When I read Kofi Annan’s oped on the human tragedy in the Sudan (Darfur) in tomorrow’s Washington Post, all I could think of was this report on that same Sudan from yesterday ‘s Fox News site.
In another section of the report, however, OIOS [Office of Internal Oversight Services] auditors recommend that the U.N. investigate possible collusion among U.N. officials to award Skylink an $85.9 million fuel contract for peacekeeping in Sudan. According to the report, one of the officials who was directly responsible for overseeing implementation of the Skylink contract abruptly resigned in December, 2005-about the time the OIOS investigation entered its final stages. No reason was given for the departure.
It goes on with numerous other UN scandals. It’s hard to keep up. The United Nations, as we all realize now, is one of the greatest economic rackets of all time, if not the greatest. And yet institutions like the WaPo continue to give Annan a forum to bemoan the state of places like Darfur as if the UN were its salvation, not one of the causes of that country’s misery. If the UN is serious about doing something for the people of the Sudan, it can start by cleaning itself up in a serious way. That begins with total fiscal transparency for all United Nations transactions. Otherwise the idea that we would trust this klepto-bureaucracy with another dime is ludicrous.
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