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DIPLOMATIC LICENSE

Current Events at the United Nations

Aired August 12, 2005 - 21:00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PAUL VOLCKER, OIL FOR FOOD INVESTIGATOR: You can be the judge, you can read the report, reach your own conclusion, and the law enforcement authorities can as well.

KOFI ANNAN, U.N. SECY.-GEN.: I have asked Mr. Sergio De Mello to serve as my special representative. He will lead the U.N. effort in Iraq for the next four months. I think he is someone who will hit the ground running.

SERGIO VIEIRA DE MELLO, FMR. U.N. SPECIAL ENVOY IN IRAQ: I will do my best to make sure that the interest of the Iraqi people comes first.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD ROTH, CNN ANCHOR: It was the darkest day ever for the United Nations, and we are approaching the second anniversary.

Welcome to DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. I'm Richard Roth.

Things seemed to go downhill everywhere for the United Nations after August 19, 2003. The bombing in Baghdad at a U.N. compound with no security. More than 20 U.N. and Iraqi people lost their lives. They were led by a man who was just days from departing, Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira De Mello, sent on a four-month mission which began with a promise to consider first the wishes of the Iraqi people.

A documentary about Vieira De Mello's life, called "En Route to Baghdad," shows how far he got with his diplomatic charm and skills. He was a special U.N. leader, from Cambodia to Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANNE-WILLEM BIJLEVELD, UNHCR: Whoever he talked to, he would be very nice, he would be very charming. They would immediately be seduced by him and so help him to get what he wants to get. That was his strength.

DENNIS MCNAMARA, U.S. SPECIAL ADVISOR: In fact, one of our journalist friends said that his biography would be "War Criminals I Have Known," because he was quite well known for dealing with these bad guys. But he had more than just a professional interest.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROTH: We have the director of the film "En Route to Baghdad" with us. She is Simone Duarte, from Brazil, too, just like Vieira De Mello.

Thank you very much for joining us.

What did you learn about this man?

SIMONE DUARTE, "EN ROUTE TO BAGHDAD" DIRECTOR: Oh, I learned so many things. First, he was very unique in the U.N. system. There was no one like him. There is no one like him. You have the charm, you have the intellect, you have dedication (INAUDIBLE) so he was a philosopher who was always in the field. So he knows the field better than anyone else, and he connected to people in a rare that is very rare to find at the United Nations, or anywhere else.

ROTH: Was it difficult to get people -- you talked to more than 60 of them -- to get them to talk about Vieira De Mello?

DUARTE: Not really. And I think one of the best examples in the film is that we went to North Korea, because the king of Cambodia wants to talk about Sergio Vieira De Mello, and it happened that he was in North Korea in Pyongyang. So he simply opened the country to me, to go there, because he wanted to talk about Vieira De Mello. So I became the first Brazilian journalist to be able to go there, to a place that every journalist wants to go, because Sergio had a way of connecting to people, like from the king to a widow of a driver in Mozambique, that was so humane and at the same time genuine, that it is very difficult to find it in a diplomat, or the diplomats that we imagine people are.

So I think the North Korea example is one of the best examples in the film but we have Kofi Annan and we have people who knew Sergio in different periods of his life.

ROTH: Well, you get the feeling people would run through a wall for Sergio Vieira De Mello. One aide in Baghdad describes how she gave her parents a tape of a TV interview with Vieira De Mello to see the man for themselves.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CAROLE KAY, PERSONAL ASST.: They sat down and watched it with one of my sisters, and they said, "Wow, what an amazing person."

And just two weeks later, I get a call saying, "That boss of yours, his name is Vieira De Mello, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Well, we've heard he's going to Iraq."

"I think he might, mom."

"Well, dad thinks he might ask you to go with him."

"Yes, I think he might."

"Well, that's all right. I'm sure he'll look after you. He seems such a nice person."

I wouldn't have gone there for anybody else.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROTH: Here we have a woman going to Iraq, and the parents, who normally would be frightened, are saying go ahead, it looks like you are in good hands.

DUARTE: That was, I mean, Sergio. He would ask someone -- you're working with him for two weeks and he would ask, "Oh, can you stay two more weeks," and people would do things for him that they wouldn't do for anybody else.

In Cambodia, there was a Cambodian politician who told me, I would go to a meeting, you know, to convince him of something, and he would convince me to do something that I didn't want to do, but he had such a smile that I couldn't resist, and I said, yes, you know.

So he had this -- I think it's more than that in the sense that he convinced people, because he was not only genuine, but he was good.

ROTH: How angry are the friends and the coworkers with the fact that the United Nations sent him and sent a U.N. team back into Iraq?

DUARTE: Oh, how can I tell you. I mean, I don't know. People -- most of the people that I interviewed, they preferred to talk about him and to talk about how unique was Iraq in all the history of the United Nations, because it was not a peacekeeping operation. It was not like a peace -- there was not a war, a peace agreement, and then the United Nations goes, which usually is the definition of peacekeeping.

And that's what everybody says, you know, that it was not a U.N. peacekeeping --

ROTH: I mean, this was a mission that even Sergio Vieira De Mello was not going to get right.

DUARTE: Yes, yes, yes.

ROTH: This was mission impossible, wasn't it?

DUARTE: It was very clear that he didn't want to go in the beginning. There was a lot of pressure from the United States, from the British, and he finally -- Kofi Annan had to ask him to go and he finally went.

But when he decided if he would go and he would only stay for four months, which was unique in the history of the United Nations, because no representative who goes to a country says I'm going only to stay for four months. So just for you to say that, it was very, you know, different from the rest.

And once he got to the mission, he was really into it. We spoke with many survivors, and he was trying to speak with all sides and all kinds of people in Iraq. And he did it. That's why they formed the government council, and it was pretty much Sergio's work and the mission work.

ROTH: I mean, as we see in the film, he talks about security being the gravest threat. This was just a couple of weeks before he went back. But did Vieira De Mello realize the threat at the building, as some have told us, and did he not put enough focus on getting protection for the building, because he didn't want it to be a U.N. compound?

DUARTE: Yes, I think it was very clear that Sergio was a man that all his life he went to many dangerous places, and he always thought the United Nations was the symbol of, we have to be with the people, and we are here to help. So I don't think he has in his mind that the United Nations would be a target, you know.

It's clear in the report that was done after his death that he had the chance to chose another office, and he said, no, let's just stay here, and apparently this office is the only one that faces -- you know, where you could possibly put something.

ROTH: And the bombers knew. They were targeting him after a meeting when he was in his office.

DUARTE: But Sergio was very like convinced that you had to be with the people. It's like we say in the film, like his colleagues say in the film, how are you going to make an election from a bunker or from an armored car. You cannot do that. And at the same time, it is the obligation of occupying powers to be responsible for security in the area.

ROTH: You once worked for the United Nations in East Timor, so do you think you could do a fair documentary for someone who worked for the United Nations also?

DUARTE: Yes, I think am, because what is important in a documentary and what I intended to show is, like, you know, see this man, what he tried to do. He believed in multilateralism and he really transformed this concept -- at the United Nations, multilateralism is like this abstract concept -- into something real. And he did things, real things, in all those places. And he spoke with nice people sometimes, you know, but he really changed peoples' lives through his work.

People possibly didn't even know who Sergio Vieira De Mello was in their country, but he changed things and made things happen.

ROTH: Richard Holbrook says he found that the Brazilian people don't even appreciate Sergio Vieira De Mello. I don't know if that is true.

You've got some amazing sound bites, you might say, one of a United Nations former coworker saying that when his father died in the same year as Vieira De Mello, he didn't think much -- he had not many feelings when his father died, but when Vieira De Mello died, he almost went to pieces.

DUARTE: But then he continues because Sergio showed us what is possible, and I think when they discuss in the United Nations, there is all these candles and all of that. I believe in multilateralism, so it was clear to me that I wanted not to do a pro-United Nations film, but about someone who believed in the United Nations.

ROTH: No Superman-like Vieira De Mello on the horizon, right? You don't see anyone?

DUARTE: No, I don't see anybody.

ROTH: Simone Duarte, director of "En Route to Baghdad," about an hour-long documentary, fascinating viewing, thank you very much for being here on DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. It was at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and it is certainly available for viewing around the world, I think, in various forms. Thank you.

DUARTE: Thank you, Richard.

ROTH: A lot of poignant moments in "En Route To Baghdad." None more so for me than when we see Sergio Vieira De Mello's apartment in Geneva, which he left to go to Iraq, and a comment from the United Nations Morten Griffiths (ph).

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I had a dream about him. It was a month after he died. In which he came back to see me. He said, look, I've been dead for a month. It's time for me to go wherever dead people go. And he said, it's been a strange month. You know, all these people have been saying these things about me. This isn't what I was like. You know that. We all know that I'm much more human than that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BOLTON, U.S. AMB. TO U.N.: Our focus as well is on taking the lessons we've learned from the Oil For Food Program and looking at what that means for U.S. governance and management into the future, that there are lessons to be learned. We shouldn't duplicate the mistakes. We should try and correct the culture that may have given rise to some of these problems.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LIZ NEISLOSS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The lessons of Oil For Food. Students, line up now. That's U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, second week on the job, on the latest report on the now-defunct program.

Welcome back to DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. I'm Liz Neisloss, picking up on the Oil For Food trail for Richard Roth.

This week, the U.N.-appointed investigation into Oil For Food led by Paul Volcker released a report on two key U.N. figures so far in the scandal. The former head of the program and a senior procurement official at the United Nations.

I sat down for a talk with Mr. Volcker. He explained his findings about the former head of the Oil For Food Program, Benon Sevan, who had previously been found to have steered some oil business to a friend's company.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VOLCKER: We did not know until more recently in this report in great detail that he personally appears to have benefitted financially, that profits were made on the oil by the people that he recommended to the Iraqis, that some part of those profits seems to have ended up in his bank account.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NEISLOSS: The report says Sevan took nearly $150,000 in kickbacks, channeled through a Swiss bank account into Sevan's New York accounts. Volcker says Sevan's finances were tight until the oil money came.

Sevan's lawyer calls that absurd and Sevan maintains the money came from his late aunt in Cyprus.

In a personal letter to Kofi Annan, Benon Sevan said he was a scapegoat for the flaws of the program.

He wrote: "As I predicted, a high profile investigative body invested with absolute power would feel compelled to target someone, and that someone has turned out to be me. The charges are false and you, who have known me all these years, should know they are false."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK MALLOCH BROWN, ANNAN'S CHIEF OF STAFF: It's very much the case at that the SG would have been as pleased as anybody if Benon Sevan had been cleared. He now accepts that there is, you know, a high level that's been assembled against him, accepts it with great personal sadness, but will continue by waiting immunity if so requested to ensure that justice is done, because that must prevail over any personal considerations.

NEISLOSS: The other subject of Volcker's report, a former procurement official, Alexander Yakovlev (ph). He was accused of taking roughly a million dollars in illegal payments from contractors not linked to Oil For Food. The report also says Yakovlev (ph) tried to get a bribe from a potential Oil For Food contractor. On the day of the report, he turned himself in and pleased guilty to U.S. authorities.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VOLCKER: He provided this potential contractor with information and suggested through an intermediary, maybe directly, that if they provided him with a little money, he would do his best to see that they got the contract. It's as simple as that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NEISLOSS: Not so simple for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who won't know until the September report on the final judgment on his behavior.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANNAN: We just have to wait until the report comes out and, has he indicated, it will come out during the first week of September, and I hope that report will be comprehensive and put things in perspective.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NEISLOSS: Let's get some perspective right now. To do that with me, I have one of the most experienced reporters on the U.N. beat, that's Evelyn Leopold of Reuters News Service. And over at the United Nations, newer but no slouch, Mark Turner of the "Financial Times."

Evelyn, we've heard about the major findings. What is the significance about these two individuals?

EVELYN LEOPOLD, REUTERS: It's rather shocking. It's the first time, Liz, that a U.N. official, two of them in different contexts, have actually been accused of corruption, and while we've learned not to be shocked at anything, the reporter still was quite a blow to the institution; not necessarily to Mr. Annan, yet, but the institution as a whole. It looks like especially in the procurement section, it looks like there is a culture of impunity. The man seemed to have taken money from a whole pile of contractors over a pile of years.

MARK TURNER, "FINANCIAL TIMES": I would definitely agree. Anyone who is still kidding themselves that somehow this was a witch hunt, as Benon Sevan claims, is certainly going to have a lot to wonder about now.

It seems almost impossible to believe anymore except for the most kind of self-deluding U.N. officials, that there hasn't been some serious, serious business here.

What was really interesting about this report was that it went beyond the Oil For Food scandal and raised the prospect of much wider corruption inside the procurement department. That is something I know that U.N. officials are incredibly worried about. They say they're looking into now and will certainly give a lot of grist to the new U.S. Ambassador Bolton's demands for reform at this institution.

LEOPOLD: Yes, you missed one line of Bolton, right after the cut that you used.

NEISLOSS: Give me the line.

LEOPOLD: He said "U.N. reform is not a one night stand."

NEISLOSS: Yes he --

LEOPOLD: So he really intends to go after this.

NEISLOSS: And so, Mark, you mentioned a broader look at procurement. You have to believe that federal prosecutors are going after that now that they've seen what Yakovlev (ph) has.

TURNER: Well, the one thing you don't want in this country is the feds on your back, and it now seems that they've got the bit between their teeth and they're going for it. This is where it is going to get really interesting.

I don't know what is going to happen with Benon Sevan himself. He seems to have made a run for Cyprus and the Cypriot government is saying they're not going to extradite him. This is a little bit embarrassing for the United Nations.

NEISLOSS: You raise a very good point there, Mark, because the United Nations had a whole deal with Benon Sevan, a dollar a year to get that diplomatic visa to keep him in the country, keep him cooperating, and apparently he was -- they got neither.

TURNER: A dollar just doesn't buy what it used to these days, Liz.

Benon Sevan is kind of a tricky character, and there are all sorts of things hidden inside his statement which could be seen as, you know, a veiled threat that he's going to start shopping higher level officials. I don't know if there is anything behind that threat, but that is certainly something Benon in private has told people, that if he gets collared for this, he's going to start telling the whole story at the United Nations, and who knows where that can lead.

LEOPOLD: Yes, and Benon is a larger than life character. I knew him for many years. Whenever the United Nations was in a fix and needed something done, security, explosions, Afghanistan, Oil For Food, he was called on to do two jobs, three jobs, four jobs at once. So it's quite a blow that he's in this position right now.

NEISLOSS: And he may still know a lot of skeletons in the closets.

LEOPOLD: Exactly. You're right.

NEISLOSS: But Kofi Annan was left hanging by this report --

LEOPOLD: Right.

NEISLOSSS: -- so where do we stand on the charges against him? He has to now wait until September. There is a new email that Volcker is looking at with potentially more evidence regarding him, and maybe we need to remind people that Kofi Annan's son, Kojo Annan, was employed by one of the Oil For Food contracts. That's being looked at.

So, go ahead -- Mark.

TURNER: Paul Volcker certainly decided to remind everybody of the fact, maybe a little bit because there had been all these claims of exoneration by Kofi Annan earlier.

To be fair to Mr. Annan, the commission continues to say it has no evidence that he actually intervened in steering contracts to Cotecna, the company that employed his son, but they've raised a lot of questions about how much he knew and when, and that is still a cloud that hangs over his head.

I just want to add quickly to that, the other big question is over Mr. Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

NEISLOSS: Right.

TURNER: A number of people who were working with Mr. Sevan in this scheme were related to Mr. Boutros-Ghali and there ae also questions about Boutros-Ghali's relationship with a fellow called Tongsun Park, the famous Korea-gate (ph) guy from the 1970s, who was hired by Iraq to try to lobby United States and United Nations officials. There is a whole bunch of things still to come out on that.

LEOPOLD: Yes, well, nothing is -- they are going to go into Boutros-Ghali's role in the Oil For Food in September, except so far, while there have been rumors, there has been no proof or evidence of wrongdoing on his part personally.

As far as Mr. Annan is concerned, Mark is right in the first part. They had no evidence, and in fact Judge Goldstone (ph), one of the commissioners working with Volcker, said that there wasn't the slightest evidence that he had in any way interfered in the awarding of this contract that we're talking about to the firm called Cotecna.

However, what they're looking into is how much he knew about their bidding in advance, because of his son, and Judge Goldstone (ph) says he should have said we can't give it to this company because there is a conflict of interest. And that's where the problem will lie.

But the problem may be much bigger for Mr. Annan because a lot of this corruption that we're hearing about was while he is in office, even if he didn't know about it.

NEISLOSS: And one quick final question, Mark. The report in September, it's supposed to touch on the Security Council. That could get very tricky. Have you heard any squeamishness from Council members yet?

TURNER: The Security Council is playing it kind of cool at the moment. The other thing that we're going to begin to see that there's been less focus on but is very important is this whole world of private oil traders who are also mixed up in the arms business, who have been doing dirty deals through a bamboozling network of front companies, both selling goods and buying oil all around the world, something in cooperation with politicians from European countries and Russia, who knows what. So that's a whole other part of this story that is yet to completely break.

LEOPOLD: Yes, that will be in October.

NEISLOSS: In October. Well, we have a lot more we could talk about, but we're going to have to leave it there. I'm going to thank you, Evelyn, for your debut appearance on DIPLOMATIC LICENSE.

LEOPOLD: You're welcome.

NEISLOSS: Thank you very much. And over at the United Nations, Mark Turner of the "Financial Times." Thank you.

TURNER: Thank you.

NEISLOSS: It's not easy being the target of a multi-million dollar problem. Kofi Annan's Chief of Staff Mark Malloch Brown thinks the blame could have been spread more fairly.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MALLOCH BROWN: We feel -- we led, we've opened the books, we've allowed everything to be investigated, and as a consequence, perhaps inevitably, we take the brunt of the press attention of it, whereas those who have kind of stayed in the shadows, who have not had a Volcker to investigate their own politicians and diplomats and companies' involvement in this program, have got away a little bit more lightly -- a lot more lightly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROTH: "Dig we must," an old utility company slogan in New York City, but employed outside the United Nations recently. The U.N. Forum on Forests lamented the alarming destruction and degradation of forests in the world. 90 percent of natural forests remain in only 24 countries.

Sometimes we use a shovel to dig a hole and bury your emails, but others survive and grow to be included in our on-air email segments.

See if you have the proper nature by growing an email for us at Diplomatic.License@CNN.com. Once again, that's Diplomatic.License@CNN.com.

That's it for us. The latest CNN weather and news is coming up next. I'm Richard Roth, in New York. Thanks for watching.

END

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