Sunday, May 24, 2009

Ban Ki Moon and Brothers

(Ban Ki Moon, center: Courtesy of the United Nations)

Friday, May 22, 2009

US Used UN to Spy on Iraq

The Boston Globe

US used UN to spy on Iraq, aides say

Focus on Hussein seen

By Colum Lynch, Globe Correspondent, 01/06/99

UNITED NATIONS - US intelligence agencies, working under the cover of the United Nations, carried out an ambitious spying operation designed to penetrate Iraq's intelligence apparatus and track the movement of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, according to US and UN sources.

The operation, which is believed to be ongoing, allowed US intelligence agents to listen in on secret communications between elite military units responsible for Hussein's security, the sources said. It remains unclear if the plan was designed to topple the regime.

The Clinton administration yesterday declined publicly to address the charges. ''I can't comment on intelligence matters,'' said David Leavy, the spokesman for the US national security adviser. ''The relevant UN resolutions mandate all member states to cooperate with UNSCOM in its mission to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program and the United States fulfilled its obligations.''

But US officials privately acknowledged that they were engaged in the operation.

Sources said US infiltration of Iraq's internal security infrastructure is far more extensive than has been made public. And it has been largely facilitated, although sometimes unwittingly, by the UN Special Commission, created by the Security Council in 1991 to make sure Iraq got rid of its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the sources said.

The top-secret operation began in February 1996, they said. The electronic surveillance team, which is operated by international UN inspectors and run out of UNSCOM headquarters in Baghdad, was part of a special UN inspection unit that tracked Iraq's ''concealment mechanism'' - an intelligence scheme that enabled Iraq to anticipate UNSCOM's every move and hide evidence of its weapons programs on a moment's notice. UN officials suspect Iraq received information on UNSCOM personnel movements from Iraqi officials assigned to the United Nations.

Frustrated by Iraq's ability to evade UN weapons probes, the United States supplied UNSCOM with eavesdropping equipment, including commercial scanners and U2 spy photographs to monitor the activities of the elite intelligence apparatus responsible for hiding Iraq's prohibited weapons and securing Hussein's safety, according to sources.

The surveillance equipment, among other things, allowed UN inspectors, sitting in their Baghdad headquarters, to listen in on radio, cell phone, and walkie-talkie communications by members of the Iraqi security network, the sources said. British and Israeli intelligence analysts helped the UN inspectors interpret the information. The United States also played a major role in interpreting the data.

''We knew a hell of a lot of information about presidential security,'' Scott Ritter, former team leader of the UN program to counter Iraq's concealment mechanism, said in a recent interview. But he said if his team found any information related to Hussein's personal safety, ''we would dump it.''

Rolf Ekeus, former executive chairman of UNSCOM, who declined to discuss the operational elements of the surveillance system, said the program was run and controlled by the United Nations inspectors, not the United States.

''Was it run by the US?'' said Ritter. ''Hell, no.''

But Ritter said that changed in March 1998, when the United States pressured British and Israeli intelligence to stop supporting the UN eavesdropping operation, and took it over itself.

With the approval of the new chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler of Australia, the United States took control in April, according to Ritter. By July, the system had been largely automated, allowing the United States to listen in on Iraqi communications from a remote location after the UN inspectors left the country before the US-British bombing campaign.

Ritter said the United States had yet to provide the UN operation with a single briefing on the information by the time he resigned in August.

''The US decided this system is too sensitive to be run by UNSCOM. They bullied their way in and took it over,'' Ritter said. ''Now any data collected by this activity is not being assessed by UNSCOM. Now, the US gained 100 percent access and is not feeding any of it back.''

A US official warned that the public disclosure of the report would compromise US intelligence activities in Iraq, and he asked the Globe to withhold certain operational details.

Butler denied that he had allowed the United States to take charge of a United Nations intelligence gathering operation. He said UNSCOM is permitted by Security Council resolutions to accept assistance from all member countries. But he denied he used that information to help the United States.

''Those charges are utterly without foundation. That is completely false,'' Butler said. ''That I handed over such a function to the Americans to operate within our organization is completely false.''

Ekeus said that he had agreed to accept the support of US intelligence agencies in the hope it would help him get to the bottom of Iraq's prohibited weapons.

And he said the system helped UNSCOM counter Iraq's efforts to hide its weapons of mass destruction.

Ekeus, now Sweden's ambassador to the United States, said Iraq had developed a system of moving key defense assets during the Gulf War. It had shielded its missile launchers by creating decoy missiles and putting their real ones on trucks and driving them around the country.

The strategy was later employed to outfox the UN inspectors, he said.

In 1991, an American inspector, David Kay, was led on a chase through Baghdad by an Iraqi truck seeking to hide nuclear weapons material.

The defection of Brigadier General Hassan Kamal in 1995 produced greater details on the extent of the Iraqi concealment, Ekeus said.

''We learned heaps more about Iraqi techniques for hiding'' their weapons, Ekeus said. ''Our task was clear; to find prohibited weapons. We started to design a system to catch'' them in the act.

He said UN inspectors, selected from around the world, were ordered to sign a contract pledging never to reveal data they found to their governments or to the public.

It remains unclear whether the United States used the intelligence it gathered from the operation to select its targeting during Operation Desert Fox, the four-day bombing campaign that ended Dec. 19. But key figures and organizations under scrutiny by the United Nations - the Special Security Organization, the Republican Guard Headquarters, and the Iraqi Intelligence headqarters - were blown up during the operation. So was the home of Abid Hamid Makhmoud, the head of the concealment mechanism and Hussein's personal safety operation.

''He is one of only three people who know where Saddam spends the night,'' Ritter said.

''If there is an ongoing covert operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein, it seems to me that Desert Fox has undermined it,'' said Bill Arkin, a Washington-based specialist on the Iraqi military. ''The bombing and evacuation of UNSCOM has heightened security and makes a coup or uprising more difficult to pull off.''

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 01/06/99.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Architectural Diplomacy

Hardened U.S. Embassies Symbolic of Old Fears, Critics Say

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 13, 2009; A05

UNITED NATIONS, March 12 -- Across the Manhattan street from the landmark buildings of the United Nations, a new architectural symbol of American outreach to the world is rising: an impenetrable concrete tower with 30-inch-thick concrete walls and no windows on its first seven floors.

Built to endure a chemical- or biological-weapon attack or an explosives-laden truck careening up Manhattan's First Avenue, the new U.S. mission to the United Nations will offer the most secure diplomatic quarters in history when it is completed next year.

The 26-story building is one of a new generation of hardened U.S. diplomatic outposts. More than 60 high-security embassies and consulates have been constructed in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa over the past eight years.


The primary goal is greater protection for the 20,000 American officials serving in those facilities, but the buildings have also been criticized as enduring symbols of the fears and anxieties that gripped the United States in the wake of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"The attacks of 9/11 are not a sufficient excuse for this bizarre edifice. I think the building sends an entirely wrong signal to the United Nations, and the world," said Stephen Schlesinger, an author who has written extensively on the United Nations. "Rather than being an approachable, beckoning embassy -- emphasizing America's desire to open up to the rest of the globe and convey our historically optimistic and progressive values -- it sits across from the U.N. headquarters like a dark, forbidding fortress, saying, 'Go away.' "

The latest quest to better guard America's diplomats began in 1998, when members of al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring more than 5,000. A review of U.S. diplomatic security in the wake of the bombings concluded that more than 180 U.S. embassies and consulates were vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and Congress mandated an unprecedented construction spree to replace those structures. The 9/11 attacks, which felled two Manhattan skyscrapers, only reinforced the need for safer buildings.

The Bush administration appointed Charles E. Williams, a retired major general from the Army Corps of Engineers, to lead the construction. Williams's Bureau of Overseas Building Operations developed a Standard Embassy Design, a one-size-fits-all blueprint that has produced dozens of high-security look-alike embassies and consulates for the State Department. Williams won praise for the speed with which the buildings went up, but also criticism that his approach sometimes resulted in shoddy work and, in the building of the $730 million embassy in Baghdad, contracting irregularities.

State Department officials defend the program, saying that a car bomb attack against the U.S. Embassy in Yemen last August underscored the threats still facing American personnel.

"We wish the world was a safer place," said Jonathan Blyth, a spokesman for the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations. "However, in the last 10 years since the bombings in East Africa, the world is a more dangerous place. We need to construct facilities to put American diplomats in safe and functional facilities for them to advance foreign policy and ultimately, hopefully, make the world better, safer and more secure for all citizens of the world."

Blyth said that State has drawn on some of the world's best architects to build high-profile U.S. embassies in cities like Berlin and Beijing. The architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was recently awarded the American Institute of Architects' Excellence in Architecture Design Citation Award for the Beijing complex, perhaps the most elegant embassy.

But Richard J. Shinnick, who replaced Williams, has conceded that many of the U.S. buildings lack grace. In a talk to industry advisers in September, Shinnick described the past eight years as "the dark ages as far as the design culture was concerned."

Foreign critics have been hostile to the Standard Embassy Design. "There is hardly a modern building in existence -- with the exception of nuclear bunkers and pesticide-testing centers -- that is so hysterically closed off from public space as this embassy," Germany's conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said of the Berlin building.

John Rubell, whose firm Moore Ruble Yudell Architects built that embassy, was taken aback by the lashing it received in the German news media, which he thought was unfair. But he said that it may be time for embassy architects to address the critics.

"We have to deal with certain realities," Rubell said. "The security issues are real, but at the same time we need to design buildings that don't primarily express that fact."

A glance at the U.N. mission makes it hard to think of anything else. Its rough concrete exterior contrasts with gleaming glass luxury towers that sprang up around Manhattan in the boom years that followed Sept. 11.

Charles Gwathmey, whose firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects designed the mission for the General Services Administration, said the building will feature an inviting glass entryway, set off by an Alexander Calder stabile, to passersby and visitors once the project is completed.

But the transparency ends at the lobby elevators. The windowless floors at the base of the building will be filled with computers and other high-tech equipment that cannot be described to the public.

Gwathmey was most proud of the building's concrete skin, noting that he had received a call from the renowned architect I.M. Pei, who asked him, " 'How did you get that beautiful concrete?' He thought it looked fantastic."


Here's a piece I wrote on the orginal building.

CAPTION(S): The new building for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations is to be set back from the street and windowless on the lowest levels, to protect against car bombs.The U.S. Mission's headquarters, built in the Brutalist style in 1961, has a cracked facade, cramped interior and outdated wiring. "When I see it in passing, my heart does not skip a beat," U.S. Ambassador John C. Danforth said.





Published on:
Monday, 8/30/2004, A section,
edition, zone, A21
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 28 Words: 1095 Slug:


'Ugly' U.S. Mission Building To Get Roomier Replacement New Headquarters at U.N. Designed to Withstand Terrorism

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer

UNITED NATIONS -- For more than 40 years, it has been the workplace of America's most famous ambassadors, including George H.W. Bush and Madeleine K. Albright. It has also served as a key staging ground for some of the country's most important diplomatic initiatives, including U.S. efforts to sell the world on its invasion of Iraq and to defuse a potential nuclear war with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis.

But the headquarters of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations doesn't generate much respect among the world's diplomatic set, whose members have derided the gray 12-story structure as an architectural eyesore that is unfit to house the world's lone superpower.

"It's ugly," said Germany's U.N. ambassador, Gunter Pleuger. "And inside it's not very modern. I think the United States delegation deserves a better one."

The United States is set to get an upgrade. Construction workers will demolish the building on 45th Street and First Avenue over the next four months to make way for a heavily reinforced, 23-story high-rise that is designed to accommodate nearly twice the staff and survive a car bomb explosion.

The $4.4 million demolition has forced more than 160 American diplomats and support staff into a commercial building several blocks from U.N. headquarters, on 45th Street near Lexington Avenue, until the new building is completed in 2008.

The passing of the storied building, whose concrete, honeycombed facade once stirred fans of Modernist architecture, has generated little protest from the city's preservationists. Even former occupants are glad to see it go.

"It's lived its life," former U.S. ambassador John D. Negroponte said in a formal ceremony convened to shutter the old building. "It's kind of worn out."

"I've been in it once," said his successor, John C. Danforth. "When I see it in passing, my heart does not skip a beat."

Another senior U.S. diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, put it more bluntly: "They should have blown up the architect."

The building, which opened its doors in the spring of 1961, was not always so despised. For a country that had been ambivalent about the United Nations, the decision to erect a permanent mission across the street from U.N. headquarters was seen as a symbol of America's commitment to working with others to pursue peace. A New York Times editorial in March 1956 hailed U.S. plans to build "our own U.N. monument" as a powerful rebuke to "a few antediluvian isolationists in Congress who would like to have us pull out of this often annoying company and go it alone."

The effort faced bureaucratic, financial and political hurdles from the beginning, when American officials began looking for a site in 1947. The late U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. overcame the forces of Washington bureaucracy and American isolationism to make it happen, invoking fears that the Soviets were considering purchasing the site for their own mission. That, he warned, would constitute a "diplomatic Sputnik for them," a reference to the first man-made craft sent into space.

During Lodge's tenure, Congress appropriated about $3.7 million in March 1958 to begin construction. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose golden bust is displayed in the main conference room at the mission's transitional headquarters, vetoed the bill because of an unrelated dispute over civil servants' retirement funds. The bill was ultimately signed into law months later.

Inspired by Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who helped design the U.N. headquarters, the firms Kahn & Jacobs and Kelly & Gruzen conceived the building in the Brutalist style, a form of architecture popular in the 1960s and 1970s that relied on sculpted, rough concrete surfaces.

"It was an expression by the U.S. government that we were to be associated with the same kind of modern values that shaped the creation of the United Nations," said Matt Postal, who once led walking tours of Modernist architectural buildings in Manhattan. Postal said that the building has since fallen on hard times. Its concrete facade is cracked and in need of a scrub. Inside, the mission is cramped and cluttered. The wiring is too old to accommodate modern electrical, security and computer networks, U.S. officials said.

Like its predecessor, the new building has taken more than a decade to finance and has faced intense resistance from the United Nations' toughest critics. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) pledged in 1998 to fight it, saying, "I intend to do all I can to make sure that hardworking Americans don't pay for a State Department palace in New York."

The building's shell, which will be constructed by the General Services Administration, will cost $50 million to $60 million. The State Department will pay more than $12 million for renting the two spaces. To save money, the government scrapped plans for a permanent residence for the ambassador.

U.S. officials declined to discuss the cost or the practical impact the move will have on U.S. intelligence agencies that have long used the United Nations as a prime post for listening in on foreign diplomats.

The mission's transition to temporary quarters, meanwhile, has irritated some diplomats, who complained they have been squeezed into smaller cubicles while the mission's top three ambassadors have been given equal space. Still, many diplomats are grateful to flee a building that provided an inviting target for car bombers. Indeed, the design for the new mission has been influenced as much by terrorists as by the aesthetics of architecture or the principles of international cooperation.

The new building will be set back from the street, and the first six floors will be windowless, in an effort to prevent injury from exploding glass from a car bomb. Former New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp described the new mission as a "high-rise bomb shelter."

"The form and material gesture diplomatically toward friendship and transparency," he wrote. "Otherwise this is black helicopter stuff: a crisp but hulking tower of power."

Crime Goes Unsolved As UN Agencies Spar

Published on: Tuesday, 5/12/2009, A section,
M2 edition, MD zone, A01
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 36 Words: 1306 Slug: uncrime12

Alleged Crime Goes Unsolved as U.N. Agencies Argue

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer

UNITED NATIONS -- It was 10:30 p.m. in Kabul, and Shkelquim Sina had just e-mailed his wife goodnight when an explosion ripped through his hotel bedroom, obliterating a wall, scorching nearly half his body and leaving the United Nations weapons expert barely clinging to life.

The alleged culprit was not a terrorist attacker but a U.N. colleague: Within 24 hours, Robert Shaw, a former weapons specialist for British intelligence, had been turned over to Afghan authorities by U.N. officials on suspicion of attempting to murder his Albanian colleague.


Robert Shaw(courtesy of a friend)


The October 2006 incident is one of the most egregious alleged crimes to have occurred within the U.N.'s ranks, but the ensuing investigation unraveled, leaving both men with shattered lives and damaged reputations with virtually no hope of having their names cleared.

Hundreds of pages of confidential U.N. documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with those involved in the incident, demonstrate how U.N. agencies turned against each other as they struggled to determine who was responsible for the explosion. The case highlights the challenges the United Nations faces in policing the conduct of more than 150,000 U.N. civilian officials and uniformed peacekeepers around the world.

Since 2006, more than 850 peacekeepers have been sent home after allegations of corruption, sexual misconduct, gold smuggling and arms trafficking. Last year, just seven of those cases had been resolved; the most serious punishments were dismissal or up to 40 days in a military jail. In a rare case of more severe punishment, Nigerian military authorities last month sentenced 27 Nigerian peacekeepers to life in prison for mutiny in Liberia after they protested the theft of their U.N. salaries by their own officers, news reports said. The officers were demoted.

"We don't know" how many perpetrators get punished, said Alan Doss, the U.N. special representative in Congo. "Clearly, the reporting system needs improvement. We don't get the kind of systematic feedback we should be getting."

Lacking its own police force, the United Nations relies on a combination of local law enforcement authorities, internal U.N. investigators and outside consultants with varying degrees of competence and limited power to enforce their findings.

Early last year, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proposed establishing a U.N. anti-crime squad to respond more aggressively to allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct in peacekeeping missions. But the initiative encountered broad opposition from member states, including the United States, whose governments feared it would place too much power in U.N. hands.

Even so, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has said that improving U.N. management of humanitarian and peacekeeping operations is one of her top priorities.

Dueling Investigations Shaw was sipping a beer at the British Embassy in Kabul on Oct. 12, 2006, when he and his friends heard the explosion that injured Sina. Shaw quickly emerged as the prime suspect because he had been seen by a maid entering Sina's room several hours before the blast.



He was jailed for 24 hours and released into the custody of a former colleague in the British military. He was arrested a second time after U.N. lawyers furnished allegations that Shaw and Sina had been involved in a conspiracy to smuggle weapons and had quarreled. A U.N. crime scene analysis concluded that the explosive had been planted under Sina's bed.

Shaw's employer, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), launched its own investigation, led by a South African police investigator, Frank Dutton, who reconstructed the crime scene a month after the explosion. He concluded that a Russian 82mm mortar shell had detonated not under the bed but next to it, suggesting that Sina had brought it into the room himself.

"There is no evidence that Mr. Shaw detonated the explosion," Dutton wrote in a January 2007 report. "The evidence supports the conclusion that Mr. Sina had taken ammunition including a mortar shell into his room and that this had accidentally detonated -- probably by falling off his bed."

Dutton contended that U.N. officials had rushed to judgment, disseminated incriminating falsehoods and suppressing evidence that might have exonerated Shaw, including testimony from a colleague of Sina's who asserted that the Albanian had frequently kept munitions in his room. "I seriously doubt it was Shaw," the witness, Barbara Sihira, said in an interview with The Post.

Dutton also faulted the U.N. mission's lawyers for failing to ensure that Shaw had adequate legal counsel and for pressuring the Afghan police to arrest him after a preliminary police investigation established that there was not enough evidence to hold him. The lawyers' actions, he wrote in a June 2007 report, were "irresponsible and resulted in the wrongful detention of a staff member under horrendous circumstances." Shaw was held for more than 30 days in a detention center with suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.

Dutton's probe showed that Shaw had improperly transferred weapons, including two surface-to-air missiles, from U.N. custody to a British weapons depot where he previously worked. The transfer was authorized by Sina and two other U.N. officials. Still, Dutton did not conclude that the men were attempting to smuggle the weapons and said the allegations of a feud were overblown. Dutton also said Shaw had unknowingly entered Sina's room after asking a maid for a bathroom.

In the weeks following the explosion, Dutton and other UNDP officials helped Shaw get out of prison and out of the country, and a top UNDP official assured Afghan authorities that Shaw had not been involved in the incident.

The U.N. peacekeeping department -- which oversees U.N. operations in Afghanistan -- maintains that Dutton misinterpreted key facts and improperly acted as an advocate for Shaw in the course of his investigation. "There were real weaknesses in the investigation," said Phil Cooper, a former top U.N. peacekeeping official.

The head of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, also rejected Dutton's findings in a July 2007 memo, concluding that the world body's failure to secure the original crime scene -- which was renovated and repainted before Dutton began his work -- made it impossible to "ascertain the origin of the explosion."

U.N. lawyers contend that Dutton naively accepted Shaw's word that he had inadvertently gone into Sina's room to use the bathroom. They also noted that Shaw had once been seen by a journalist stealing a key to room where Sina previously lived.

Shaw initially denied possessing the key. But in a Post interview he acknowledged that the key had turned up in his personal belongings, saying it had been planted there by someone seeking to frame him. He also said the smuggling allegations were concocted by his superiors in retaliation for having raised concerns about the safety record of a British de-mining organization that was later involved in the accidental deaths of Afghan minors.

'My Name Is Mud'
The United Nations typically severs relations with suspects, and sometimes even victims, to limit the damage to the organization's reputation. Shaw and Sina, both highly regarded weapons technicians, saw their contracts terminated within months of the explosion, and they were forced out of the United Nations.

"My name is mud," said Shaw, who is suing the UNDP for $5 million, saying it suppressed evidence that he was innocent. He imagines the conversations prospective employers might have: "Have you not heard? He blew someone up."

Last year, the UNDP offered to pay $50,000 in compensation to Shaw with no acknowledgment of liability.

Sina said the UNDP ended his contract while he was recovering from the explosion. He is seeking unspecified financial compensation from the organization, saying his injuries and trauma have left him incapable of supporting his wife and two children.

"Never, never as an ex-ammunition technical officer, as an ex-major in the army, would I have made that stupid mistake to keep ammunition in my room," he said. "How can the U.N. leave this case orphaned?"
M2 edition, MD zone, A01

See story on page
See all pages in this section for this day

See story on the web

Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 36 Words: 1306 Slug: uncrime12

Alleged Crime Goes Unsolved as U.N. Agencies Argue

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer

UNITED NATIONS -- It was 10:30 p.m. in Kabul, and Shkelquim Sina had just e-mailed his wife goodnight when an explosion ripped through his hotel bedroom, obliterating a wall, scorching nearly half his body and leaving the United Nations weapons expert barely clinging to life.

The alleged culprit was not a terrorist attacker but a U.N. colleague: Within 24 hours, Robert Shaw, a former weapons specialist for British intelligence, had been turned over to Afghan authorities by U.N. officials on suspicion of attempting to murder his Albanian colleague.

The October 2006 incident is one of the most egregious alleged crimes to have occurred within the U.N.'s ranks, but the ensuing investigation unraveled, leaving both men with shattered lives and damaged reputations with virtually no hope of having their names cleared.

Hundreds of pages of confidential U.N. documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with those involved in the incident, demonstrate how U.N. agencies turned against each other as they struggled to determine who was responsible for the explosion. The case highlights the challenges the United Nations faces in policing the conduct of more than 150,000 U.N. civilian officials and uniformed peacekeepers around the world.

Since 2006, more than 850 peacekeepers have been sent home after allegations of corruption, sexual misconduct, gold smuggling and arms trafficking. Last year, just seven of those cases had been resolved; the most serious punishments were dismissal or up to 40 days in a military jail. In a rare case of more severe punishment, Nigerian military authorities last month sentenced 27 Nigerian peacekeepers to life in prison for mutiny in Liberia after they protested the theft of their U.N. salaries by their own officers, news reports said. The officers were demoted.

"We don't know" how many perpetrators get punished, said Alan Doss, the U.N. special representative in Congo. "Clearly, the reporting system needs improvement. We don't get the kind of systematic feedback we should be getting."

Lacking its own police force, the United Nations relies on a combination of local law enforcement authorities, internal U.N. investigators and outside consultants with varying degrees of competence and limited power to enforce their findings.

Early last year, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proposed establishing a U.N. anti-crime squad to respond more aggressively to allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct in peacekeeping missions. But the initiative encountered broad opposition from member states, including the United States, whose governments feared it would place too much power in U.N. hands.

Even so, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has said that improving U.N. management of humanitarian and peacekeeping operations is one of her top priorities.


Dueling Investigations Shaw was sipping a beer at the British Embassy in Kabul on Oct. 12, 2006, when he and his friends heard the explosion that injured Sina. Shaw quickly emerged as the prime suspect because he had been seen by a maid entering Sina's room several hours before the blast.
He was jailed for 24 hours and released into the custody of a former colleague in the British military. He was arrested a second time after U.N. lawyers furnished allegations that Shaw and Sina had been involved in a conspiracy to smuggle weapons and had quarreled. A U.N. crime scene analysis concluded that the explosive had been planted under Sina's bed.

Shaw's employer, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), launched its own investigation, led by a South African police investigator, Frank Dutton, who reconstructed the crime scene a month after the explosion. He concluded that a Russian 82mm mortar shell had detonated not under the bed but next to it, suggesting that Sina had brought it into the room himself.

"There is no evidence that Mr. Shaw detonated the explosion," Dutton wrote in a January 2007 report. "The evidence supports the conclusion that Mr. Sina had taken ammunition including a mortar shell into his room and that this had accidentally detonated -- probably by falling off his bed."

Dutton contended that U.N. officials had rushed to judgment, disseminated incriminating falsehoods and suppressing evidence that might have exonerated Shaw, including testimony from a colleague of Sina's who asserted that the Albanian had frequently kept munitions in his room. "I seriously doubt it was Shaw," the witness, Barbara Sihira, said in an interview with The Post.

Dutton also faulted the U.N. mission's lawyers for failing to ensure that Shaw had adequate legal counsel and for pressuring the Afghan police to arrest him after a preliminary police investigation established that there was not enough evidence to hold him. The lawyers' actions, he wrote in a June 2007 report, were "irresponsible and resulted in the wrongful detention of a staff member under horrendous circumstances." Shaw was held for more than 30 days in a detention center with suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.

Dutton's probe showed that Shaw had improperly transferred weapons, including two surface-to-air missiles, from U.N. custody to a British weapons depot where he previously worked. The transfer was authorized by Sina and two other U.N. officials. Still, Dutton did not conclude that the men were attempting to smuggle the weapons and said the allegations of a feud were overblown. Dutton also said Shaw had unknowingly entered Sina's room after asking a maid for a bathroom.

In the weeks following the explosion, Dutton and other UNDP officials helped Shaw get out of prison and out of the country, and a top UNDP official assured Afghan authorities that Shaw had not been involved in the incident.

The U.N. peacekeeping department -- which oversees U.N. operations in Afghanistan -- maintains that Dutton misinterpreted key facts and improperly acted as an advocate for Shaw in the course of his investigation. "There were real weaknesses in the investigation," said Phil Cooper, a former top U.N. peacekeeping official.

The head of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, also rejected Dutton's findings in a July 2007 memo, concluding that the world body's failure to secure the original crime scene -- which was renovated and repainted before Dutton began his work -- made it impossible to "ascertain the origin of the explosion."

U.N. lawyers contend that Dutton naively accepted Shaw's word that he had inadvertently gone into Sina's room to use the bathroom. They also noted that Shaw had once been seen by a journalist stealing a key to room where Sina previously lived.

Shaw initially denied possessing the key. But in a Post interview he acknowledged that the key had turned up in his personal belongings, saying it had been planted there by someone seeking to frame him. He also said the smuggling allegations were concocted by his superiors in retaliation for having raised concerns about the safety record of a British de-mining organization that was later involved in the accidental deaths of Afghan minors.

'My Name Is Mud'
The United Nations typically severs relations with suspects, and sometimes even victims, to limit the damage to the organization's reputation. Shaw and Sina, both highly regarded weapons technicians, saw their contracts terminated within months of the explosion, and they were forced out of the United Nations.

"My name is mud," said Shaw, who is suing the UNDP for $5 million, saying it suppressed evidence that he was innocent. He imagines the conversations prospective employers might have: "Have you not heard? He blew someone up."

Last year, the UNDP offered to pay $50,000 in compensation to Shaw with no acknowledgment of liability.

Sina said the UNDP ended his contract while he was recovering from the explosion. He is seeking unspecified financial compensation from the organization, saying his injuries and trauma have left him incapable of supporting his wife and two children.

"Never, never as an ex-ammunition technical officer, as an ex-major in the army, would I have made that stupid mistake to keep ammunition in my room," he said. "How can the U.N. leave this case orphaned?"

Monday, May 18, 2009

Iraq Uses Oil Wealth to Thwart US Efforts to Isolate Saddam

The Washington Post
Published on: Tuesday, 7/03/2001, A section,
edition, zone, A01

Iraq Uses Its Buying Power As Leverage Increasing Clout Complicates U.S. Efforts to Isolate Hussein
By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post

UNITED NATIONS, July 2 -- For more than four years, France has been the world's largest beneficiary of trade with Iraq through a U.N.-sponsored humanitarian aid program, signing deals for more than $3 billion worth of Peugeot minibuses, Renault garbage trucks, Alcatel communications equipment and other French goods.

But in the past year, France's privileged status has begun to fade. Irritated by Paris's opposition to illegal surcharges on oil exports and its training of U.N. weapons inspectors, Baghdad has slashed trade with its most important European supplier nearly in half.

The change illustrates how Baghdad uses its buying power to reward international allies and punish opponents, complicating efforts by the United States to isolate Saddam Hussein's government and prevent him from rebuilding his military or developing weapons of mass destruction.

Today, the Bush administration was forced to concede defeat, at least temporarily, on one of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief foreign policy initiatives, an effort to win approval in the 15-member U.N. Security Council for an overhaul of the 10-year-old economic sanctions on Iraq. (Details, Page A16.)

One of the principal factors in the U.S. defeat was Iraq's financial muscle. It has been growing along with Baghdad's oil revenue, which has surged from $4 billion in 1997 to $18 billion last year. Moreover, analysts say Iraq has undertaken a broad shift in its trade policy, channeling ever more trade to its neighbors and making it harder for Washington to secure their support.

In the last six months of 2000, according to confidential U.N. records, Egypt signed more than $740 million in contracts with Iraq, making it Baghdad's No. 1 trading partner. Following close behind is the United Arab Emirates, with $703 million in business. Syria, meanwhile, buys as much as $1 billion in oil from Iraq each year.

The Iraqi government has used this leverage to try to block the Bush administration's plan and, gradually, to erode the sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. When the United States and Britain introduced a Security Council resolution that would lift restrictions on imports of civilian goods but tighten up on military-related items, Iraq halted its oil exports in protest on June 4.

To punish France, apparently for backing some aspects of U.S. policy, Baghdad cut its imports of French goods to $310 million in the second half of 2000, down from $616 million in the first six months of last year, according to U.N. records. Baghdad also has threatened retaliation against its neighbors, including Turkey and Jordan, if they go along with a U.S.-British proposal to tighten their borders and halt Iraqi smuggling.

"Politics is about interests. Politics is not about morals," said Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Douri. "If the French and others will take a positive position in the Security Council, certainly they will get a benefit. This is the Iraqi policy."

The pressure clearly is having an impact.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov warned last week that Moscow would veto the U.S.-backed sanctions resolution because it threatened Russia's commercial relations with Baghdad. Iraq owes Russia about $8 billion, largely for past arms sales, and Russian companies are major middlemen in the Iraqi oil trade.

Syrian President Bashar Assad also told U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan at a June 14 meeting that he would not allow U.N. inspectors into his country to enforce the U.S.-British plan. And Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb sent Annan a letter warning that Jordan's cooperation "might very well threaten its social, economic and political stability."

Even some of Washington's most stalwart allies have been swayed by the prospect of gaining a foothold in Iraq's expanding oil economy. The Netherlands, where exports to Iraq dropped after it backed an American plan for weapons inspectors in 1998, has been pressing the 15-member Security Council to lift a ban on foreign investment in Iraq's oil sector.

Diplomats said the Netherlands, like many other countries, is eager to obtain commercial contracts for its own firms, including the powerful Royal Dutch/Shell Group.

"Iraq is using money and oil as a weapon against the international community," said James B. Cunningham, the acting U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "My government is accustomed by now to Iraq's cynicism towards its own people, and to its bluster and threatening policies. We find it harder to understand, however, why others would join in playing that game when the status quo is clearly not satisfactory."

The U.N. Security Council first voted in December 1996 to allow Iraq to sell oil to purchase food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. Gradually, all limits have been removed on the amount of oil that Iraq can sell through the "oil-for-food" program, but the revenue must go into a U.N. escrow account, and Iraqi purchases are carefully reviewed by a Security Council committee.

Under the U.S.-British proposal, the council effectively would end restrictions on civilian imports. But it would establish a series of highly targeted or "smart" sanctions to prevent Iraq from smuggling oil through neighboring countries, evading U.N. scrutiny and using the profits to buy military supplies.

Some analysts contend that the Bush administration miscalculated the degree of opposition to this plan.

"I think we were naive in pressing for smart sanctions, first in enumerating to the world exactly what they were, second in believing we could realize them," said Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, a trade group in New York.

The Bush administration had hoped to win approval of the Security Council resolution this week. But resistance, particularly from Russia, forced the United States and Britain today to agree instead to a five-month extension of the existing oil-for-food program. It is the second time that the administration has pushed back its self-imposed deadline for revamping the sanctions.

Britain's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeremy Greenstock, appealed to the council last week not to "allow national economic self-interest to hold up positive measures for the Iraqi people."

"The risk is that if we do not act now, the Security Council may never be in a position to act," he added. "There is no intention in this resolution to harm the economic interests of neighboring states or others doing legitimate business with Iraq. We expect to see an expansion of civilian trade which will benefit all."

Four of the five permanent members of the Security Council -- the United States, China, France and Britain -- reached agreement last week on a list of items with both military and civilian applications. Such "dual-use" imports would be subject to Security Council approval under the U.S.-British plan. But Russia did not accept the list.

The talks were deeply influenced by Iraq's growing economic might. France and China succeeded in drastically shortening the original U.S. list in part to allow unrestricted imports of items, including computers and telecommunications equipment, that their companies are trying to sell to Baghdad.

For instance, the French telecommunications company Alcatel has more than $73 million in pending contracts with Iraq for microwave equipment, fiber optics, digital radio and other telecommunications devices, according to confidential U.N. records. Chinese companies, meanwhile, have more than $80 million in pending contracts. The Pentagon suspects one of those firms, Huawei Technologies Co., of illegally providing Iraq with fiber-optic cable to improve its antiaircraft missile batteries.

Chavez Calls Bush a Racist Devil

The Washington Post

Published on: Thursday, 9/21/2006, A section,
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20
Inches: 23 Words: 854 Slug: chavez21

Venezuelan Leader Demonizes Bush
Chavez Calls President a Racist 'Devil'
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 -- President Hugo Chavez, the combative Venezuelan leader, denounced President Bush in a U.N. speech Wednesday as a racist, imperialist "devil" who has devoted six years in office to military aggression and the oppression of the world's poorest people.

Speaking from the lectern where Bush spoke a day earlier, Chavez said he could still smell the sulfur -- a reference to the scent of Satan. Even by U.N. standards, where the United States is frequently criticized as the world's superpower, Chavez's remarks were exceptionally inflammatory. They were also received with a warm round of applause.

Chavez's address followed a series of strident speeches by U.S. adversaries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Together, they represent an emboldened alliance of oil-rich states that defy U.S. demands to change their policies on a range of issues, including the development of nuclear technology and the role of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.

"Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world," Chavez told the chamber of international diplomats. "I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world."

Bush administration officials dismissed Chavez's remarks as the ravings of a reckless political leader. "I'm not going to dignify a comment by the Venezuelan president towards the United States," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. "I think it's not becoming for a head of state."

In an effort to bolster his case, Chavez waved a copy of Noam Chomsky's book "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Domination" and recommended that everyone read it. The book, written by the American linguist and longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy, argues that the United States' pursuit of political supremacy is having devastating consequences for the majority of the world's people.

"The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples -- to the peoples of the world," Chavez said. "What would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? . . . I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people, think. They would say, 'Yankee imperialist, go home.' "

"The world is waking up," he added. "I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism."

Chavez's U.N. appearance is part of a Venezuelan campaign to gain election to the Latin American seat on the U.N. Security Council, a post that would place it in a position to challenge U.S. policies. The United States, which vigorously opposes Venezuela's candidacy, is supporting a competing bid for the post by Guatemala, a poor Central American republic with little political influence at the United Nations.

In portraying the United States as an imperial power, Chavez sought to evoke memories of the Cold War, when Third World revolutionaries such as Cuban President Fidel Castro (an ally and mentor of Chavez) and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe delivered scathing attacks against the United States.

U.N. experts said that though Chavez's speech may resonate with delegations who oppose a new world order built around American power, it was so undiplomatic that it may undermine his chances of getting into the Security Council. It "confirms the worst stereotypes about the U.N. General Assembly being a circus sideshow filled with venom and rabid anti-Americanism," said Edward Luck, an expert on the United Nations at Columbia University. "I never thought anyone could make Ahmadinejad look like a moderate, but Chavez has done it."

Although Chavez is renowned for his caustic views on the Bush administration, some senior U.N. diplomats were startled by his statement. Asked if Chavez had gone too far, China's Foreign Minister Li Zhao Xing said: "He really said that? Are you sure? He would go that far?"

Britain's Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett suggested that the Chavez comments went beyond the pale of diplomatic protocol at the United Nations. "Even the Democrats wouldn't say that," she said.

Some of the world's poorest countries, such as Bolivia, sought to prove they could stand up to the United States. Bolivian President Evo Morales, a close ally of Chavez, chastised the Bush administration for adding his nation to a list of major drug-producing countries because it permits the cultivation of coca, which is consumed by many Bolivians as tea but is also used to make cocaine.

Holding a coca leaf in his hand, Morales told the General Assembly he would never yield to U.S. pressure to criminalize coca production. "With all respect to the government of the United States, we are not going to change anything. We do not need blackmail or threats," Morales said.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

US Police Misconduct Mars Bosnia Mission

Published on: Tuesday, 5/29/2001, A section,
edition, zone, A01


Misconduct, Corruption by U.S. Police Mar Bosnia Mission U.N., Europeans Query Push To Bring In More Officers
By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post

UNITED NATIONS -- In the five years since international police officers were sent to Bosnia to help restore law and order, the U.N. police mission there has faced numerous charges of misconduct, corruption and sexual impropriety. But in virtually every case, the allegations have been hushed up by sending officers home, often without a full investigation, according to internal U.N. reports and interviews with U.S. and European officials.

The troubles of the U.N. police mission in Bosnia have important consequences for the Bush administration. Eager to scale back military commitments, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is pushing to reduce the 3,350 American soldiers on peacekeeping duty in Bosnia and replace them with civilian police.

But some U.N. and European officials question the wisdom of shifting responsibility onto the international police force without first addressing its flaws, including low recruitment standards, a hazy command structure and the ability of individual officers to act with near impunity.

"Here we are, international police officers hoping to demonstrate and impress the locals with democratic policing and high moral values, and we're actually presenting them with one or two people who ought to be investigated and locked up," said Richard Monk, a top British police officer who served as the U.N. police commissioner in 1997.

Among the 1,832 U.N. police in Bosnia are 161 officers from the United States. Although the record of the U.S. contingent is no worse than others, senior American officials acknowledge serious problems in selecting and training U.S. police officers to serve in Bosnia. That job has been given to a private, Texas-based corporation, DynCorp Technical Services, under an exclusive, $15 million annual contract with the State Department.

In the past year alone, at least three American policemen were removed from the Bosnian mission for sexual misconduct and exceeding their authority, according to U.N. officials.

In prior cases, several other U.S. officers had been forced to resign under suspicion of committing statutory rape, abetting prostitution and accepting valuable gifts from Bosnian officials. Yet none was prosecuted. The most serious punishment imposed on an American officer was dismissal and the loss of a $4,600 bonus.

Asked about the allegations, DynCorp issued a statement voicing disappointment "that the misconduct of a few individuals has cast a shadow on the more than 2,000 police monitors who have helped to achieve the U.N. mission to rebuild these nations."

"Upon learning of the allegations from U.N. officials, we acted swiftly and responsibly, terminating and repatriating the individuals involved," the company said but refuses to disclose how many U.S. officers have been sent home.

International police have diplomatic immunity from prosecution in Bosnia, and unless their governments waive that immunity, the most severe punishment the United Nations can impose on renegade officers is to send them home.

Thomas Miller, the U.S. ambassador in Bosnia, conceded that in a race to find American police willing to serve abroad, the U.S. contingent accepted some officers who were unfit to serve on the International Police Task Force, or IPTF.

"In terms of the quality of U.S. IPTF folks, I have seen some really good ones," Miller said. "And I've heard about some not so good ones. No, let's be honest, bad ones."

American officials say the failings are due to inexperience in international policing and the absence of a national police force like France's Gendarmerie or Italy's Carabinieri. American participation in U.N. civilian police, or CivPol, missions has increased from about 50 American officers in Haiti in 1993 to about 880 serving today in U.N. missions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor.

President Bill Clinton issued a directive in February 2000 acknowledging that "the current process used by our government to recruit, prepare, train and deploy civilian police officers to CivPol operations is not adequate."

Last summer, the White House asked the FBI and police commissioners from major U.S. cities to provide a reserve of police officers who could be sent abroad to serve in U.N. missions. But the FBI and big city police departments demurred. "They slammed the door on us," said a former Clinton administration official.

Recruiting Difficulties When the U.N. mission in Bosnia began in 1996, DynCorp scoured U.S. police departments in search of bored or underpaid officers looking for a change of pace. Advertisements in police publications promised adventure in a distant land for as much as $100,000 a year. To meet the State Department's demand for police, the company hired many retired officers, including some older than 65.

According to U.N. and DynCorp officials, many of the U.S. officers have performed nobly, even donating money and labor to local charities.

"The top 10 percent [of the American contingent] were fantastic: They are what made the mission," said a former U.N. police officer who requested anonymity. "But the bottom 10 percent made your eyes water."

One former Illinois state trooper was wearing a pacemaker when he arrived in the town of Stolac to set up the U.N. police headquarters, according to Steve Smith, a former officer from Santa Cruz, Calif., who served as the U.N.'s regional commander in Stolac.

"There was [another] guy, he was very elderly, in his sixties, that couldn't stay awake," Smith said. "He was very overweight, he waddled rather than walked. Neither one of them could have passed a physical."

But the main trouble with American officers, in Smith's view, was that they were difficult to command.

"It's easy to keep the French guys in line because they come from the Gendarmerie Nationale and they get an evaluation at the end of their stay," he said. "For the Americans, on the other hand, there are no professional consequences unless they want to keep working for DynCorp. The problem is that you have no hammer. . . .

"They're making $85,000 in a place where everyone else is making $5,000 and they're chasing whores, they're shacking up with young women, and they're basically just having a good time," Smith said.

Although U.N. officials said they were disappointed in the Americans, they conceded that the U.S. contingent was far from the weakest in the mission. Indonesia, Pakistan and Nepal sent police officers who could not speak English -- the working language of the IPTF -- or drive a vehicle, officials said. Jordanians, Pakistanis and Germans have also been sent home for sexual misconduct.

The Ukrainian contingent in Stolac made it abundantly clear that they had come to Bosnia to make money, not reform the local police, Smith said. He said their compound was packed with cars they were reselling for a profit back home.

The IPTF was created by the Dayton peace accord, which ended Bosnia's civil war in 1995. Its task was to integrate the country's warring Muslim, Croat and Serb officers into a national police force and monitor their activities. However, the U.N. officers are prohibited from carrying arms and do not have authority to make arrests; their role is mainly to monitor and advise local police.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton agreement, has described the police mission as its "weakest" component.

Murky Chain of Command Among the problems is a fuzzy command structure that gives the U.N. brass limited authority over police officers recruited from more than 45 countries with widely varying law enforcement systems.

Mark Kroeker, now police commissioner in Portland, Ore., said that in an American police department, the chief "calls all the shots." If there are allegations of misconduct, he said, "you do your investigation, you impose discipline, and it's over." But in Bosnia, where he served as a deputy commissioner until 1998, "There were so many overlapping policies and rules and laws that it made it very diffuse."

The final say in disciplinary matters, according to Kroeker and U.N. officials, rests with the home governments, which seldom are interested in prosecuting or even thoroughly investigating the muddy allegations that arise in the Balkans.

One American officer was fired in December after the United Nations learned that he had paid 6,000 German marks -- about $2,900 -- to acquire "ownership" of a Moldovian prostitute he met at a brothel in Sarajevo.

She lived with the officer for several months before leaving him in a quarrel and returning to the brothel, according to senior U.S. and U.N. officials.

Some commanders took a lenient view. "This American was a rather innocent dupe," said a senior U.N. official. "It's actually a love story. He fell in love with this girl and bought her freedom."

Miller, the U.S. ambassador, said he had little sympathy for the officer.

"Maybe I'm just simplistic, but money was paid for a human being. . . . That's wrong. That's just plain and simply wrong," Miller said.

That incident was only the latest in a series of alleged misconduct cases that have tarnished American police officials in Bosnia.

David McBride, 53, a former Oklahoma commissioner of public safety, rose quickly through the IPTF ranks to become deputy police commissioner before he was forced to resign in August 1999.

An internal disciplinary panel concluded that he had violated the code of conduct by accepting financial favors from local government authorities, including a free room at the Interior Ministry's guest house, a mobile phone and use of a VW Golf automobile. When McBride traveled to the provincial town of Jace for a meeting, a local Bosnian-Croat police chief, Jozo Lucic, paid his hotel bill, according to U.N. investigators and McBride himself.

Senior U.N. and DynCorp officials said the gifts and McBride's failure to file reports on his meetings with local authorities had created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.

McBride contends that he was a victim of character assassination by U.N. personnel who clashed with him over police policy. In a telephone interview, he said he had told his superiors about the gifts. He also furnished copies of e-mail messages in which he informed U.N. authorities about where he was living and who had supplied his cell phone.

"At no time ever did I do anything improper, unethical or illegal," McBride said. "Had I known what I know now -- that things in Bosnia are political and blown out of proportion -- I would be much more careful to avoid putting myself in a position that could be construed, for political purposes, as being inappropriate."

Nevertheless, European officials cite the McBride case and other alleged instances of American misconduct as evidence that DynCorp has provided the United Nations with substandard police.

"I have always been concerned about how the United States did its recruitment," said Eric Morris, a senior U.N. official who set up the panel that examined McBride's activities. "The United States says that they have no choice because they don't have a national police force. We always felt quality control was lacking."

In another case, Peter Alzugaray, 53, a former Miami police officer, attracted the attention of U.N. investigators in the spring of 1997, a year after he allegedly began a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old Bosnian girl in the town of Drvar.

"He said he was adopting her. She said that he had given her two rings, and that he was going to take her to America," said a U.N. official familiar with the case. "And the mother signed a document saying the girl could live with this guy."

A DynCorp official said the company fired Alzugaray and stripped him of his police gear as soon as it learned of the situation. But he disappeared before the company could send him back to the United States, the DynCorp official said.

Alzugaray acknowledged in an interview that the United Nations accused him of having sexual relations with a minor. But he said the Bosnian woman was actually 17 years old when he met her. And, he said, they waited a year before they began a sexual relationship, got married and moved to Miami.

"If she would have been a minor, would the Americans have given her a visa?" to come to Miami, he asked.

The relationship ended, he said, when she learned he had lied to her about owning a house in America and having only one ex-wife and two children. After arriving in Miami, they moved into a room in his sister's home, and he admitted that he had been married three times and had six children, Alzugaray said.

Last July, he said, the Bosnian woman visited an aunt in Texas, "met a young man and never came back."

U.N. officials insist that there has been steady improvement in the quality of international police serving in Bosnia, East Timor and elsewhere. DynCorp, for example, now requires American officers to undergo more strenuous fitness tests.

"To their credit, there has been a visible tightening of the standards," a U.N. official said, referring to the United States. "They have gone from a horrible standard to an adequate one."

Yet the U.S. contingent continues to face disciplinary problems.

In December, two American, two British and two Spanish police officers were forced out of the IPTF after they overstepped their authority by raiding three brothels and freeing 34 women. The top U.N. official in Bosnia, Jaques Klein, initially described the men as overzealous but superb officers who had acted out of moral outrage.

Under questioning by U.N. police investigators, however, some of the officers admitted having had sexual relations with women they had rescued, according to U.N. sources and an internal U.N. document. A British officer who participated in the raid told U.N. investigators that his colleagues had been regular customers at the three brothels.

UN Quashed Probe Into Human Trafficking

The Washington Post
Published on: Thursday, 12/27/2001, A section,
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 53 Words: 1892 Slug:

U.N. Halted Probe of Officers' Alleged Role in Sex Trafficking Lack of Support From Above, in Field Impeded Investigators
By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post

UNITED NATIONS -- The United Nations quashed an investigation earlier this year into whether U.N. police were directly involved in the enslavement of Eastern European women in Bosnian brothels, according to U.N. officials and internal documents.

The decision to halt the investigation came when the U.N. Mission in Bosnia was reeling from the disclosure that several of its police officers had been dismissed for sexual misconduct.

David Lamb, a former Philadelphia police officer who served as a U.N. human rights investigator in Bosnia until April, said that in February he began to look into allegations against six Romanian, Fijian and Pakistani officers stationed in the town of Bijeljina.

The most serious charges, he said, were that two Romanian policemen had recruited Romanian women, purchased false documents for them and then sold the women to Bosnian brothel owners.

Within weeks, Lamb said, his preliminary inquiry found more than enough evidence to justify a full-scale criminal investigation. But Lamb and his colleagues said they also faced physical threats and were repeatedly stymied in their inquiries by their superiors, including a senior Ukrainian police officer who ordered an end to the investigation of the Romanians' conduct.

"I have to say there were credible witnesses, but I found a real reluctance on the part of the United Nations . . . leadership to investigate these allegations," Lamb said.

U.N. officials respond that they are committed to combating trafficking in women, but that a U.N. oversight team concluded there was insufficient evidence of systematic police involvement in the sex trade. They say it is difficult to penetrate the murky underworld of the Balkans and note that the responsibility for prosecuting U.N. police officers belongs to their home countries, not the United Nations.

According to some human rights advocates and former U.N. employees, the episode demonstrates the unwillingness or inability of the U.N.'s International Police Task Force (IPTF) in Bosnia to discipline its 1,600 officers from 48 countries.

The Washington Post reported in May that in the five years since international police officers were sent to help restore order in Bosnia, the U.N. police mission has faced numerous charges of misconduct, corruption and sexual impropriety. But in nearly every case, U.N. officials handled the allegations quietly by sending the officers home, often without a full investigation.

Two Americans also have filed whistleblower lawsuits alleging that they were fired by DynCorp, a private contractor that selects U.S. police to serve in Bosnia, because they had complained that fellow officers were patronizing brothels and purchasing women. DynCorp denied that the workers were fired for that reason.

But Lamb's investigation involved the most serious allegations yet: that some members of the IPTF directly participated in trafficking in women for forced prostitution.

Illicit Trade

Each year, thousands of Eastern European women, primarily from Ukraine, Moldova and Romania, are drawn to Bosnia with offers of employment as dancers, waitresses, bartenders or prostitutes. In some cases, their passports are taken, and they are sold to local brothel owners, according to human rights workers.

"Many of them think they are on their way to Italy to work as waitresses," said Martina Vandenberg, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who has investigated the Bosnian sex trade. "Some know that they will work as sex workers, but have no idea that they will be bought and sold as chattel and forced to work essentially as slaves."

Vandenberg said local brothel owners and Bosnian war profiteers turned from smuggling arms to trafficking in women after the end of the Bosnia war in 1995 and have established links to organized crime across Europe.

While the U.N. mission in Bosnia has taken an increasingly tough line against local brothel owners over the past two years, Vandenberg said it has not been "forthcoming when asked about cases of IPTF officers involved in trafficking, either as clients or as traffickers. That lack of transparency has sent a message that there is impunity for this."

U.N. officials respond that the IPTF has conducted dozens of raids against Bosnian brothels and has rescued more than 350 women who had been forced to serve as prostitutes.

After being criticized for ignoring allegations of involvement by U.N. police and peacekeepers, Jacques Klein, the U.N. secretary general's special representative to Bosnia, instructed his police commissioner in June to "ensure that each case is investigated."

But Klein also argued in a letter to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that it would be a mistake to focus on the role of U.N. personnel as customers of brothels.

"Placing undue and unfair emphasis on U.N. peacekeepers diverts attention away from those ultimately responsible for trafficking. The focus of our efforts should be on corrupt government officials and members of organized crime who perpetrate the trade and allow it to flourish," he wrote.

When asked by a reporter this summer whether the United Nations had looked into allegations involving Romanian police officers, Klein and other U.N. officials in Bosnia denied any knowledge of an investigation. "I have absolutely no evidence, no record, and I'm unaware of any internal investigation into any alleged misconduct involving a Romanian police monitor," Klein said.

But, after weeks of denials, U.N. spokesmen in New York and Bosnia acknowledged that the Romanians had been the subject of internal U.N. inquiries. Confidential U.N. documents and interviews revealed that Romanian officers had been investigated by Lamb, then by a Canadian officer, by the Romanian government and finally by the Office of Internal Oversight, the U.N.'s chief anti-corruption unit.

Lamb outlined his findings in e-mails and a memo to the regional U.N. headquarters in Sarajevo. In an e-mail sent March 28 to five U.N. officers, he identified a Romanian, Constantin Dumitrescu, as one of five U.N. police officers who "were in some way linked to allegations of involvement in prostitution and women trafficking."

Lamb said his findings were based largely on interviews with Bosnian police sources and women who had fled from brothels and were awaiting deportation to their homelands.

The women said a Romanian officer and his wife were involved in the recruitment and sale of women, working out of a brothel near the Bosnian town of Zvornik. Lamb said investigators initially thought the officer was Dumitrescu, but further investigation shifted suspicion to a second Romanian officer, Julian Boros.

The United Nations has denied requests for interviews with Dumitrescu and Boros.

Threats

Another internal memo, written March 18 by one of Lamb's investigators, Pablo Badie of Argentina, said Boros admitted buying working documents from the Romanian embassy for two women but warned him to halt the inquiry.

"Stop immediately anything against Romanians," Boros told Badie, according to the memo. "Do not mess with me, neither with my colleague Dumitrescu. I'll not tell you more, but I think you can guess what can happen."

Rosario Ioanna, a Canadian officer, was assigned by the U.N. police's internal affairs bureau to follow up on the findings of Lamb and Badie. The confidential internal affairs report alleges that the Romanian officers sought to impede Ioanna's investigation, to remove four trafficking victims from police custody and to intimidate them during questioning.

Ioanna and Badie obtained a list from a trafficking victim of about 10 other Romanian officers who were patronizing brothels. Ioanna described a meeting at a Bijeljina cafe with two informants, identified in U.N. documents as Mr. S and Mr. P, who charged that Romanian officers served both as traffickers and as informers for local brothel owners.

In return for tipping off the brothels about police raids, one of the Romanians "was given a farm vehicle to work his farmland back in his country," the two informants told Ioanna, according to a March 19 report for the U.N. internal affairs Discipline and Internal Investigation Section.

Ioanna also told colleagues that the U.N.'s local brass had sought to shut down his investigation and let the Romanian government decide whether its officers were guilty. The U.N.'s Ukrainian police chief of staff, Oleh Savchenko, ordered him to ignore the Romanians and to limit his investigation to less serious charges of sexual misconduct -- primarily soliciting prostitutes -- against five policemen from Fiji and Pakistan, according to Lamb and two other people familiar with Ioanna's account.

The relatively minor accusations against four of the five officers, including the Pakistani station commander, were "substantiated" and the officers were sent home, according to a U.N. report. The fifth officer left the mission.

But the more serious charges languished.

Retaliation

In the meantime, some of the officers under investigation accused Ioanna and Badie of having sexual relations with local translators. A preliminary internal inquiry into the investigators' activities found no wrongdoing, according to U.N. officials.

Lamb believes the accusations were retaliation of a crude but common variety.

"This is the third case that I am aware of in which human rights officers have found themselves under fire for reporting or investigating IPTF involvement in prostitution/women trafficking," he wrote in an e-mail March 8 to Donald Haney, an IPTF officer who was conducting the inquiry.

Neither Savchenko nor Ioanna responded to requests for comment. Attempts to reach Badie in Bosnia and through his family in Argentina were unsuccessful.

The Office of Internal Oversight sent two investigators from New York to Bosnia on June 26 to conduct a preliminary inquiry into wider allegations of U.N. police involvement in sexual trafficking. The inquiry was requested by Mary Robinson, the U.N.'s high commissioner for human rights, and other senior U.N. officials to determine whether a formal investigation was warranted.

The investigators never contacted Lamb. Nor did they speak with U.N. police whistleblowers, such as Kathryn Bolkovac, an American officer who has accused U.N. police of complicity in sexual trafficking and is suing DynCorp. The company denied that Bolkovac was dismissed for pursuing the allegations.

Most importantly, the women who had initially made the allegations -- the key witnesses -- had left Bosnia.

On July 6, the oversight team reported that there were insufficient grounds to move ahead with a full-blown criminal investigation, according to the U.N.'s chief spokesman, Fred Eckhard.

"There will be no investigation," Eckhard said. "They did not find any evidence of systematic or organized involvement in human trafficking. They did make a number of recommendations of how the U.N. police could strengthen their role in combating human trafficking."

Marius Dragolea, charge{acute} d'affaires at Romania's mission to the United Nations, said a team from Romania's Interior Ministry also went to Bosnia in June to investigate rumors of Romanian police involvement in sexual trafficking. He said it concluded the allegations were unfounded.

"If these allegations were unhappily proved to be right, all those involved would be punished," Dragolea said. "Up to now, we have no evidence . . . of illegal activities concerning Romanian police. This is a conclusion also reached by the leadership of the IPTF."

US Firms Aid Iraqi Oil Industry

US Firms Aid Iraq Oil Industry

The Washington Post
Feb. 16, 2002

U.S. Firms Aiding Iraqi Oil Industry Commerce With Baghdad Grows Quietly as Washington Urges Regime Change
By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 17 --

Four years ago, when he was director of central intelligence, John M. Deutch headed up American efforts to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Today, Deutch sits on the board of Schlumberger Ltd., a multinational company that is helping Baghdad service its oil rigs.

As secretary of defense during the Persian Gulf War, Richard B. Cheney played a key role in the U.S.-led military coalition that forced Iraq to retreat from Kuwait. But as chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., a Dallas-based maker of oil equipment, Cheney recently held a major stake in Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump Co., two American players in the reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry.

While the United States and Britain wage almost daily airstrikes against military installations in northern and southern Iraq, U.S. companies, executives and even some architects of American policy toward Iraq are doing business with Saddam Hussein's government and helping to rebuild its battered oil industry.

Though perfectly legal, the growing U.S.-Iraqi commerce has been kept quiet by both sides because it seems to fly in the face of Washington's commitment to "regime change" in Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's claim to be defying the world's lone superpower. The United Nations also helps both countries avoid embarrassment by treating the business arrangements as confidential.

The trade is permitted under the "oil for food" deal, a humanitarian exemption from the U.N. trade embargo imposed on Iraq after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It allows Iraq to sell oil and use the proceeds, under U.N. supervision, to purchase food, medicine and other humanitarian goods, as well as spare parts to keep the oil flowing.

Placing bids through overseas subsidiaries and affiliates, more than a dozen U.S. firms have signed millions of dollars in contracts with Baghdad for oil-related equipment since the summer of 1998, according to diplomats, industry officials and U.N. documents.

"The United States is the cradle of the international oil industry," said James Placke, who tracks Persian Gulf oil production for Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. "A lot of the equipment in Iraq's oil industry was originally made in America, and if you want spare parts, you go back to the original supplier."

Most U.S. oil companies have been prohibited by Baghdad from directly purchasing Iraqi crude since the United States bombed Iraq during Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. But Iraq nevertheless has emerged in the past year as the fastest growing source of U.S. oil imports, according to Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation.

American companies, he said, now purchase about 700,000 of the 2 million barrels of oil exported daily by Iraq, mainly through foreign middlemen who load the Iraqi crude and transport it directly to American ports, primarily in the Gulf of Mexico.

"The Chevrons and the Exxons of this world have to buy from the Russians, the French and the Chinese traders," said Goldstein. But, he added, "the U.S. spare parts industry is too dominant to ignore."

After approving the oil-for-food exemption in 1996, the U.N. Security Council gradually raised the amount of oil Iraq was allowed to sell, and on Dec. 17 it removed the ceiling.

In June 1998, the 15-nation Security Council voted to allow Iraq to buy up to $300 million in spare parts every six months. The council is considering a proposal to double that limit.

According to U.S. government figures, American firms account for only a tiny share of the nearly $10 billion in trade that has been conducted under the oil-for-food exemption. U.S. citizens have received licenses to export about $15 million of oil-related spare parts and $400 million of food, medicine and water treatment equipment to Iraq, according to the State Department.

But those figures do not count most products purchased by Iraq from American subsidiaries abroad. This indirect U.S.-Iraqi trade is tracked by the United Nations, which must approve all the contracts. But little information about it has been made public.

The U.N. humanitarian program for Iraq maintains a Web site that lists contracts by number, with a brief description of the goods involved and the country--but not the company--selling them to Iraq. According to this, the United States has been responsible for only 2 out of 2,080 contracts for oil spare parts submitted to the United Nations for approval. France, China and Russia, by contrast, submitted a total of 746 contracts.

America's real share of this trade, while unclear, is certainly far greater. Until recently, visitors to the Web site could search for a company name and then call up the contract numbers associated with that company, allowing cross-referencing between contracts and companies. The search engine was shut down last week after U.N. officials learned that The Washington Post had used it to investigate U.S. companies doing business with Iraq through foreign subsidiaries.

John Mills, spokesman for the U.N. Office of the Iraq Program, declined to comment on the extent of U.S. trade with Iraq, saying it was proprietary trade information.

According to diplomats and the Web site, American firms that have done business with Iraq, directly or through subsidiaries, include such petroleum industry giants as Halliburton, the world's largest oil field service company; Schlumberger, the second largest oil field servicer; the Fisher-Rosemount unit of Emerson Electric Co. in St. Louis; the Hamilton Sundstrand unit of United Technologies in Windsor Locks, Conn.; and Baker Hughes Inc. of Houston.

Deutch, the former CIA director who sits on the board of Schlumberger, and officials at the firm's New York headquarters did not respond to requests for comment on their dealings with Iraq.

A Halliburton spokesman, Guy Marcus, confirmed that two of his firm's former joint ventures--Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump--conducted business with Baghdad. "The joint ventures sold spare parts to Iraq through European subsidiaries," he said.

Marcus added, however, that Halliburton's share of both joint ventures was sold in the last two months to Ingersoll-Rand of Woodcliff Lake, N.J., which now wholly owns them. He also said that Cheney, the former secretary of defense, "was not involved in the management of either joint venture and was not involved in the decision to make such sales" to Iraq.

According to one diplomat at the United Nations, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump signed $29 million in contracts for spare parts with Iraq through affiliates in Austria, France, Germany and Italy. Marcus said he did not know whether that figure was accurate.

Peg Hashem, a spokeswoman for Hamilton Sundstrand, confirmed that a French subsidiary, Dosapro Milton Roy, sold pumps for Iraqi water treatment plants in a contract worth "under $1 million." She said it was also possible that the firm had sold additional equipment to Iraq.

Spokesmen for Dresser-Rand, Dresser-Ingersoll Pump Co. and Baker Hughes did not respond to requests for comment on their ties to Iraq. But a Fisher-Rosemount spokesman, Walt Sharp, acknowledged that it has sold equipment to Iraq. Although he was not sure of the value of the contracts, he said, all the deals were approved by the Treasury Department and a U.N. Security Council sanctions committee.

Indeed, Diplomats said Washington has been a greater obstacle for American businesses than Baghdad. The United States has placed "holds" on more than 1,000 contracts valued at $1.5 billion under the oil-for-food program, including some held by American companies. A review of 22 Fisher-Rosemount contracts, for example, showed that the United States had held up eight and approved seven; the remainder were pending or had been canceled.

"We don't play favorites," said a State Department official.

UN Says Peacekeepers Abused Women in Congo

Published on: Saturday, 11/27/2004, A section,
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 26
Inches: 25 Words: 989 Slug:

U.N. Says Its Workers Abuse Women in Congo Report Laments a 'Significant' Incidence of Pedophilia, Prostitution and Rape
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 26 -- Sexual exploitation of women and girls by U.N. peacekeepers and bureaucrats in the U.N. mission in Congo "appears to be significant, wide-spread and ongoing," according to a confidential U.N. report that documents cases of pedophilia, prostitution and rape.

The report by a U.N. peacekeeping official who recently visited Congo says that some U.N. personnel paid $1 to $3, or bartered food or the promise of a job, for sex. In some cases, U.N. officials allegedly raped women and girls and then offered them food or money to make it look as if they had engaged in prostitution.

Senior U.N. officials in New York said they have received 150 allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. personnel in Congo. The officials declined to provide names or nationalities of those charged with misconduct, saying they are under investigation. But U.N. officials familiar with the charges said that Tunisian and Uruguayan peacekeepers and a French civilian are among those accused of abuse.

"The situation appears to be one of 'zero-compliance with zero-tolerance' throughout the mission," according to the Nov. 8 report, which summarizes the findings of a U.N. mission to the region led by Prince Zeid Hussein, Jordan's U.N. ambassador. "It appears that the most frequent form of sexual exploitation occurring in [the U.N. mission in Congo] relates to instances of prostitution with minors and adult women, with occasional instances of rape."

The abuse in Congo mirrors previous scandals at U.N. missions in Cambodia and Bosnia, where U.N. police from the United States, Romania and many other countries were implicated in sexual crimes and misconduct. In contrast to those episodes, the United Nations has sought to confront the charges publicly and admitted that policies devised to combat those activities have failed.

"I am afraid there is clear evidence that acts of gross misconduct have taken place," U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said at a Nov. 19 summit in Tanzania. "This is a shameful thing for the United Nations to have to say, and I am absolutely outraged by it."

In July, Annan appointed Zeid, who served as a political affairs officer in a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Bosnia from 1994 to 1996, to lead an internal U.N. effort to combat sexual exploitation. Zeid is trying to persuade countries that supply troops for peacekeeping missions to discourage soldiers from engaging in sexual misconduct and to discipline those who do. He is expected to produce a more substantive report of findings and recommendations.

The top U.N. peacekeeping official, Jean-Marie Guehenno of France, said that the United Nations is prepared to lift the immunity of U.N. civilians who engage in sex crimes so they can face prosecution. But senior U.N. officials say they have no authority over the prosecution of foreign troops and fear that if they publicly expose them, their embarrassed governments will withdraw badly needed peacekeepers from U.N. missions around the world.

So far, the United Nations has sent at least two Tunisian peacekeepers home, and a French civilian accused of sexually molesting children was surrendered to French authorities. If convicted in a French court, he could face a prison term of up to seven years. The report on Zeid's mission to Congo said the case came to the attention of U.N. officials after "an initial attempt by locals to blackmail the alleged perpetrator."

The U.N. mission in Congo, headed by former U.S. ambassador William Lacy Swing, employs more than 1,000 civilians and nearly 11,000 peacekeepers from 50 countries. It was created five years ago to help end a war that involved the militaries of seven African nations and to pave the way to elections in a country the size of Western Europe.

But the devastating impact of the war and the presence of large numbers of well-paid international peacekeepers in one of Africa's poorest regions have created opportunities for prostitution.

U.N. officials in Congo said that peacekeepers were "aggressively targeted by prostitutes" at their bases, according to the report. But the report's author suggested that the U.N. mission also demonstrated little commitment to stopping prostitution and other acts of misconduct.

The worst alleged violations occurred in the town of Bunia, where more than half of the U.N. mission is headquartered. The U.N. Office of Internal Oversight cited 68 allegations of sexual misconduct against U.N. military personnel and four against civilians in Bunia between May and September 2004.

A 13-year-old girl interviewed in Bunia by Zeid's team said that she was raped by a U.N. worker. "One day, in May 2004, my grandmother had to attend a funeral and I was left alone at home to look after my brothers and sisters," she told investigators. "That night, around 8 p.m., one of the [U.N. Congo mission's] soldiers came into the house. He raped me. My brothers and sisters were in the house at the time."

The United Nations has been aware of the abuses in Bunia and other towns in Congo for several months. In May, the U.N. mission in Congo created a task force to stem the abuse. But procedures implemented to halt the activities "had largely faded away" by the time Zeid's team arrived on Oct. 24, according to the report.

U.N. policies on sexual exploitation have sent mixed messages to the peacekeepers. While the U.N. code of conduct in Congo explicitly prohibits peacekeepers from soliciting prostitutes, U.N. troops were supplied with condoms when they arrived, the report said, sending "a confusing message."

U.N. officials investigating abuse, meanwhile, received anonymous death threats. "The general impression is that members of the mission do not feel protected and therefore are reticent about being seen as the whistleblowers," according to the report.