alim_Mansur/2004/11/17/717585.html
Annan appointed Benon Sevan, an Armenian Cypriot, to run the program
Canoe.com
Wed, November 17, 2004
A scandal even bigger than (lack of) WMD
By SALIM MANSUR For the Toronto Sun
In the recently published book, The Bomb in My Garden, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi
provides a chilling insider account of Saddam Hussein’s quest for a
nuclear bomb.
Obeidi was appointed in July 1987 by Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law,
as the chief scientist responsible for uranium enrichment program.
Kamel fled into exile in Jordan after the first Gulf War, later returned
to Iraq seeking forgiveness and was executed on orders of the tyrant.
Obeidi writes Saddam was “himself a weapon of mass destruction. He had
invaded two neighboring countries, killed thousands of Iraqis and
Iranians with chemical weapons, tortured and terrorized his own people,
and buried many of his victims in mass graves.”
As a scientist, Obeidi grasped more clearly than most that the “danger
of nuclear proliferation will haunt mankind for many lifetimes to come.”
Obeidi also confirms from his ringside seat that Iraq had been denuded
of an “active nuclear weapons program before the invasion of Iraq.”
However, his detailed narrative is about Saddam possessing “the
capabilities and, it must be presumed, the intention to restart it
someday when the world was no longer watching him so closely.”
Now, since American weapons inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer
determined in their recently published report that there were no WMD
found in Iraq, the mystery remains.
But in the meantime, what has been documented thus far from files still
being unearthed inside Iraq is a scandal of even greater proportion than
WMD: The corruption of the UN Oil-for-Food program.
This program began in 1996 to provide relief for Iraqis while their
country was under UN sanctions, by assisting in the sale of Iraqi oil,
and using the money to purchase essentials.
The program became a source of huge illicit funding for Saddam’s regime.
Duelfer estimates Saddam amassed in excess of $21 billion with which to
procure illegal goods for his favored weapons program from foreign
suppliers.
Oil-for-Food became Saddam’s hidden weapon to bribe UN officials through
kickbacks, undermine UN authority and influence permanent members of the
Security Council — China, France and Russia — and non-permanent
members, such as Syria and Ukraine, to support lifting of sanctions.
Saddam’s subversion of the UN took place as other UN agencies protested
that sanctions were responsible for the rising numbers of Iraqi children
dying, at one time estimated around 5,000 every month.
The extent of UN corruption — reaching into the office of Kofi Annan,
the Secretary-General — is yet to be fully accounted. But the
unfinished evidence provided by Duelfer in his final report on Iraq is
hugely damaging to an organization that never recovered from its
criminal ineptness over the genocide in Rwanda.
Annan appointed Benon Sevan, an Armenian Cypriot, to run the program.
Sevan has taken an early retirement and gone silent. There are also
allegations of influence-peddling inside the UN through Annan’s son,
Kojo Annan, working as a consultant for a Swiss firm responsible for
supervision of Oil-for-Food shipments to Iraq.
And given the extent to which France has been involved with Iraq from
its sale of the first nuclear reactor, Osiraq, to its traffic in the
Oil-for-Food program, French obstructionism in the Security Council to
American insistence on enforcing UN resolutions preceding the war
becomes questionable.
>From the killing fields of Rwanda to the killing fields of Iraq, the UN
was not an innocent bystander, and Kofi Annan, the man who runs it, has
much to answer for.
The great irony in all of this is the inverse proportion of rage against
America’s liberation of Iraq by non-Iraqi Arabs and Muslims and the
Michael Moore crowd in the West, to the rage of Iraqis, as Obeidi
narrates, against those who kissed and danced with the devil incarnate
in Baghdad.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress