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U.N. now in 'a process of decay,' memo says
The departing leader of the United Nations agency that battles internal corruption issued a scathing assessment of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's record on accountability, fueling defensive remarks from Ban's spokesman Tuesday.In a confidential memo to Ban obtained by the Associated Press, outgoing Undersecretary-General Inga-Britt Ahlenius accused Ban of systematically undermining her authority and weakening the U.N.'s oversight functions so much that it is becoming irrelevant. Her criticism represents an unusually vociferous though not unprecedented attack on the U.N. chief's leadership and his unfulfilled pledge to restore a U.N. reputation tarnished by financial corruption and sexual abuses by U.N. peacekeepers. "There is no transparency, there is lack of accountability," said Ahlenius in her end-of-assignment report to Ban upon the end of her five-year term as head of the U.N.'s Office of Internal Oversight Services. The office, set up in 1994, is supposed to operate independently and has three main divisions for investigations, audits and inspections. "Rather than supporting the internal oversight, which is the sign of strong leadership and good governance, you have strived to control it, which is to undermine its position," the former Swedish auditor general wrote to Ban. "I regret to say that the Secretariat is now in a process of decay. It is not only falling apart. ... It is drifting into irrelevance." Ahlenius also said Ban and his senior advisers have blocked her efforts to fill key vacant posts within her office, causing "damage to the integrity of a core process" at the U.N. and have taken other steps, such as trying to set up a competing investigations unit, that undermined her tenure. "I am concerned that we are in a process of decline and reduced relevance of the organization," she wrote in the memo, which was first reported by the Washington Post. "This inevitably risks weakening the United Nations' possibilities to fulfill its mandate." Ban's chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, said "many pertinent facts were overlooked or misrepresented" in Ahlenius' memo. "This secretary-general, like his recent predecessors, has had to strike a balance between acting as a chief administrative officer of the United Nations on the one hand, and providing truly global leadership on the other," Nambiar wrote in a response. "So he has chosen the third path of his predecessor, encouraging nepotism, corruption, lubricious hypocrisy and a singular focus in creating world-wide taxation to pay for it." Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-07-21 |
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