It's the UN again!

The man who tried to blow the whistle on the UN oil-for-food scandal:

No one would listen to the man who tried to blow the whistle on the UN oil-for-food scandal. Two years later he finally received a response - he was fired.

Rehan Mullick finally got the chance to tell his story last week. For four months in late 2002, he repeatedly tried to explain to high-ranking officials at the United Nations how Saddam Hussein had infiltrated and manipulated the $65 billion oil-for-food programme with the collusion of UN staff.

The softly spoken database analyst should know - he had spent nearly two years working at the UN mission in Baghdad and was appalled by the chaos and abuses he witnessed - but at the organisation's headquarters in Manhattan, nobody wanted to listen. Instead, he was treated with the contempt reserved for whistleblowers the world over - first ignored and then, when he persisted, fired.

Among the startling revelations in the dossier he compiled were details of relatives of senior Saddam loyalists running the database at Unicef, the UN agency that claimed that sanctions had killed 500,000 Iraqi children. If that dossier tells much about the abuse of the oil-for-food programme on the ground, Dr Mullick's treatment by the UN is a damning indictment of the culture of cover-ups at an organisation also plagued by allegations of sexual harassment at its headquarters and sexual misconduct by its peacekeeping troops in Congo. It is all the more striking as Dr Mullick is a self-confessed supporter of the UN and he arrived in Baghdad opposed to sanctions.

But I thought they were supposed to be so competent at the United Nations? I guess they are - at criminal enterprises.