister Alawi in order to go on the record with them about the risks of further aggravating the situation in the country. Inexplicably, the letter was transmitted by fax by my staff, which ensured that it was promptly leaked. Coming shortly after my statement about the illegal nature of the war, and days before the U.S. presidential election, it provided the UN's enemies in Washington with further ammunition, this time alleging that I was interfering in U.S. domestic politics. Nothing had been further from my mind. My focus was on halting the slide into a deeper conflict, but the reality of our intentions and our actions became increasingly irrelevant as we became the focus of a wider campaign to delegitimize the United Nations. To this end, the Oil-for-Food Programme was the perfect instrument.

The program was established in 1996 to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people living under strict sanctions as they bore the brunt of the impact caused by the world's determination to deny Saddam the means to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction. It mushroomed, however, into a vast multibillion dollar structure involving thousands of contracts from dozens of countries whose companies traded with Saddam's regime. Initially designed as a Band-Aid for the people of Iraq—and for the conscience of those in the West who wished to diminish the impact of sanctions on the civilian population—it was over time manipulated by the Iraqi regime into a scheme involving kickbacks by thousands of international companies. At the same time, and outside the program, extensive smuggling of oil—primarily through Turkey, Jordan, and Syria—took place, providing Iraq with illicit income amounting to some $8.4 billion. To this, members of the Security Council, including the United States and the United Kingdom, turned a blind eye.

For the UN Secretariat tasked with managing this enterprise, the Oil-for-Food program was a persistent source of concern given the magnitude of the sums and trading involved, and the complexity of a system that had been designed as a temporary measure. In early 2004, reports began to emerge from postwar Iraq that numerous individuals—mostly traders and middlemen—had benefited personally from oil allocations under the program. The bombshell was that one of these people was alleged to be Benon Sevan, the long-serving UN official who was overseeing the program as director of the Office of the Iraq Programme. Soon, select corners of the media seized on this charge to allege that the entire program had been a vast, corrupt enterprise. We were stunned by this possibility—and totally unprepared to manage the consequences in a poisonous atmosphere of acrimony, mistrust, and ideologically driven attacks on the institution.

To uncover the truth about the UN's role in a program that over seven years sold some $64 billion worth of Iraqi oil and purchased food and other basic goods for the Iraqi people, I asked Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States, to lead an independent inquiry. Over the following year, he and his team engaged in a comprehensive effort to establish the role of the UN Secretariat as well as that of the member states in the evolution of the program. Their findings, delivered through a series of reports, were deeply troubling. The UN's management of the program came in for severe criticism, which focused primarily on our procurement, auditing, and supervisory practices. Volcker and his team also identified in excess of two thousand companies from a range of countries which had enriched members of Saddam's regime by paying kickbacks in return for contracts—a fact that was far less reported by the press.

As secretary-general of the United Nations and its chief administrative officer, the findings of the Volcker inquiry were deeply distressing. The incidents of corruption that plagued the program were a great disappointment to me professionally. On a personal level, however, there was the added allegation that my son Kojo had been implicated in the Oil-for-Food matter—and this was far more painful. It also provided the UN's enemies with the means through which to implicate me personally in the malfeasance that had occurred in the management of the program. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Kojo had been employed by Cotecna, a Swiss-based trade inspection company, which in 1998 won a UN contract to inspect humanitarian goods entering Iraq. When this was first raised in the media in 1999, my chef de cabinet, Iqbal Riza, asked the UN's head of management, Joe Connor, a former CEO of Price Waterhouse, to look into the matter and establish whether there was any issue of conflict. He, and our legal counsel, Hans Corell, agreed that since the Contracts Committee had not been aware that Kojo had worked for Cotecna, there was no possibility of a conflict. In addition, Kojo had stopped working for Cotecna in 1998.

The revelation—to me and to the world—that Kojo had continued to receive payments from Cotecna all the way up to February 2004 for work in West Africa, five years later than we first thought they had ended, was deeply painful. I told the press on the day of the revelation that I was surprised and disappointed that my son had not been clearer about his relationship with the company.

The attacks on the UN, and me personally, were growing. In early November, weeks before Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota published an op-ed article in the
Wall Street Journal
calling for my resignation, my loyal and fearless friend Richard Holbrooke decided to intervene. Knowing Washington as he did, he could see where this was going and suggested a private meeting at his New York apartment overlooking Central Park on Sunday, December 5.

He asked me to come alone, without aides, and said he would be leading a conversation with close and trusted friends who only wished me success, but were prepared to speak candidly about the depth of the challenge and the need for decisive action. He was right. He had carefully assembled a group that included the head of the UN Foundation, Tim Wirth; Les Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations; and my former advisors John Ruggie and Nader Mousavizadeh, now at Harvard and Goldman Sachs, respectively. Richard himself played the role of both conductor and soloist—skillfully drawing out even the most difficult questions but always pointing us to solutions. Gelb set the stage by saying that he'd just come back from Washington where he had met with senior members of the administration. It was clear, as he put it, that “they won't push you, but if you stumble, they're not going to catch you either.”

Over a long four hours, I mostly listened as close friends looked me in the eye to tell me things they might not have otherwise, but now felt needed to be said. I filled a dozen pages of a yellow legal pad with often bracing statements about the need to address head-on the barrage of accusations—and to do this both as a matter of public engagement as well as substance. If we did not address some of the underlying management and accountability issues raised, as much within the organization as without, by the Oil-for-Food matter, we would not be seen as credible in seeking to turn the page. And if we didn't get a better handle on responding to the media onslaught, nothing we did in practice would get through the din of a twenty-four-hour news cycle feeding on every rumor, allegation, and speculation. I left Richard's home with a sense that changes needed to be made at all levels of the organization, and that transparency in our response was needed more than ever.

During the following week, a range of global leaders began to reach out to express their support. Colin Powell, Rafik Hariri, Nelson Mandela, Olesegun Obasanjo, and Thabo Mbeki; Paul Martin, Madeleine Albright, and Jimmy Carter; Javier Solana and Tony Blair were among those who reached out to assure me of their friendship and sympathy. Chirac, Schroeder, and Zapatero called me jointly from a meeting to urge me on. And my friend Jim Wolfensohn, the World Bank president, in his inimitable Australian manner offered Nane and me a chance to spend the Christmas holidays at his house in Wyoming as a way of saying “to hell with everybody,” as he put it. The Chinese foreign minister called me to say, “China and the Chinese people will always be your good friend, and the Chinese government highly appreciates what you are doing.” Tellingly, he concluded by saying that “we support your efforts to protect and defend the sovereignty of the UN.”

It is true to say that the Security Council never should have asked us to administer the Oil-for-Food Programme, and that we as an organization never should have agreed to run it. But it is not enough. Once we were engaged in this mission—like any other given to us in a conflict or in poverty-ridden countries—we had a responsibility to manage it competently and scrupulously. In this we failed, through weak and porous procurement practices, incomplete auditing systems, and overall management for which I as secretary-general was ultimately responsible. That the far larger—and more consequential—damage to the Programme came from the oil smuggling implicitly encouraged by Western powers and the thousands of corrupt contracts entered into by companies from countries with seats on the Security Council is a reality that remains underappreciated and underreported.

After the final Volcker report was issued exonerating me of any charges of involvement with Cotecna's contract, I received a call from Bill Clinton. Throughout the ordeal, he had demonstrated his friendship as well as a unique appreciation for the forces that I had been up against. He recounted an extraordinary conversation that he had recently had with George Bush. Clinton had warned him, “You do not want Kofi Annan's blood on your hands.” Bush's reply was revealing: “My right-wingers want to destroy the United Nations, but I don't.” As much as the ideologues of the Bush administration who took their country and the world into a calamitous war wanted to see the UN shattered in the process, ultimately statesmanship prevailed and Washington slowly realized the need for the organization to regain its indispensable role in international security.

W
HEN THE
B
OMBING
S
TOPS
: L
ESSONS OF
I
RAQ

“What happens when the bombing stops? What about the day after? What then?” These were the questions that I put to the leaders of the permanent five members of the Security Council—privately and publicly—throughout the long and torturous run-up to the invasion of Iraq. We were all engaged in a contest of resolutions, rights, perceived threats, and imagined opportunities for remaking strategic landscapes, I as interpreter and occasional referee, they as gladiators in a global arena.

The question of the aftermath of war and what would become of Iraq after an invasion of “shock and awe” was given little of the attention that it deserved. Few would argue with this judgment today, with the devastating debris of a decade of civil war barely behind us. A unilateral war that replaced tyranny with anarchy in Iraq holds lessons for every member of the international community: the need for legality and legitimacy when force is used, the vital importance of advance planning for the postconflict environment, the critical condition of security as the basis on which any reconstruction can take place.

It is equally essential that the folly of the Iraq War, with the resulting calamity for the people of the country and the broader region, does not doom forever intervention when action is endorsed by the Security Council, a humanitarian crisis is urgent, and the cause is just and legitimate. In the case of the Iraq War, the Security Council resolution cited by the United States and United Kingdom as basis for their actions could just as easily have been used in the opposite case. The Council itself stated that it would be the judge of whether Saddam was not honoring his obligations and would therefore face serious consequences. And this is why a second resolution was absolutely necessary. It was up to the Council to first determine whether Saddam was in compliance or not. And it was then, separately, up to the Council to determine what the serious consequences would be if he wasn't. It wasn't up to two member states to take the law into their own hands.

When the United States and the United Kingdom recognized that they would not be able to assemble the nine votes necessary for Council authorization, they had a choice: they could have given the inspections more time in order to gain greater evidence for their suspicions, and thereby support for enforcement action. Instead, they proceeded to flout the very authority they so assiduously had sought and in whose defense they claimed to be acting. Their way of defending the authority of the United Nations and the Security Council was to ignore its authority when its judgment didn't suit them. And in an extraordinary line of reasoning for a parliamentarian, Tony Blair decided to argue that since they couldn't receive enough support for their actions in the Council, the Council—and not they—had rendered itself illegitimate.

The Iraq War was neither in accordance with the Charter nor legitimate. For the authors of the war, moreover, the justification kept changing. Was it Iraq's noncompliance with UN Security Council demands? Was it support for terrorism? Was it regime change and democracy promotion? Ultimately, of course, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; no links to al Qaeda were established; and the idea of regime change, already considered unacceptable by the vast majority of member states, was seen to be an invitation to calamitous consequences for the invader as well as the invaded.

In my address to the General Assembly in 1999, I had observed that the Charter's own words “declare that ‘armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest.'” “But what is the common interest?” I asked. “Who shall define it? Who shall defend it? Under whose authority? And with what means of intervention?” I did not expect that my questions would be answered with such a deep divergence of views, and with such dire consequences, as those brought about by the wars of 9/11.