One-Worlders Rob Children to Live in Luxury

• Many Americans think they are doing poor kids a favor when they donate to UNICEF, but an independent study found the funds could be going to fat cats who are addicted to wasteful spending habits.

The United Nations apparatus, whatever its original characteristics and achievements may have been, has "degenerated into a corrupt and self- perpetuating bureaucracy" by now, a recent review by Nicholas Eberstadt, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Center for Population and Development Studies, has found.

Other foreign-policy analysts interviewed for this SPOTLIGHT report voiced similar views.

"Note that Dr. Eberstadt is not talking about the secretary-general's staff, a notoriously spendthrift and self-promoting clique," said Henrietta Garzon, a former researcher in the U.S. State Department's International Organizations office.

In fact, the Eberstadt study was focused on UNICEF, the international children's fund long considered one of the UN's most benign and relatively cost- effective agencies.

"If even UNICEF has gone rotten at the core, that may be the end of any leftover illusions about globalist dogooders," Mrs. Garzon says.

Yet the facts and figures assembled in the new study convincingly demonstrate that congress was right in demanding not just a cut in U.S. dues assessed by the world organization but as independent audit of its budget by the General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog. A sampler of Eberstadt's findings:

• In 1967, most of UNICEF's resources were directed at lowering infant mortality, juvenile disease control and improve child nutrition. But by last year, well over a third of the agency's annual budget -- about $1 billion -- was spent on "administrative" outlays -- that is, bureaucratic boondoggles.
• Americans who donate to UNICEF are unaware that much of the money is kept by the so-called UN national committees that organize the fund-raising drives. "Between a quarter and two-fifths of the money raised n UNICEF's name now goes straight to the fund raisers themselves," Eberstadt found.
• The audit of a single UNICEF field office -- in Nairobi -- discovered that $1 million was stolen outright and nearly $10 million wasted on first-class travel and endless "conferences" staged in posh hotels by high-living regional UN bureaucrats.
• A recent study by Booz, Allen & Hamilton, a U.S. consulting firm, was reproachful about what it called UNICEF's "proclivity for luxury accommodations during official travel." Booz Allen was sharply critical of the agency's habit to disguise its self-serving spending habits by maintaining a huge in-house public relations operation at a cost of some $25 million yearly.
• Even the U.S. State Department's bureaucrats, described by Eberstadt as inveterate "UNICEF boosters," have grown critical of the agency's self-indulgent corruption last year. A State Department report demanded that UNICEF tighten its belt and sharpen its accounting.

But is UNICEF listening?" asked the Eberstadt review. "If so, it isn't apparent."