By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 12 2001 (IPS)

An internal investigation unit of the United Nations strongly criticised the world body’s key anti- drug agency Monday, saying it had launched several ambitious projects without studies or assurances of donor support.

The Office of Internal Oversight Services also cited highly centralised and arbitrary decision-making at the Vienna-based Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP).

Pino Arlacchi, the ODCCP chief, was unavailable for comment Monday but officials here said he had assured them that swift remedial measures would be taken. Investigators had called for “drastic and immediate change” and said they would review the situation later this year.

Arlacchi, who holds the rank of undersecretary-general, was known as a successful crime fighter in his native Italy. He took the ODCCP’s reins in 1997, when the office was set up to oversee the UN Drug Control Programme and Centre for International Crime Prevention.

He became embattled in February, however, when his operations director, Michael von der Shulenburg, left – but not before circulating a letter of resignation in which he lashed out at Arlacchi’s management style.

Monday’s audit report appeared to uphold some of those complaints. “A major concern that came to the fore was the highly centralised and arbitrary manner in which the Office was run by the Executive Director,” it said.

A failure to establish clear lines for delegating authority from Arlacchi to programme managers, it added, “clouded accountability and paralysed decision-making during his absence from Vienna.”

The internal watchdog also found that ODCCP staff “believed that there was no transparency in management decisions, especially concerning personnel matters.”

The Dutch government, citing management problems, has already frozen some of its contributions – projected at about four million dollars for this year – to the ODCCP. Other donors reportedly have sought assurances their money wasn’t being misspent.

The ODCCP has an annual budget of about 140 million dollars, all of which comes from voluntary contributions. The five major donors are: Britain, Italy, Sweden, the United States, and Japan.

Officials acknowledged that Shulenberg’s letter had played a role in the investigation. But they were especially concerned that some governments had complained that poor management had affected the implementation of ODCCP programmes. Some of these complaints had received an airing in the European press.

According to the audit, many ambitious ODCCP plans remained in limbo without any executive indication as to whether or not they had been approved.

Investigators “found that consistency of the planning process was often disrupted by ad hoc and impulsive executive decisions. New and substantial commitments were made without any prior in-house review or coordination with donors.”

They singled out a 250-million-dollar programme aimed at eliminating the cultivation of opium poppies and coca – launched by Arlacchi in Afghanistan in 1997.

When ODCCP was faced with donor objections to the project, according to investigators, it went ahead with a scaled-down version financed mostly from general-purpose funds. By the beginning of 2000, the money had all but dried up, and there were no potential donors in sight. The project had to be significantly downsized.

A similar fate befell an equally ambitious crop-substitution effort in Pakistan, begun in 1999.

A number of anti-drugs projects were also approved without adequate analysis of their feasibility. Policy has since been revised, requiring ODCCP to obtain at least half the necessary funding before launching any project.

The internal oversight office also conducted a separate investigation of several allegations of misconduct and mismanagement, some concerning a project known informally as the “Boat Project” – a proposed public relations gimmick in which a 90- year-old sailor was to steer a wooden boat around the world.

Details of that probe were not released but were submitted to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was expected to decide on further action.

Monday’s audit report acknowledged, however, that Arlacchi’s “energetic efforts heightened the global visibility of the office…and made it more action-oriented.”

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