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Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005

In an op-ed piece in the International Herald Tribune on Tuesday, Benon Sevan said the program was not perfect - but it was "highly successful" in channeling food and medicine to millions of Iraqis trying to cope with U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

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"There are many thousands of people alive today because of the oil-for-food plan," he wrote.

Sevan, who sent a copy of the piece to The Associated Press on Monday night, made no mention of earlier accusations by a U.N.-backed investigation that he took $147,184 in illegal kickbacks.

Instead, he accused the Independent Inquiry Committee's investigation of unfairly targeting management failures in the U.N. Secretariat when it was the U.N. Security Council that set up the program and gave its own sanctions committee authority to monitor sanctions and oil-for-food.

Under the program, Iraq was allowed to sell limited and then unlimited quantities of oil provided most of the money went to buy humanitarian goods. It was a lifeline for 90 percent of the country's population of 26 million.

But Saddam was allowed to choose the buyers of Iraqi oil and the sellers of humanitarian goods, which he used to curry favor by awarding oil contracts to former government officials, activists, journalists and U.N. officials who opposed the sanctions.

The investigation, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, said lax oversight allowed Saddam's regime to pocket $1.8 billion in kickbacks in the awarding of contracts during the program's operation from 1997-2003. The smuggling of Iraqi oil outside the program in violation of U.N. sanctions poured much more money - $8.4 billion - into Saddam's coffers during the same period, it said.

Sevan took issue with the Volcker committee's criticism of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, his deputy Louise Frechette and Sevan for failing to provide information about Iraqi demands for illicit kickbacks and surcharges to the Security Council through formal rather than informal channels.

Stressing that he never withheld information, Sevan said the Office of the Iraq Program, which he headed, informed the sanctions committee "not only on surcharges but also on at least 70 occasions of contracts reflecting suspicious pricing (and hence possible kickbacks)."

"Yet the committee declined in every instance to act," he said.

"Similarly, I informed the U.S. government, effectively the policeman for sanctions violations in the Gulf, of maritime smuggling on a massive scale that was occurring, to no avail," Sevan said.

Volcker's report said the United States and other council members allowed oil smuggling to help Iraq's trading partners who were suffering a loss of income.

Sevan noted that these partners - Jordan and Turkey - "are also U.N. allies," and he said "it smacks of hypocrisy" to criticize his office "for a political compromise made to help the economies of American allies."

© 2005 The Associated Press

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