[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 115 (Tuesday, August 16, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 16, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
 THE U.N. OFFICE OF INTERNAL OVERSIGHT SERVICES: A CRITICAL EVALUATION

  Mr. PRESSLER. Mr. President, over the last several weeks, I have 
raised many concerns regarding the management problems at the United 
Nations. On July 29, 1994, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a 
resolution to create a reform office charged with the clean-up of U.N. 
management and budgetary malfeasance. Repeatedly, I have waged my 
concerns about this office [OIOS]. I do not believe that the OIOS will 
possess the independence necessary to offer true reform at the United 
Nations.
  Recently, former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote an editorial 
in the Washington Post critical of this OIOS. I agree wholeheartedly 
with her assessment of the office as well as an assessment offered by 
the editorial board of the Washington Times newspaper. Additionally, 
the U.N. Association documented the events leading up to the U.N. 
adoption of the resolution mandating the creation of the OIOS in its 
weekly report. I ask unanimous consent to place these articles in the 
Record at this time.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, July 28, 1994]

                  At the U.N., Dispensing With Reform

                         (By Jeane Kirkpatrick)

       How, you may wonder, could an organization acquire 850 
     minibuses that it did not need, buy a water purification 
     system that never worked, purchase dozens of extremely 
     expensive computers that never were used and hire highly 
     paid, top-level bureaucrats for nonexistent jobs?
       These and dozens of similar things can happen because 
     efficiency is not a central value at the United Nations. 
     Reform is not popular in this culture that features high 
     salaries and lifestyles like those of the rich and the 
     famous.
       Waste, fraud, double-dipping, overstaffing and 
     mismanagement have dogged the United Nations from its 
     founding. By now these practices are habits in an 
     organizational culture that protects mismanagement in the 
     name of multiculturalism and sees efforts at reform as 
     hostile to the organization.
       The last two Americans who made a serious effort at reform 
     (Richard Thornburgh and Melissa Wells) were forced out of the 
     U.N. system, their recommendations ignored, their efforts 
     unappreciated. The report of former U.S. attorney general 
     Thornburgh on mismanagement was shredded on the instructions 
     of the secretary general, but a few copies survived and 
     circulate today in Washington and New York. And of course, 
     the abuses Thornburgh described persist.
       Over the years, various parts of the U.S. government have 
     tried various tactics to deal with the waste, fraud, 
     mismanagement and sexism endemic in the U.N. system. In the 
     '80s the ``Kassebaum Amendment'' (by Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, R-
     Kan.) successfully used the threat to withhold 20 percent of 
     U.S. regular contributions to gain some reform in the United 
     Nations' budget-making process. It was a step, but only a 
     step.
       President Clinton made a personal appeal to the General 
     Assembly for appointment of an independent inspector general 
     with broad investigative powers. Clinton's long-delayed 
     presidential decision directive on peace-keeping noted its 
     concern that the United Nations ``has not yet rectified'' 
     management deficiencies, and promised the administration 
     would work for ``dramatic'' improvements in management of the 
     U.N. system, beginning with the ``immediate establishment of 
     a permanent, fully independent office of Inspector General 
     with oversight responsibility that includes peacekeeping.''
       The Clinton administration's top U.N. delegate, Ambassador 
     Madeleine Albright, warned the U.N.'s Fifth Committee that 
     ``poor management can be the Achilles' heel of the United 
     Nations,'' saying, ``I cannot justify to the taxpayers of my 
     country some of the personnel arrangements, the sweetheart 
     pension deals, the lack of accountability, the waste of 
     resources, the duplication of effort and the lack of 
     attention to the bottom line that we often see around here.'' 
     Of course, she was right. Such practices cannot be justified 
     to taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars are being wasted.
       Albright, too, called for establishment of an independent 
     inspector general's office. But no serious move was made 
     toward establishing the post until a bipartisan coalition in 
     the U.S. Congress passed the ``Pressler Amendment'' (so 
     called for its author, Sen. Larry Pressler, R-N.D.), which 
     put teeth in the request. Failure to establish ``an 
     independent and objective office of Inspector General'' by 
     the end of July would result in the United States 
     withholding 10 percent of its total (non-peace-keeping) 
     contributions ($420 million) for fiscal 1994, and 20 
     percent in fiscal 1995.
       The Pressler Amendment got the attention of the General 
     Assembly, which negotiated a resolution it hopes will satisfy 
     Congress. But the resolution calls for an inspector general 
     who would not be independent. Instead the ``compromise'' 
     provides for an inspector general appointed by the secretary 
     general on the basis of geographical rotation and expertise, 
     who will report to the Secretariat and can be fired by the 
     secretary general with the approval of a majority of the 
     General Assembly. It also does not give the inspector general 
     an independent budget, or jurisdiction over all U.N. agencies 
     or broad investigatory powers.
       U.S. negotiators, it is reported, tried but failed to win 
     greater independence for the proposed inspector general and 
     lacked the time to achieve more.
       One might have thought the General Assembly would feel the 
     pressures of time more acutely than the U.S. team. But this 
     team cannot bear the through of withholding $420 million from 
     its U.N. contributions and is acutely uncomfortable with 
     threats of punitive action. So the Clinton team at the United 
     Nations is doing what the Clinton administration so often 
     does in its foreign policy: It is making major concessions to 
     reach an agreement that does not really achieve the 
     administration's goals, then presenting that agreement as a 
     victory and further undermining U.S. credibility in the 
     process.
       Apparently the Clinton team would rather offend Congress 
     than U.N. colleagues. The General Assembly's ``acceptance'' 
     of the terms of the Pressler Amendment is rather like the 
     Serbs' ``acceptance'' of the last peace plan for Bosnia. It 
     offers the form but not the substance of compliance--and 
     hopes that Congress did not really mean it.
                                  ____


              [From the Washington Times, August 2, 1994]

                Half a New Broom for the United Nations

       Last year, when the United States pulled out most of our 
     troops from Somalia, the idea was that U.N. troops would take 
     over the task of peace keeping. That's generally the scenario 
     these days, whether the talk be of Rwanda or Haiti. It's 
     solution that has the appeal of promising Western powers like 
     the United States or France a way out of a quagmire they do 
     not particularly want to get stuck in. However, what happened 
     in Mogadishu suggests the limitations of this approach. No 
     sooner had the Americans turned over the operation than it 
     was discovered that Egyptian troops guarding a U.N. depot 
     were allowing Somalis to walk in and remove whatever objects 
     that liked.
       The instance is not an isolated one, of course. Last year, 
     former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh produced a report 
     on the staggering waste, fraud and corruption going on at the 
     United Nations, based on his stint there as undersecretary 
     general for administration and management. Now, Mr. 
     Thornburgh did not set out to produce this document as an 
     enemy of the organization, but rather as someone who would 
     like to see the United Nations saved from itself. He 
     suggested that an important step would be to institute an 
     office of inspector general to monitor the United Nation's 
     many far-flung operations and vast, sprawling bureaucracy--
     according to the best estimates available, some 50,000 
     people, though no one knows for sure.
       At the time. Mr. Thornburgh's recommendations did not evoke 
     much of a response. In fact, he never received an official 
     reply from U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Nor 
     was the report distributed in the organization. Most of the 
     copies there were reportedly shredded. ``This is not an 
     institution that takes kindly to criticism,'' he told The 
     Washington Times' editorial page. No, indeed.
       An amendment offered by Sen. Larry Pressler, Republican of 
     South Dakota, in July to the Foreign Operations 
     Appropriations bill seems to have had more of an impact. Mr. 
     Pressler proposed to withhold 10 percent of the U.S. 
     contribution for 1994 and 20 percent for 1995 unless 
     President Clinton by Sept. 30--the end of the fiscal year--
     can show that the United Nations has established an office of 
     inspector general. Accountability for American taxpayers' 
     money, and a lot of it, too, is what the Pressler Amendment 
     is all about.
       This Saturday, the U.N. General Assembly voted to give Mr. 
     Pressler some of what he wanted. It agreed to establish an 
     office of Internal Oversight Services, the head of which 
     would serve one five-year term and hold the rank of 
     undersecretary general.
       While this is certainly a step on the right direction, it 
     is a step that does not go far enough. A real question 
     remains on how independent this office will be. This is not 
     so much because, according to the resolution adopted, the 
     inspector general can be removed by the secretary general 
     backed by a vote in the General Assembly. Such a move, if 
     politically motivated, would meet with an outcry from major 
     donor nations. No, the problem is that the office will not be 
     independently funded, but be part of the budget drawn up by 
     the secretary general. That gives him considerable power over 
     its operations.
       It's too early for the White House to declare victory in 
     the debate over the U.N. inspector general. If Mr. Clinton 
     believes the United Nations to be as important as he says he 
     does, he'll have to send his negotiators back to the 
     bargaining table.
                                  ____


    [From U.N. Association, Washington Weekly Report, July 22, 1994]

            Senate Adopts Amendment Restating U.S. Position

                         (By Jeffrey Laurenti)

       Reacting to reports to an impending breakthrough in the 
     negotiations in New York, the Senate on 14 July adopted an 
     amendment to the foreign assistance appropriations bill, H.R. 
     4426, that restates US requirements for the creation of an 
     independent Office of Inspector General (OIG). Sen. Larry 
     Pressler (R-SD), who led the successful effort to mandate the 
     withholding of some US assessed contributions to the UN 
     regular budget and peacekeeping operations unless the 
     inspector general's office were created, told the Senate that 
     the new post ``would not be independent. This is an 
     unequivocal violation of the language in the Foreign 
     Relations Authorization Act (Public Law 103-236, Section 
     401),'' he said. Pressler called on the Senate to adopt the 
     amendment restating the US position to show that ``the United 
     States will not stand idly by while the United Nations slaps 
     us in the face.''
       In a related development on the same day, Pressler and two 
     Republican colleagues, Sen. Robert Dole (R-KS), the minority 
     leader, and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), senior minority member 
     of the Foreign Relations Committee, dispatched a letter to US 
     Permanent Representative Madeleine Albright insisting on a 
     ``stringent'' interpretation of the criteria in the foreign 
     relations authorization act, which they said ``the terms of 
     the draft resolution do not currently meet.'' According to 
     the signers, ``The terms establishing the office must 
     demonstrate unequivocally the independence of the OIG and 
     define clearly its specific oversight activities.'' They 
     concluded, ``The stakes are high, the opportunity fleeting. 
     Without significant and immediate action to improve the 
     efficiency of UN operations, congressional willingness to 
     fund UN activities will dminish further.''


                 Seen As Clinton Administration Success

       In New York, the creation of the inspector general post in 
     the face of deep suspicion of Washington's motives was 
     credited by many UN delegates as a significant success for 
     the Clinton Administration. During the Negotiations, UN 
     delegates frequently expressed exasperation over perceived 
     divergences in positions within the United States Mission to 
     the United Nations, and they complained of uncertainty about 
     whether they were getting the views of the US Government or 
     the Clinton Administration's critics on Capitol Hill. The 
     resolution's drafters took much of its language from US law 
     and US position papers in order to ease the certification the 
     President is required to make to Congress.

                          ____________________