thedrifter
01-22-07, 09:12 AM
Ban's Reform Call
The U.N. responds to our Cash for Kim reporting.
Monday, January 22, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has been on the job for less than a month, but with a 26-word announcement Friday he did more to reform that international body than anything ever attempted by predecessor Kofi Annan.
"The Secretary-General will call for an urgent, system wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programs." So said Mr. Ban's spokesman after the Secretary-General met with Ad Melkert, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Program. The key word here is "external." Concerns about corruption in the U.N.'s Oil for Food program bubbled for years before Mr. Annan finally agreed to set up the independent Volcker Commission.
The proximate cause for Friday's meeting between Messrs. Ban and Melkert, and for Mr. Ban's clean-house announcement, was Melanie Kirkpatrick's op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal on Friday detailing irregularities in the UNDP's programs in North Korea and citing U.S. concerns that tens of millions of dollars in hard currency have been funneled to dictator Kim Jong Il.
The UNDP must have got Mr. Ban's memo. We publish today a letter in The Wall Street Journal (available here) from the agency's Mr. Melkert, responding to Ms. Kirkpatrick's article and our accompanying editorial. "We . . . welcome an independent and external audit of our operations in North Korea," he writes. And, "If the member states of the U.N. and UNDP's board were to decide that our presence there were no longer useful, we would leave immediately."
Kim Jong Il is about as likely to change the way he does business as he is to move to Hollywood to pursue his avocation as a movie buff, so a UNDP pullout from North Korea is the right policy. The Pyongyang government won't even permit U.N. officials to visit the sites of some of the projects that their agency is funding. There's no way of knowing whether the "battery factory" paid for with U.N. money actually exists or is just a vehicle for funding Kim's regime.
In a statement posted on its Web site Friday, the UNDP asserts that it can account for all but $337,000 of its recent expenditures in North Korea. Of the $6.5 million spent in 2005-2006, it says, only $337,000 went to projects directly managed by the North Korean government. The agency now manages most of its projects in North Korea directly.
If oversight has improved in the past two years, so much the better. In any case, any investigation ought to go back at least to the late 1990s, when an internal audit turned up shenanigans and much more money was spent, and ideally all the way back to 1979, when the program began.
We also couldn't help but notice the second-day story by the Washington Post's Colum Lynch, whose reporting is known to speak for the U.N. bureaucracy. He said some in the U.N. consider the U.S. questions to be an attempt to discredit Mark Malloch Brown, who ran UNDP from 1999-2005 before becoming Mr. Annan's chief of staff. We hadn't mentioned Mr. Malloch Brown in our Friday editorial, but now that Mr. Lynch does we agree his tenure at UNDP should also be looked at.
Meanwhile, the UNDP's executive board meeting this week should be lively as members consider the U.S.-led motion to defer UNDP programs in North Korea pending an investigation. The 36-member board is composed of 18 "rich" countries and 18 "poor" ones, which means those that provide the money and those that spend it. It would be quite a spectacle if the poor countries side with fellow board member North Korea.
The ultimate sanction is money, and there's already movement in Congress to withhold the U.S. contribution to the UNDP, which last year constituted 11.4% of the agency's core budget. Unlike dues to the U.N., contributions to the UNDP and other agencies are voluntary. New Jersey Republican Scott Garrett plans to introduce a bill this week to cut off U.S. funding for the UNDP pending a full accounting and an investigation into its program in North Korea. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, ranking Republican on the International Relations Committee, said Friday that she "and other members" are determined to apply "pressure."
In the absence of a U.N. leadership that demanded transparency and accountability, Congress and various U.S. Administrations have been trying to reform the organization for years. If Secretary-General Ban follows through on his call for "external" audits of all U.N. programs, it will be a refreshing change at Turtle Bay.
Ellie
The U.N. responds to our Cash for Kim reporting.
Monday, January 22, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has been on the job for less than a month, but with a 26-word announcement Friday he did more to reform that international body than anything ever attempted by predecessor Kofi Annan.
"The Secretary-General will call for an urgent, system wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programs." So said Mr. Ban's spokesman after the Secretary-General met with Ad Melkert, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Program. The key word here is "external." Concerns about corruption in the U.N.'s Oil for Food program bubbled for years before Mr. Annan finally agreed to set up the independent Volcker Commission.
The proximate cause for Friday's meeting between Messrs. Ban and Melkert, and for Mr. Ban's clean-house announcement, was Melanie Kirkpatrick's op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal on Friday detailing irregularities in the UNDP's programs in North Korea and citing U.S. concerns that tens of millions of dollars in hard currency have been funneled to dictator Kim Jong Il.
The UNDP must have got Mr. Ban's memo. We publish today a letter in The Wall Street Journal (available here) from the agency's Mr. Melkert, responding to Ms. Kirkpatrick's article and our accompanying editorial. "We . . . welcome an independent and external audit of our operations in North Korea," he writes. And, "If the member states of the U.N. and UNDP's board were to decide that our presence there were no longer useful, we would leave immediately."
Kim Jong Il is about as likely to change the way he does business as he is to move to Hollywood to pursue his avocation as a movie buff, so a UNDP pullout from North Korea is the right policy. The Pyongyang government won't even permit U.N. officials to visit the sites of some of the projects that their agency is funding. There's no way of knowing whether the "battery factory" paid for with U.N. money actually exists or is just a vehicle for funding Kim's regime.
In a statement posted on its Web site Friday, the UNDP asserts that it can account for all but $337,000 of its recent expenditures in North Korea. Of the $6.5 million spent in 2005-2006, it says, only $337,000 went to projects directly managed by the North Korean government. The agency now manages most of its projects in North Korea directly.
If oversight has improved in the past two years, so much the better. In any case, any investigation ought to go back at least to the late 1990s, when an internal audit turned up shenanigans and much more money was spent, and ideally all the way back to 1979, when the program began.
We also couldn't help but notice the second-day story by the Washington Post's Colum Lynch, whose reporting is known to speak for the U.N. bureaucracy. He said some in the U.N. consider the U.S. questions to be an attempt to discredit Mark Malloch Brown, who ran UNDP from 1999-2005 before becoming Mr. Annan's chief of staff. We hadn't mentioned Mr. Malloch Brown in our Friday editorial, but now that Mr. Lynch does we agree his tenure at UNDP should also be looked at.
Meanwhile, the UNDP's executive board meeting this week should be lively as members consider the U.S.-led motion to defer UNDP programs in North Korea pending an investigation. The 36-member board is composed of 18 "rich" countries and 18 "poor" ones, which means those that provide the money and those that spend it. It would be quite a spectacle if the poor countries side with fellow board member North Korea.
The ultimate sanction is money, and there's already movement in Congress to withhold the U.S. contribution to the UNDP, which last year constituted 11.4% of the agency's core budget. Unlike dues to the U.N., contributions to the UNDP and other agencies are voluntary. New Jersey Republican Scott Garrett plans to introduce a bill this week to cut off U.S. funding for the UNDP pending a full accounting and an investigation into its program in North Korea. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, ranking Republican on the International Relations Committee, said Friday that she "and other members" are determined to apply "pressure."
In the absence of a U.N. leadership that demanded transparency and accountability, Congress and various U.S. Administrations have been trying to reform the organization for years. If Secretary-General Ban follows through on his call for "external" audits of all U.N. programs, it will be a refreshing change at Turtle Bay.
Ellie