Whistleblower at the UN!

Well, it's not easy being a whistleblower at the UN. Actually, you'll probably lose your job. Rehan Mullick was a database analyst working at the UN mission in Baghdad, and he saw the Oil-for-Palaces scandal up close.

In his only interview since his appearance before the Volcker commission, Dr Mullick told The Telegraph that he realised there were serious problems almost as soon as he arrived in Baghdad in October 2000. He was to discover that Saddam was diverting supplies intended for his long-suffering people to his military machine; that the UN operation was riddled with senior Ba'athist officials; and that nobody had any real grasp of how the programme was running.

Dr Mullick's expertise in databases and statistics gave him an immediate and shocking insight into the disorganisation at the UN mission. At first he thought the system was simply terribly badly organised. Only later did he discover that nobody wanted to fix it.

Dr Mullick made his first attempt to alert his UN bosses in Iraq to problems soon after his arrival in October 2000. He repeatedly raised the alarm and filed reports and recommendations for nearly two years, but was rejected or ignored at every turn. Frustrated by his treatment in Baghdad, he took his complaints to New York in August 2002 with stacks of documents to back up his criticisms. The Telegraph has seen the devastating report that he submitted in vain to a series of UN chiefs. "The regime's subversion of and access to the UN's information nerve centres [its various databases] is scandalously blatant," he wrote.

Here's a horrible story of how the Saddam abused a UN agency.

The UN was required to employ hundreds of local Iraqi staff as part of its deal with Saddam, yet little effort was apparently made to ensure that this did not lead to widespread penetration of the mission's most sensitive operations by regime loyalists. Indeed, among the most important disclosures in the report is the scale of infiltration of the database staff at Unicef, the UN's children's agency. This was the organisation that had produced the much-quoted but highly controversial estimate that 500,000 Iraqi children had died because of sanctions, a figure based partly on an extrapolation of statistics provided by Saddam's own health ministry.

In his report, Dr Mullick told his bosses that the Unicef database was "run by a coterie of individuals with direct links to the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The daughter of an Iraqi deputy prime minister and her cousin closely guarded the date-related activities there."

Although the 500,000 statistic was produced before he was posted to Baghdad, Dr Mullick told The Telegraph that he was sceptical about the accuracy of figures emerging from Unicef in Baghdad. "The death of a single child because of sanctions is a tragedy, but there is no excuse for exaggerating the figures," he said.

Similarly, he listed the local staff working on the oil-for-food database: the son-in-law of the deputy foreign minister, the daughter of a top official, the son of a retired intelligence official, the son of a former ambassador and the relatives of other Ba'ath party members.

And what happened in the end?

What Dr Mullick experienced in Baghdad was bad enough, but worse was to come when, despairing of exerting any influence in Iraq, he flew to New York in August 2002, sure that there he would find someone to listen. He was wrong.

He approached the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (the UN wing that first hired him) and also sent a copy of his protest to Dileep Nair, the head of the Office of Internal Oversight and one of the officials reprimanded in the Volcker report last week. Finally, in December, he received his response - a letter informing him that his contract would not be renewed because UN officials in Iraq said they had heard nothing from him. He listed 35 occasions on which he had been in touch with the UN, but he still lost his job.

Please read the whole story.