Changing Ways

The Opinion Journal today hails the announcement by Ban Ki-Moon directing that an external investigation of all of the United Nations funds and programs in the wake of revelations that North Korea may have been using funds improperly. They reach the same conclusion I did: Ban is a refreshing change over the corrupt Annan administration.

The proximate cause for Friday's meeting between Messrs. Ban and Melkert, and for Mr. Ban's clean-house announcement, was Melanie Kirkpatrick's op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal on Friday detailing irregularities in the UNDP's programs in North Korea and citing U.S. concerns that tens of millions of dollars in hard currency have been funneled to dictator Kim Jong Il.

The UNDP must have got Mr. Ban's memo. We publish today a letter in The Wall Street Journal (available here) from the agency's Mr. Melkert, responding to Ms. Kirkpatrick's article and our accompanying editorial. "We . . . welcome an independent and external audit of our operations in North Korea," he writes. And, "If the member states of the U.N. and UNDP's board were to decide that our presence there were no longer useful, we would leave immediately."

Kim Jong Il is about as likely to change the way he does business as he is to move to Hollywood to pursue his avocation as a movie buff, so a UNDP pullout from North Korea is the right policy. The Pyongyang government won't even permit U.N. officials to visit the sites of some of the projects that their agency is funding. There's no way of knowing whether the "battery factory" paid for with U.N. money actually exists or is just a vehicle for funding Kim's regime.

In a statement posted on its Web site Friday, the UNDP asserts that it can account for all but $337,000 of its recent expenditures in North Korea. Of the $6.5 million spent in 2005-2006, it says, only $337,000 went to projects directly managed by the North Korean government. The agency now manages most of its projects in North Korea directly.

Interestingly, that time frame coincides pretty closely with the departure of Mark Malloch Brown as head of that agency. One has to go, "Hmmmmm." It will be highly interesting to watch what else scurries out from under the rocks at the UN as they are turned over one by one.