United Nations Statement On Oil for Food Editorial

By Edward Mortimer 

Your Oct. 28 editorial "Saddam's U.N. Payroll," on the U.N. Oil for Food program, was misleading in several respects:

1. During 1995 and 1996, when the program was being negotiated, first between members of the Security Council and then between the U.N. and Saddam Hussein's regime -- Kofi Annan was undersecretary general for peacekeeping and therefore not involved in designing it. Moreover, the Secretariat did not have "more or less complete discretion" to design the program, which had both to satisfy the members of the Security Council and to be accepted by the Iraqi government before it could be implemented. As Patrick Kennedy, U.S. representative to the U.N., explained to a House hearing earlier this month, "these specific decisions to allow the government of Iraq to continue to exercise authority, to let Saddam Hussein continue to determine who he could sell oil to and purchase goods from were all reluctantly accepted to ensure that the significant sanctions program would remain in place, thus achieving a U.S. goal."
   
2. In releasing information on contractors that did business with Iraq, Paul Volcker was careful to stress that he was not implying guilt, which has yet to be determined.
   
3. U.N. officials never "tried to pretend" that the allegations of corruption were "trumped up by Ahmed Chalabi and neoconservatives" when Iraq's al Mada newspaper published a list of the oil voucher recipients. To the contrary, the U.N. sought copies of the documents which formed the basis for that list, in order to investigate further.
   
4. It is doubtful whether sanctions would ever have been lifted so long as Saddam was in power, since the U.S. and U.K. could have exercised their veto to prevent this. But even if they had been, U.N. weapons inspectors would have continued to monitor the situation. Nor does U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer quote Saddam himself as saying that he would at once have re-started his weapons program, as you imply. He says that Saddam's senior aides assumed that this was his intention, but had not discussed it with him directly. Speculation aside, the report finds that Saddam unilaterally destroyed those parts of his WMD arsenal that were not destroyed by U.N. inspectors, and had not begun to reconstitute it by the time of his downfall.
   

* Mr. Mortimer is director of communications in the office of the U.N. Secretary General.