THE last thing the embattled United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan needs as he prepares to host a major summit on reform next month is an embarrassing new exposé of incompetence, corruption and espionage at the heart of his troubled organisation.

Yet the opening of a new session of the general assembly will coincide with publication of a scathing memoir by a former high-ranking UN official who claims the recent Iraqi oil for food scandal is part of a pattern of abuse that member states, including America and Britain, have made little attempt to curb.

Having worked for more than a decade in the UN secretariat, Pedro Sanjuan, a former political affairs director, argues in his book The UN Gang that America needs to get tough with “the crooks, the hardened criminals, the spies, the terrorist sympathisers, the nepotists and the racists at the UN [who] don’t like to be interfered with”.

Sanjuan warned last week that even John Bolton, the controversial new US ambassador, would find it hard to push through reforms without heavyweight political support from the White House and the US Congress.

Bolton upset UN diplomats by demanding a long list of changes to a 29-page draft agreement prepared for the summit by the general assembly’s president, Jean Ping of Gabon.

More than 170 heads of state are expected to attend the meeting, which was intended to polish up the UN’s image.

With investigations continuing into allegations of fraud in the UN-directed oil for food programme, Annan had been hoping to shift attention to new proposals for combating poverty and disease, for dealing with climate change and nuclear disarmament, and for strengthening the UN’s response to terrorism and genocide.

Instead, preparations for the summit were plunged into disarray when President Bush’s administration demanded a comprehensive rewriting of the draft reforms.

Adding to Annan’s woes is Sanjuan’s 200-page broadside, hailed by one US reviewer as “powerful ammunition for those who wish to reform or abolish the UN”.

In an eyewitness account of what he describes as “thievery and other immoral excesses”, Sanjuan blames successive secretary-generals for encouraging a “culture of corruption” in the 1980s and 1990s.

Of U Thant, the Burmese former secretary-general, Sanjuan writes: “New offices and departments had to be invented to accommodate his crony hangers-on who had bloated the office of the secretary- general beyond all foreseeable expectations.”

Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian who was later accused of being a Nazi, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Annan’s predecessor, both “kept the venerable tradition of cronyism alive”.

Sanjuan said last week that Annan deserved “moderate praise” for paying lip service to the need for UN reform, but the secretary-general’s own brush with scandal in the oil-for-food affair may hamper his ability to fix the “rotted political plumbing in the UN secretariat”. Annan’s son Kojo is one of the figures under investigation over his alleged role in the programme that traded Iraqi oil for humanitarian supplies.

Sanjuan declared himself an admirer of Bolton but wondered if any UN ambassador had the power to effect significant change, a view shared by many on the American right.

“Serious deep sweeping reform is not going to happen at the UN this September,” warned one right-wing columnist in The Wall Street Journal. “To cut a clean swathe through 170 heads of state . . . all embedded in tons of UN paperwork and surrounded by the world’s largest traffic jam, is beyond the powers of any mere mortal.”

Sanjuan warned that US and other member states were virtually impotent when it came to checking up on activities in the secretariat. “Can a member state — the US, for example — ask to see the UN’s books, if any books are kept at all? The answer is a very diplomatically worded ‘no’.”

Sanjuan argued that the US Congress should threaten to withhold funds from the UN if it fails to clean up its act.

“The overriding issue now is that the congenitally corrupted secretariat has acquired a new significance,” he said. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “the UN is now a much bigger deal than the silly kindergarten sandbox arena that it amounted to before the 1990s”.

He added: “Let us hope our leaders have the wisdom to save the UN from itself before it is too late.”

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