Having salivated over the sauce in the Volcker report and thrown Mr. Natwar Singh out of the Foreign Ministry, may we ask where the beef is? I ask because I am sufficiently Gandhian to believe there must be a moral relationship between ends and means, and while the goal of embarrassing Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi is seductive, the discredited report of a questionable officer is probably not the best way to achieve this.
The Iraq crisis is deeper than Volcker’s selective scandals. While American lust for Iraqi oil goes back over three decades, a convenient reference point is the 1990 Kuwait war, when a 34-nation Allied coalition (not including India) took on Saddam Hussein. The US Department of Defense estimated war costs at $61 billion; others said $71 billion. About $53 billion was contributed by various countries, and if we accept the estimate of $ 71 billion, we get a deficit of $ 18 billion, and a motive for the theft of Iraqi funds under the Oil for Food Programme (OFFP).
The real scandal is revealed in the pie-chart of expenditure under OFFP, shown on the UN website (http://www.oilforfoodfacts.org/history.aspx), but not in Volcker’s report. Volcker covered up this multi-billion dollar scam by planting red herrings, sending Indian media and politicians running after cents; neither paused to rethink even after Volcker admitted he diluted his report to save Secretary General Kofi Annan.
According to the UN website, the OFFP legally yielded $69.4 billion, which was meant exclusively for food, medicines and other necessities. But only $38.6 billion was actually spent on so-called “humanitarian purposes.” A whopping $18 billion was looted as Reparations for the Kuwait war – though this was not sanctioned by any UNSC Resolution, despite valiant claims by some honourable Indians. It may be relevant to ask who is going to pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the illegal invasion of their land and devastation of their grand cities, and for US-sponsored loot of Iraq’s oil wealth by way of “reconstruction” contracts to favourite firms linked to leading politicians.
To return to OFFP, about $1.3 billion was spent on oil transportation, $1.1 billion on operational costs, $0.6 billion on repayment to unidentified member states, and $0.5 billion on UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (the weapons inspection teams whose composition remains secret). I saw the UN pie-chart at the instance of the gutsy Ms. Radha Rajan of Vigil Public Opinion Forum (http://www.vigilonline.com), who pointed out that UN snatched $30 million from the mouths of dying Iraqi men, women and babies as a gift to Volcker for this gutter inspector’s report. I say this because the Volcker Commission’s $30 million salary came from the $38.6 billion, supposedly already spent on humanitarian work.
Now UN claims that the OFFP was wound up three months prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the remaining sum of $9.3 billion transferred to a Development Fund for Iraq (which no one knows who is running, how, and for what). So Mr. Kofi Annan must explain how Volcker and his boys (some of whom quit, abusing him of fudging matters) received $30 million from money already spent on humanitarian work! There is obviously a massive fudging of figures here, and the Security Council must scrutinize the humanitarian work budget, and clarify if the cost of the so-called Independent Inquiry was also the responsibility of the enslaved Iraqi people! I somehow don’t think so, and after Volcker’s confession, Mr. Annan should be asked to put in his papers.
Volcker has named friends and firms that paid Saddam an extra 30 cents per barrel for Iraqi oil in defiance of a UNSC ruling. The sad truth is that UN deliberately fixed the price of Iraqi oil below the international rate, to facilitate the rape of its oil wealth. This is what made the 30-cent premium to the Saddam regime financially worthwhile. It may be kept in mind that UN failed to provide for even transport costs of the oil, and later had to approve transport costs amounting to $1.3 billion when it vetted individual contracts.
Clearly, at least half of $69.4 billion ‘legal’ funds from OFFP was misappropriated. Iraqis died at the rate of 300 a day, 1.8 billion in ten years, for lack of life-saving drugs, under the sanctions regime. And under oil-for-food, the White Man made money. Iraq’s untold scandal is that we do not know, thanks to embedded journalists, how many Iraqis are dying of starvation and privation because of the Occupation and lack of accountability about Iraqi oil funds. Yet Volcker attempts a shameless witch-hunt against former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali because he resisted American manipulation of the Security Council to serve its oil greed. When Saddam Hussein came to power, the foreign oil companies gave Iraq a measly $400 million per annum; Saddam made Iraq a prosperous nation.
American rapacity to grab Iraqi oil forced Saddam Hussein’s hand. The Iraqi people were being denied life-saving drugs and chemicals for water treatment on the pretext that these were ‘dual-use’ chemicals. Saddam tried to avert the slow genocide of his people by raising a minor premium on oil sales. American cynicism can be gauged from the fact that in the 1970s there was a major scandal in which White American doctors were found indulging in forced abortions of Native American women visiting hospitals for check-ups (it may be interesting to study how this nation of immigrants keeps its non-White population in check).
Saddam did not funnel his premium into a secret Swiss Bank account, but brought it back to the Central Bank of Iraq, to give his people life-saving drugs. America is angry, not because corrupt officials misused a good scheme, but because a “rogue” regime manipulated a corrupt system for a good cause! The Volcker Committee is discredited by the fact that it was headed by a White American; UN emerges as a shameless stooge of America, the sooner it goes the way of the League of Nations, the better.
What is more, Saddam’s sleight-of-hand probably generated only $1.8 billion over seven-years (1996–2002), whereas $18 billion was misappropriated as reparations for the 1990 Gulf War alone. Volcker’s team, which merely collected papers from the Iraqi oil ministry after the Occupation, creamed $30 million as salary. Truly, White American sense of proportion is unparalleled.
White Settler justice is a sore point even with decent Americans. Bert Sacks of Voices in the Wilderness, which was fined $20,000 for violating sanctions to distribute medicines, said: “The real scandal with Oil-for-Food is that $64 billion of Iraq’s own wealth was all that was permitted by the US through the UN Security Council. After war reparations and other deductions were made, this came to less than a dollar a day for each of 20 million Iraqis in the South-Central regions for all their needs — food, water, electricity, medicine, everything. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died because the limit of a dollar a day was ‘woefully inadequate’ to meet their needs — and the US and the UN Security Council knew that.” Yet an American judge ruled that it was lawful for Washington to deny necessary drugs and medical supplies to Iraq, despite the evidence that lakhs of children were dying because of brutal economic sanctions.
The Pioneer, 16 November 2005