A RICO Lawsuit About Another UN Oil-For-Food and Debt Relief

[Annie]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/cRosett/?id=110007423

Seems they'll never learn:

Dollars for Dictators
A lawsuit alleges Oil for Food-like corruption in the Congo Republic.

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Following last month's United Nations world summit, the poverty professionals are hard at work, having just marked World Poverty Eradication Day with powwows at U.N. offices around the globe and calls for global taxation to fulfill the U.N.'s "millennium development goals," which propose to halve poverty by the year 2015. Among the participants have been Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, the despotic duo, who took time out from presiding over the regress of their respective nations to jet to Rome for the 60th anniversary of the U.N.'s World Food and Agriculture Organization, whence they lambasted the U.S. and Britain and called for more aid and debt relief for the developing world.

To see poor people get rich is a worthy goal, and the likes of Messrs. Chavez and Mugabe aside, there's no doubt that in many cases it is well meant. Poverty is brutal, and in our age of miracle technologies it is needless. But if the real hope is to end poverty, we are going to need a lot less palaver about aid and debt relief, and a lot more focus on how to end the real cause of poverty--which is not scarcity of local resources, or lack of official assistance, or a deficiency of harangues and high-level panels courtesy of assorted dictators and U.N.-o-crats, but simply bad government.

The problem with presenting the eradication of poverty as an end in itself is that this implies the solution is to pour more money into the aid pipelines. Unfortunately, official aid too often tends to have the perverse effect of lining the pockets of the same unlovely regimes that engender poverty in the first place. Rich donors feel virtuous, dictators feel more secure, and legions of aid bureaucrats travel the world in a whirl of per diems and poverty-eradication conferences. Meanwhile, behind the fancy talk and big donations are often realities that on the ground look very different.

For a peek behind the scenes, take the case of the Republic of Congo, often referred to as Congo-Brazzaville to set it apart from its larger neighbor with a similar name (the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire). Congo is one of those West African nations lumped onto the usual lists of places where the people are miserably poor, and the wealthy nations of the world, with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the vanguard, are now in the process of providing debt relief. At last month's U.N. world summit, Congo's president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, joined the appeal for global aid to Africa, calling for "action while there is still time."...