Coffee with Sevan

Last weekend in the Wall Street Journal, journalist Claudia Rosett recounted a rather extraordinary experience.

During a recent visit to Cyprus, Rosett dropped by the home of Benon Sevan – the key protagonist in the massive U.N. Oil for Food scandal. But to appreciate the irony and implications of the encounter that resulted, one must recall the back story.

Rosett is the journalist who, almost single handedly, broke the Oil for Food story. And at every step of the way as the scandal grew, Rosett was out in front. She consistently had the best sources to go with her record of just plain out-working everyone else.

But Rosett didn't work for The New York Times or the Washington Post, so she didn't win the Pulitzer she probably deserved. Instead, she works for the Foundation of Defense Democracies, and her stories, therefore, appeared not on the front pages of newspapers around the country, but on the op/ed page of the Wall Street Journal, in National Review, on FoxNews.com and in the indispensable New York Sun.

Those forums allowed Rosett not only to break news, but also to share her well-informed opinion. And share she did, often pairing crucial information and critically insightful news with the kind of biting commentary that the U.N. very much deserved.

That made Benon Sevan a primary target for Rosett's rhetorical darts.

Sevan, you will recall, was the U.N. official hand-picked by Secretary General Kofi Annan to run the Oil for Food program. We have since learned that Sevan was himself taking bribes from Saddam Hussein while presiding over the hopelessly corrupt program. As a result, Sevan was fired from his U.N. post and now faces prosecution in the United States and several other nations should he ever emerge from his self-imposed exile in his native Cyprus. (Cyprus has no extradition treaty with the United States, and Cypriot authorities have shown no interest in prosecuting Sevan.)

So imagine Sevan's surprise when he opened his door on a lovely Cyprian spring morning to discover the woman who had pilloried him in media around the world.

Whatever we think of Sevan and his behavior, we all would have understood if he had simply slammed the door in Rosett's face.

It is a testament to Rosett's skill and Sevan's manners that they wound up sharing a cup Turkish coffee in Sevan's living room.

Unfortunately for interested readers, that's about all Sevan shared. Rosett agreed not to ask about Oil for Food, and Sevan offered up no juicy tidbits.

But through their shared coffee, Rosett accomplished what she seemed to have in mind – gaining a better understanding of the man behind Oil for Food – the largest financial scandal in the history of the world.

The portrait Rosett paints of her oily antagonist will surprise some. Sevan, it seems, does not have horns, but Rosett worried a bit about using the elevator down the shaft of which Sevan's elderly aunt plunged to her death shortly after receiving gifts from her nephew totally about $180,000.

Sevan clearly wants the world to believe that he's a committed public servant. But Rosett's portrait of him again raises real questions about whether the problem was Sevan himself or an ingrained culture of corruption, nepotism, favoritism and incompetence that pervades the world body. One wonders how many other Benon Sevans that are filling out the U.N. bureaucracy – glad to share coffee and friendly, diplomatic conversation – but ready and willing to steal food from the mouths of widows and orphans in order to fatten their own wallets.

It is this culture of corrupt, if not criminal, behavior that any attempt to reform the U.N. must address. But even with reform in place, it's hard to believe that the changes will achieve any meaningful results or shift in the bureaucrats' attitudes. That makes one wonder if starting from scratch wouldn't be a better way to go.