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'I Am Not Running Away' : Benon Sevan

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  • 'I Am Not Running Away' : Benon Sevan

    'I AM NOT RUNNING AWAY' : BENON SEVAN
    By Claudia Rosett

    Wall Street Journal , NY
    Opinion Journal, NJ
    April 1 2006

    Meet Benon Sevan, the man at the center of the Oil for Food scandal.

    NICOSIA, Cyprus--"Medium or sweet?" asks Benon Sevan. He is inquiring
    how much sugar I would like in the Turkish coffee he's boiling up for
    us on his kitchen stove, and I am torn between thanking him for his
    hospitality and wondering if he might poison the refreshments. For
    the past three years, we have had a somewhat fraught connection, via
    a shared interest in the biggest corruption scandal ever to hit the
    United Nations--he as a star suspect, and I in writing about it. So
    when, together with a traveling companion, I paid a surprise visit
    on a recent Sunday afternoon to Mr. Sevan's current home--here in
    the capital of his native Cyprus--I really had little hope that he
    would do anything but slam the door on me.

    This city of old sandstone walls, street cafes and orange trees is
    where the former head of the U.N. Oil for Food program has been living
    quietly since he slipped out of New York last year, shortly before
    he was accused by Paul Volcker's U.N.-authorized investigation of
    having "corruptly benefited" from the graft-ridden U.N. aid effort
    for Iraq. Since then, Mr. Sevan's name has been in the news, but the
    man himself has been all but invisible. He has refused to talk to
    the press, and he turned away a group of visiting U.S. congressional
    investigators who knocked on his door last October. The U.N., while
    paying Mr. Sevan his full pension, has deflected almost all questions
    about him. He has not been brought before any court of law. As a
    citizen of Cyprus, he is safe on the island from U.S. extradition,
    and there is no sign the Cypriot authorities are planning to bring
    charges against him.

    Yet the questions abound. It was with trepidation that I approached the
    nine-story white building where Mr. Sevan now lives, in a penthouse
    apartment previously inhabited by his late aunt, a retired civil
    servant. Two years ago, as the U.N.'s Oil for Food investigation was
    about to begin, she was hurt in a fall into the building's elevator
    shaft, and some weeks afterward she died of her injuries. It later
    turned out that Mr. Sevan had declared as gifts from this same
    aunt--to whom he was quite close--some $147,000 in bundles of cash
    that Mr. Volcker in a report last year alleged were actually bribes
    skimmed out of Oil for Food deals. No foul play has been charged in
    her death, but it did seem worth taking a close look at the building's
    sole elevator. It appears to have been recently replaced. The new
    one, its steel doors gleaming, delivered us smoothly to the small
    stone-floored landing in front of Mr. Sevan's door.

    I knocked. The tall, bespectacled 69-year-old answered, wearing a
    gray-and-blue T-shirt, warm-up pants, slippers and a thin gold watch.

    He recognized me instantly, and protested: "I don't want to talk
    to you. I have nothing to say." We stared at each other, and he
    volunteered: "I am not ashamed to look in the mirror when I shave
    myself." Then: "I am closing the door now."

    But he didn't. What ensued instead was a quick bargaining session
    across the threshold. Recalling a statement released by Mr. Sevan's
    lawyer last August, that he was used by the U.N. probe as a "scapegoat"
    to "deflect attention from other, more politically powerful targets,"
    I asked if he might like to share his own version of the events and
    characters involved in Oil for Food. He replied: "I will write my
    story one day." I offered to buy him lunch, if he'd like to come
    out and start telling it now. He declined, saying almost wistfully,
    "I used to be the one who bought the lunches." Then, in friendlier
    tone, he added, "I'm sorry I cannot show you Cypriot hospitality
    and invite you in for coffee." After some more dickering, I finally
    offered the compromise that I would not ask him to answer questions
    on the record about Oil for Food. With that, he ushered us into his
    living room for what turned into a 2 1/2-hour chat.

    It is a strange limbo in which Mr. Sevan now lives, apparently alone
    and with a lot of time on his hands. Just three years ago, he was
    running a multibillion-dollar U.N. operation in Iraq, and together
    with his wife, Micheline Sevan (who also worked at the U.N.), was
    renting a midtown Manhattan apartment for $4,370 per month, owned a
    house in the Hamptons, and was jetting around the world on U.N.

    business. Today, if Mr. Sevan wishes to remain out of reach of various
    criminal investigations spawned by Oil for Food, he is basically
    confined to self-imposed exile on Cyprus.

    Mr. Sevan denies this, saying, "I am not running away. I always
    planned to come back here." But it's hard to believe this is the
    manner of return he had in mind. His apartment is comfortable but not
    plush. There are several rooms and two balconies, but the interior
    is an odd mix of slightly shabby furniture inherited from his aunt
    and exotic souvenirs of his 40-year U.N. career. In the hallway,
    jumbled on a shelf just beside the door, is a heap of Muslim skullcaps
    collected during his 1988-92 stint in Afghanistan. His living room
    sports two ornate Oriental carpets, but on the day we dropped by Mr.

    Sevan had set up next to them a small square laundry rack, on which
    he was drying a dozen pairs or so of dark socks, pegged with blue, red
    and yellow plastic clothespins. Saying, "I am sorry about the mess," he
    quickly moved the rack outside onto a balcony that looks toward Mount
    Olympus, though that afternoon the view was shrouded by storm clouds.

    Among the mementoes laid out on a living room sideboard is a long
    wooden statuette that Mr. Sevan says he picked up while working more
    than 30 years ago for the U.N. in Irian Jaya, Indonesia. He explains
    that he has not bothered to display it upright, on the wall, because
    he is waiting to move into another apartment in Nicosia, now being
    renovated--this one also a penthouse, but better appointed, with a
    "wraparound balcony." The current apartment, which he says he bought
    for his aunt--"very cheap," back in 1967--he plans to keep as well.

    He means to use it as "not exactly an office, but somewhere to work."

    He wants eventually to write two books, "one on Afghanistan and one
    on Iraq."

    I ask if he is working anywhere at the moment. "No," he says. But in
    keeping with old habits, he gets up early in the morning--"I study."

    He says he needs only about four hours of sleep a night, and "10
    minutes meditation after lunch," which he says served him well while
    working at the U.N. office in New York. This rouses the specter of
    Oil for Food, and he adds, in one of many protestations of innocence
    throughout our conversation, "I sleep at night in peace," and, more
    ominously, "I hope others can sleep at night."

    On the coffee table is a stack of books, the top one titled "Teach
    Yourself Modern Greek," though Mr. Sevan--an ethnic Armenian who
    speaks fluent Turkish and English--says he hasn't been doing much
    with this particular volume: "Maybe the cleaning lady put it there."

    Under a window is a flat-screen TV. Mr. Sevan says he doesn't care
    much for its entertainment offerings: "I only watch the news." When
    he gets up to make coffee, I offer a packet of chocolate Easter eggs
    I happen to have in my purse. He declines, slapping himself across the
    chest and saying "I have gained seven pounds since I came back"--though
    for a man pushing 70, he looks fit enough.

    In keeping with our devil's deal, I am not asking about the U.N. But
    it is neither out of mind, nor even out of sight. Mr. Sevan's kitchen
    window, above the sink, looks out on the so-called Green Line,
    patrolled by U.N. peacekeepers, which runs right through Nicosia,
    dividing Cyprus into the Turkish north and Greek Cypriot south--now
    the Republic of Cyprus. "It's a tragedy," says Mr. Sevan, referring
    to the division of the island. I ask if it's appropriate in this
    southern part of Cyprus to use the term "Turkish coffee." He quips,
    "In Greece they call it Greek, in the north they call it Turkish. I
    sometimes call it Byzantine."

    Turning to current politics, he asks, "So what's happening with
    America and Turkey? Is America withdrawing its support from Turkey?"

    I say I'm not up on the latest, and Mr. Sevan chides me for caring
    only about Oil for Food.

    The first cup of coffee--small and strong--is quickly gone. Mr. Sevan
    offers a second round, and this time pulls out a pack of cigarettes,
    noting that once he starts, he tends to smoke them all. Lighting
    up, he begins to reminisce about his years working for the U.N. in
    Afghanistan, during and just after the 1989 Soviet troop withdrawal.

    "Kabul was like a big open target," he says, recalling the rockets
    that would hit the city. He observes that even the dogs learned to
    interpret the sounds of an attack: "Incoming, the dogs would howl;
    outgoing, they would bark." He remembers, in particular, landing
    at the Kabul airport during that era, in front of a plane that was
    shot down on approach, and getting out of his own plane just before
    it was hit on the airfield, leaving it looking--he searches for the
    simile--"like a honeycomb."

    That memory, and the coffee, reminds him of the terrorist
    truck-bombing, in August 2003, of the U.N. offices in Iraq,
    post-Saddam, at Baghdad's Canal Hotel, in which U.N. special envoy
    Sergio Vieira de Mello was killed. Mr. Sevan, then wrapping up Oil for
    Food, was visiting from his U.N. headquarters and was in the Baghdad
    building when it was hit. He says he escaped alive only because he'd
    left his desk to see a deputy who was late for a meeting and had the
    appeal of keeping an espresso machine in his office: "That's what
    saved my life."

    Mr. Sevan goes into a back room to retrieve some photos of the bomb
    damage, and when he returns he is also carrying a cigar. "I need it
    for this," he says, showing one by one some dog-eared paper-printout
    photos of the collapsed hotel wall and the interior of his office
    there, littered and pocked with debris from the blast. Mr. Sevan says
    he decided at that point he'd had enough. He returned immediately
    to New York, although Mr. Annan's former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza,
    "called and asked me to stay longer."

    He looks into his empty coffee cup, and we chat about fate, and the
    custom of fortune-telling from the shape of coffee grounds. He says
    he is resigned to what happens, "I am not born again, but I've always
    believed in God."

    We get up to go, and Mr. Sevan walks us not only to the door, but
    just outside it, to the elevator. We are still saying our goodbyes
    as the elevator doors start to snap shut. With his help, we pry them
    open long enough for Mr. Sevan to say, "I hope you enjoy your stay
    in Cyprus." And we descend to the small vestibule where, on one of
    the battered old wooden mailboxes, the former U.N.

    undersecretary-general, alleged bribe-taker, self-described scapegoat
    and retired pensioner at the heart of the biggest corruption scandal
    in U.N. history has taped his name, perhaps unsure himself whether
    it is meant as a gesture of impunity or invitation: "Benon Sevan."

    Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the
    Defense of Democracies.

    http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor ial/feature.html?id=110008172
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