Is The United Nations Committed To Transparency and Getting Along With The US?

Watching Fox News Sunday today, I was taken by the candor and conciliatory tone as well as the "get along" attitude of Mark Malloch Brown the new chief of staff to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Brown countered the opinion of liberals here in the states by practically signing off on President Bush's new choice for ambassador to the UN, Josh Bolten when he said:

People forget a little bit more than 10 years ago he was a very effective assistant secretary of state in the State Department dealing with the U.N.

Second, you know, a U.S. ambassador to the U.N. has to be very effective in New York, but he also has to be very effective in Washington. And, of course, that's where there's a real silver lining to John Bolton's appointment, because if he can corral the different congressional points of view and the administration's point of view into a single set of recommended reforms for the U.N., which we can respond to, that's good news for us.

Next we finally note the UN sounding the alarm over proven allegations of prostitution, child sexual abuse and rape by UN troops towards innocents in Africa's Congo and elsewhere:

Well, it's devastating. It's a terrible set of allegations, that peacekeepers sent to keep the peace in poor, weak countries with vulnerable people who have not been able to have their rights protected for years, that some of them behave in this way. I mean, it completely undercuts our mission, and we recognize that.

And the secretary-general has made it clear that use of prostitution, sex with under-age children, that fraternization beyond strict limits, all of this is not allowed and will be a cause for peacekeepers to be sent home and, in some cases, to make them criminally prosecuted.

So he's coming down on it hard, and he's sent the equivalent of his vice president, the deputy secretary-general, out to the main missions over the last few weeks to lay down the law, make sure everyone understood it.

But host Chris Wallace doesn't let him off the hook with that mere platitude and presses Brown on the fact that abuses have been attributed to the UN before:

But why over the last few weeks? The fact is, in Cambodia, in the early 1990s, there were allegations of this, and a top U.N. official said at the time, "Boys will be boys."

This isn't a recent incident. This has been going on for more than a decade. Why are you sending officials out in recent weeks saying this will not be tolerated?

And Brown responds:

Because it's happened in some missions, and when it happened in Cambodia, it was attacked there, and we tried to address it.

But I think the problem is, we are dealing with something which in some ways is as old as soldiering itself. And the difference is that the U.S. military or my own military, the British military, have in recent decades invested a huge amount of leadership and resources to break these old habits of occupying military groups, to make them realize that this abuse of women in the community is utterly unacceptable.

In our case, our very underfunded peacekeeping missions, with soldiers stitched together from Bangladesh, Jordan, many other different countries, all under their own different commands and without the resources to give them the other recreational options, that the standards of behavior have not been modernized in the same way that has happened with the American or the British military, and we've now got to tackle that.

And the governments who support us in the Security Council have to help us do it by improving the lines of command and putting the resources in it to give soldiers other options.

But then Wallace finally gets to the meat of the matter, the Oil for Food scandal:

There's also -- and I don't want to pass over this, and we're starting to run out of time -- the Oil-For-Food scandal, in which billions of dollars were skimmed off.

U.N. investigators found that the U.N. director of that program, Benan Sevan, had a grave and continuing conflict of interest. They're still investigating whether Annan's son, Kojo, made money off this deal -- very serious allegations.

And yet, when Kofi Annan wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal just a few weeks ago, his first response to the investigation by Paul Volcker was to say that the charges were overblown and a hyperbole.

Depending on your political leaning, Brown's answer for this might leave much to be desired:

Well, look, you know, I think that sometimes the U.N. is like the sort of Washington politician who says, "Yes, I may have been in the midst of a scandal, but look at the other guys." Because it is a fact that, you know, a lot more money went missing from the sanctions that the U.S. and other Security Council members turned a blind eye to, when the oil was smuggled out, money went missing after the U.S. occupation. So it is the case that our bit of this is a part of a bigger scandal.

But having said that, for the U.N. to have had management breakdowns that led to this kind of abuse, even if it's on lesser scale than sometimes FOX and others implies, is a terrible problem. And it's why we're introducing a whole set of management reforms over the coming months, to make sure something like this could never happen again.

So indeed it appears that The United Nations is finally admitting it has problems but Kofi Annan will remain the head of the UN and there is some question of whether or not the United Nations is taking full responsibility. Those like me might still say, "Get the US out of the UN."

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