Kofi Annan has spent his long career in a series of increasingly well-paid UN posts, and his wife, Nane, is famously related to one of the wealthier families of Sweden. So perhaps they already owe New Yorkers an explanation of why, for years before Kofi became Secretary-General, they felt justified in hanging on to a New York low-rent apartment subsidized by New York taxpayers as part of a program meant to give low- to middle-income New York families a boost in life.
The bigger mystery, however, is that after Kofi and his wife moved into the rent-free official UN residence at the beginning of 1997, their old low-rent taxpayer-subsidized apartment appears to have been passed to the family of his brother, Kobina Annan — who for some years has been serving as Ghana’s ambassador to Morocco, complete with an official residency in Rabat. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this, but, as I note in an article in Tuesday’s New York Sun, it sure does raise a lot of questions. Why won’t Kofi answer them?
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Skeptic:Thank you so much Claudia. This is an excellent piece of investigative journalism.
The corruption and privilege that the inhabitants at the UN participate in are unbelievable.
Hopefully this information will be covered by more in the media. Will there be any comments by the new Secretary General on his predecessors financial dealings?
News of these types of behaviors make it hard to see any good that the UN does. I am trying to figure out if there is actually any good coming out of the UN.
Dec 19, 2006 - 6:17 pm Merkur:It’s an expose of corruption in high places! Except it isn’t, because as the article states, “No one is saying that any of the Annans have broken the law”.
It’s an expose of the life of privilege that UN staff live! Except it isn’t, because as the article can only suggest that “the effective New York taxpayers’ subsidy for whoever has held the lease there during that time would add up to well over $100,000″ over an 18-year period - a colossal $5,500 a year!
It would be a great piece of investigative journalism if it addressed its central question to the right place. If there are irregularities in how this scheme for providing housing for low-income families has been administered, surely your issue is with the administrators of the scheme?
Dec 20, 2006 - 11:27 am Filippo:Dear Claudia,
Thanks for the interesting story and the coverage, which implies an inherent capacity to investigate. As a UN junior personnel, I have no claims to make on the piece, but just two comments. First, Kofi Annan’s apt, as the one of every UN’s, is not subsidized by NY tax payers, but rather worlwide tax payers. Please try not to politicize the issue. Your articles indeed implies over benefits that UN personnel should not be allowed to. Let me remind you that, whatever position is held at the UN, salaries are usually half of any diplomatic personnell, and usually are not even comparable with those from the very same scale of responsibilities hold in private sector companies.
Having said that, surely the UN is not proof-read by acts corruption of mismanagement. These cases must be investigated and punished. However, let me remind the first commentarist to this article that the central point should not be “I am trying to figure out if there is actually any good coming out of the UN.”, but rather focussing on where the real source of power is within the UN. You will “astonishingly” find that UN Administrators and personnell are far less powerful than Presidents of States, whose control and decisions of actions over the United Nations often countervene the spirit of the UN.
Dec 20, 2006 - 12:55 pm Brian:Filippo wrote:
Please re-read what Claudia wrote: she clearly distinguished between his UN financed dwelling, one attached to the office of Secretary General of the UN, and the abode in which Mr. Annon resided prior to assuming that august position, a NY apartment not subsidized by the UN but subsidized exclusively (if not completely) by US citizens.
It was the later that Mr. Annan seems to have passed along to his brother.
Filippo continues:
Translation: the UN cannot work for good because it has no power. It has no power because each nation, or bloc of nations, is out to further its own agenda, irrespective of fairness or good (hence the absence of UN condemnation for even a single Palastinian action taken against Israel, and the plethora of resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations against the Palastinians; the failure of member nations to punish peacekeepers who are guilty of rape, extortion and the like; and corruption within the UN bureaucracy, like the Oil for Food scandal).
Filippo’s observation, which I happen to agree with, is roughly analogous to a physician diagnosing an incurable, untreatable and fatal disease: it identifies why the doomed patient is unable to function normally, allows us to predict the patient’s future, but offers no treatment.
All of which raises 2 interesting questions: if the UN is broken in the way Filippo and I believe it is, what is the logic behind complying with UN resolutions when they are ineffectual at best, and at worst bolster tyrants, breed corruption and victimize the weak, all the while opposing US interests?
And what is the argument in favor of continuing the extravagant funding we’ve so generously provided the UN, when we (at least, Filippo and I) know full well the UN cannot be fixed?
Brian
Dec 20, 2006 - 5:00 pm jo:Brian,
By your logic, should the US government be closed down because of its miserable incompetence in dealing with Katrina /N Orleans? Or because of the billions of US$ lost to faud, corruption and mismagement in the US controled CPA in Iraq?
Sure the UN and the US government has corrupt and incompetent people in their midsts; but presumably you do recognise that there are many branches of the US Gov. and UN that do great work notwithstanding corruption elsewhere in the organisation….
Dec 20, 2006 - 9:08 pm Brian:Jo
Though I do not, I could concede that the US and the UN tolerate corruption and crime equivalently, and your point would still be fallacious.
In short, two wrongs do not make a right. The fact that the US may be “bad” doesn’t justify the UN being equally bad, and you have created a classic tu Quoque fallacy.
The issue isn’t whether individuals of both organizations — the US and the UN — engage in criminal acts.
The issue is: i) whether or not both have the power to enforce their edicts; and ii) whether or not they exercise that power.
The UN does not have the power to bring wrongdoers to justice and to punish them, and therefore it’s authority is ineffectual. (They cannot exercise power they do not possess.)
The US has the power to bring wrongdoers to justice and the US exercises it.
Your comparison of the UN to the US is inapt, and I’m still left wondering what argument one could muster to justify the huge amount of funding the US contributes to the UN each year. (”The US is bad too” doesn’t compel me . . .)
(Unlike the UN, the US has a system that is self-correcting, a system that can improve itself based on elections, executive orders, and the judiciary.)
Brian
Dec 21, 2006 - 1:07 am Merkur:Brian:
Naturally each nation is out to further its own agenda, including the US; what else would you expect? Your issue is that you believe that not enough of these agendas are “good”, but please would you like to define “good” in the geopolitical context? And can you also define what you mean by the “UN”, because I think that what you’re referring to is, in fact, the General Assembly. (I’ll assume that this is the case in the rest of my response.)
To be more precise your question is, what is the logic of the US complying with UN resolutions? I assume that Saddam Hussein would have used similar logic; why should Iraq have complied with the UN resolutions against it, when they were so clearly ineffectual?
My answer would be that the world is better off with some form of mediation between states, and the UN provides a vehicle for a significant part of that mediation. When you say that UN resolutions “bolster tyrants, breed corruption and victimize the weak”, can you be more specific about which resolutions you have in mind?
“Extravagant funding”? The US budget for fiscal year 2007 is $2.8 trillion; the US contribution to the regular UN budget (not including the operational agencies) is $422.7 million, or 0.015% of the national budget.
The US also contributes a huge amount to the operational agencies as well, for which we should all be thankful. The biggest US contribution is to peacekeeping operations ($1.13 billion), but if you think peacekeeping is a waste of money, fair enough. At this point, you may wish to point out the failure of some peacekeeping operations, while ignoring those that those that might be considered successful.
The argument for continuing that funding is that it’s a membership fee. You may wish to argue that the US should withdraw its UN membership, but clearly your elected representatives generally disagree with you. I guess their reasons are pretty simple: they believe that the UN can achieve things that the US is either unable or unwilling to do itself.
The UN doesn’t have the power to “enforce its edicts” because it wasn’t set up that way, since member states - including the US - wouldn’t and won’t allow infringements of their national sovereignty. I assume you would agree that this should be the case?
Really? I didn’t realise that the janjaweed had been stopped in Darfur, and I must have missed the coverage of the trials of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. I’m glad to see that the US is going to be trying the murderers of Rafik Hariri; and surely we’ll see North Korea disarming before Christmas.
Of course the US should and does support all these things, but its chosen vehicles are often the United Nations and its various bodies. Perhaps I’m being a little unfair, but I hope you get my point. There are limits to power, some things are better done collectively than individually, and some feel that the United Nations, however flawed, offers the best means for many of those actions.
None of which, of course, has anything to do with an apartment that the UN Secretary-General previously occupied. Given the scale of the problems that the world faces right now, I find it hard to care much about Kofi’s apartment, particularly as the article offers no evidence of any “wrongdoing” on the part of Kofi Annan himself – only the suggestion of inappropriate behaviour.
Dec 21, 2006 - 9:51 am Brian:I wrote:
To which Merkur replied:
Saddam Hussein did use similar logic and did not comply with UN resolutions. Which makes my point: the UN lacks the power to force compliance, even in the case of a mass murderer who had previously used WMD, was believed by most to have them immediately prior to the invasion, and who was by all accounts simply biding his time until sanctions were removed to go into full production of them again. All the while he was profiting from the oil for food kickbacks.
I have nothing against mediation, as along as it shows promise of success.
But I’ve all too often heard the refrain: “We haven’t exhausted negotiations” used seemingly as an excuse to continue talking and an excuse not to act.
The fact is, negotiations are eternal unless there is an incentive to stop them. And the product of negotiations is not always laudible (think “Peace in our time.”).
I would regard resolutions that are not enforced as bolstering tyrants, breeding corruption and victimizing the weak. Saddam Hussein knew full well he had precious little to worry about from the UN since he knew that, after 14 toothless resolutions, the UN would not act against him, even as he violated them.
So the corruption of the OFF program deprived Iraqis of the kinds of humanitarian aid the selling of oil was intended to provide when funds were diverted (surreptitiously) to palaces and dual use programs to keep his WMD programs idling along.
Other tyrants get the same message.
I then wrote:
and Merkur replied:
Irrelevant. The UN is entirely opaque, and for all I know, a vast variety of UN luminaries are squirreling large amounts of it away for personal use, or using it for bribes, or are investing gobs of it in everything from prostitutes to villas.
The OFF program demonstrated corruption on a biblical scale — what we don’t know is how broad and deep the UN’s corruption goes, nor are we likely to find out because the UN is not transparent.
Merkur continues:
The failed peacekeeping missions are well documented, as are the human rights violations committed by unpunished peacekeepers under the UN banner.
But don’t forget the peacekeeping missions that have not occurred: Like Rwanda and Sudan.
Forgive my cynicism, but when you claim success for certain UN peacekeeping operations, I have to wonder if the peace was kept because of the UN’s presence or in spite of it, or would have occurred without a UN presence.
Is it just me, or is there something a tad outrageoous about the UN claiming credit for successes which might not be its due, but avoiding responsibility for corruption and human rights violations attached to its agents?
Merkur continues:
Oh quite the contrary . . . I think the US should remain in the UN, pay a membership of $500,000, keep its seat on the Security Council, and use the money saved on dues for something else. I’d settle for straight forward humanitarian aid — provided the money was properly accounted for, there were mechanisms in place to hold corrupt and incompetent officials responsible and there was the political will to use such mechanisms — at least from time to time.
I wrote:
Merkur replied:
Precisely. Pigs can’t fly because they don’t have wings. They weren’t set up that way. And you assume correctly: I’d oppose in the strongest possible way the prospect of the US being subject to UN edicts.
Which simply makes my point: the UN does not have the power to punish people who commit human rights abuses under its banner, because it wasn’t designed that way.
Nor was it designed with the transparency required to ensure unbelievers that it is seriously interested in rooting out corruption in its own bureaucracy, as the single example of OFF and the protective-crouch response of the UN to it is ample evidence.
Each is a “fatal design flaw,” rather like trying to construct a bridge across a river with no bottom (ever see Bridge on the River Kwai?).
I wrote:
To which Merkur correctly took me to task:
That’s my bad — if I’d had my thinking cap on, I’d have written that sentence differently. I’d have qualified it to read: “The US has the power to bring wrongdoers who misbehave under the US banner to justice and the US exercises that power.” (I’d made that qualification in another thread.)
Merkur wrote:
[ . . . ]
I think Clifford May is right: if it were John Bolton and not Kofi Annan, I think the furor would have been much louder (that comment is a general observation only, not directed at Merkur).
Brian
Dec 22, 2006 - 1:10 pm