The Hindu Business Line : Country in quandary

EVER since the references in the Volcker report to the Congress Party and the External Affairs Minister, Mr Natwar Singh, became public knowledge, the country has been in a quandary as to whom to believe, and whom to disbelieve. Here is a comprehensive document depicting the tangled web of payoffs and kickbacks in one of the worst managed UN programmes whose humanitarian purpose was cynically exploited for selfish ends. It has been prepared by a Committee comprising personages of impeccable credentials: An American who was the respected head of the Federal Reserve, a Swiss expert who had made extensive investigations into money laundering and financial misdeeds and an eminent South African well-versed in the working of international organisations.

Its appointment had secured the approval of the Security Council (Resolution 1538 of April 21, 2004) which called upon the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and all other Member States, including their national regulatory authorities, "to cooperate fully by all appropriate means with the inquiry", and declared its intention "to remain actively seized of the matter." Its report submitted to the UN on October 27 is based on a scrutiny of nearly a million records maintained by the concerned Ministries of the Government of Iraq pertaining to the period in which all the various shady transactions took place.

Long before they came within the purview of the Volcker Committee, within a few months of the US occupation of Iraq, their contents, were being carried on the Web sites of the West Asian media and put out in the statements of the members of the Coalition Authority. (Ref article "Oil as a weapon of mass corruption", Business Line October 15, 2004)

Thus, they were not a concoction of the Volcker Committee which only compiled them from available official sources. The Committee should be lauded for having done a credible job, while leaving it to national governments to undertake their own probes into the matter from where it had left off.

The right thing to do now is not to cast aspersions on the Committee, or indulge in any histrionics, but to institute a thoroughgoing inquiry, as the Prime Minister has promised, into the "root of the matter to establish the truth or otherwise of the references." That is the only way for the country to clear the air and come out of its quandary.

B. S. Raghavan

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