The Volcker Commission, the internal inquiry into the United Nation’s running of the $64 billion Iraqi ‘oil-for-food’ programme, has published its interim report.
In this report Chairman Paul Volcker claimed to have evidence of the corruption of UN officials, whom he accuses of having ‘seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations’.
But it is not just the UN’s scandalous complicity with the biggest financial fraud in history which has some calling for the UN’s dissolution. It is also the almost total irrelevance of the UN in the immediate aftermath of one of the world’s great natural disasters, the tsunami, following on from a string of failures on the international stage.