Trading oil for lives

IT is the true scandal behind the Iraq war – perhaps the biggest scam in history – but it’s one you’ve heard little about.
The wrong villain, you see. Not the United States at all.
No, it’s instead the United Nations and its anti-war friends that are said to be up to their grimy necks in a $12 billion blood-for-oil rip-off.
And which activist or Left-wing journalist wants to tell you that some of the fiercest opponents of the war against Iraq — including, of course, French and Russian politicians — may have been bribed by Saddam Hussein?
Yet the truth about the UN’s Iraqi Oil-for-Food program might still ooze out, because two inquiries have at last been set up into this startling scandal.
Last month a US Congress committee said it would examine how billions of dollars were siphoned off the UN Oil-for-Food program, the world’s biggest international “humanitarian” aid scheme.
And even UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan, whose son has been caught up in the allegations, has had to set up his own inquiry, led by former US Federal Reserve boss Paul Volcker.
Stand by. These inquiries may slap sense into the idealists who still worship the UN, refusing to see it’s now a sick bureaucracy that sides too often with tyrants against democracies. They may also kill the notion that the bad US should bring in the nice UN to teach Iraqis all about good government.
This scandal broke three months ago, when one of Iraq’s many new newspapers named 270 people and organisations it said had been bought off with cheap oil issued to them by Saddam through the UN Oil-for-Food program.
This list, drawn from the records of the Iraqi Oil Ministry, was an astonishing rollcall of influential people from around the world. Less astonishing was that so many were from France, Russia and China, the three UN Security Council countries that tried so hard to stop the other two, the US and Britain, from toppling Saddam and liberating Iraq.
A quarter of the named recipients of this cut-price oil — oil they could sell for huge mark-ups, usually in exchange for secret 10 per cent kickbacks to Saddam — were from Russia. They included the Russian state, the Communist Party, the Liberal Democrat Party and the unnamed “chief of the Presidential Office”.
The French were the second biggest winners, according to the Iraqi documents, with Saddam’s oil flowing to big-shots such as former interior minister Charles Pasqua, former ambassador to the UN Jean-Bernard Merimee, and Patrick Maugein, an oil company boss and friend of President Jacques Chirac.
Others named in the documents included Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, British anti-war MP George Galloway, Yasser Arafat’s PLO, India’s Congress Party and Shakir Al-Khaffaji, the financier of a film defending Saddam by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
Even Father Jean-Marie Benjamin, the Catholic priest and peace activist who set up the infamous Vatican meeting between the Pope and Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, is named as having got an oil contract worth $2.5 million.
YET more oil went to financier Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, named by the UN itself as an individual “belonging to or associated with” al-Qaida. Yes, another one of those links between al-Qaida and Saddam that anti-war polemicists like Professor Robert Manne swear don’t exist.
But perhaps the most interesting of all the listed names is that of Benon Sevan, who ran the UN’s Oil-for-Food program. The records note that Saddam slipped Sevan, a UN Under Secretary-General, 14 million barrels of his oily best.
When these names were first published by Iraq’s Al Mada newspaper, it seemed risky to treat them seriously. Who’d trust a new Iraqi newspaper?
Indeed, many of the people named denied getting Saddam’s oil. Others, like Maugein and the head of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship Association said while they did get oil, their commissions were legal.
But the Iraqi Governing Council took this very seriously indeed, hiring Claude Hankes-Drielsma, the respected former head of PriceWaterhouse, to check who got what from Saddam through a UN program meant to buy food for Iraqis.
Hankes-Drielsma was shocked by what he found, and last month wrote to Annan to say the UN had “failed in its responsibility to the Iraqi people and the international community”.
“It will not come as a surprise if the Oil-for-Food program turns out to be one of the world’s most disgraceful scams and an example of inadequate control, responsibility and transparency, providing an opportune vehicle for Saddam Hussein to operate under the UN aegis to continue its reign of terror and oppression,” he warned.
IN reading this, remember that feted “journalists” like John Pilger used to claim before the war that the UN and US were deliberately killing tens of thousands of poor Iraqis with their wicked sanctions, which were meant to force Saddam to disarm.
In response, the UN set up its Oil-for-Food program, under Benon Sevan, to let Saddam sell some oil under UN supervision to buy only approved supplies for his people. For its efforts, the UN took fat commissions of more than $2 billion.
While some of the oil money did indeed buy food and medicine, this UN-approved trade also helped Saddam to tighten his grip on his terrified people.
It did so by putting Iraq’s one source of foreign income under Saddam’s personal control, letting him sell cut-price oil to people he liked in exchange for secret commissions which he used to build his many palaces.
The graft is estimated to total $12 billion, with Saddam skimming $6 billion for himself. The UN also let him spend the $60 billion the scheme raised for “food and medicine” with his pet suppliers, many of whom had to pay him commissions, too.
And by the end, the UN didn’t insist Saddam use Oil-for-Food money for anything like essential supplies. Just before the war, Annan approved $25 million for an Olympic sports city for Saddam’s mad son Uday, and $60 million for the propaganda ministry run by the notorious “Comical Ali”.
Meanwhile, the shipments of UN-approved “aid” to Iraq was monitored by a Swiss firm that hired Annan’s son Kojo as a consultant. Iraqis say much of the food and medicine passed by this company was actually spoiled or out of date.
And all the while this torrent of oil money flowed through a French bank nominated by Saddam. Remember how keen France was to save this killer?
O F course, there may be nothing to these allegations, just as Manne says there’s nothing to reports Saddam helped al-Qaida. No one has admitted to corruption and no one has been found guilty.
But something stinks — so badly that Sevan abruptly left the UN for what is said to be an early retirement and is refusing interviews.
Yet it still doesn’t stink enough for our Leftist activists and writers, academics and journalists, to see that the greatest scandal of the Iraq war has nothing to do with the democracies of the US, Britain or Australia.
Instead, the true scandal may well be that a genocidal dictator maintained a reign of terror with the active help of a UN that he bought off with billions of dollars that were meant to help feed the very people he enslaved.