Roger Franklin: Growls over UN land grab

Opinion

At the east end of 42nd St there's a patch of Manhattan real estate that is a reminder of the way the world should be. To black, white, yellow, brown and every colour in between, it's hallowed ground, a place where anger is restrained by reason and, when needed, the just application of superior force. Equality prevails, corruption is unknown, favouritism unthinkable. To all who enter, it is a sanctuary of freedom.

No, not the United Nations, which is on the opposite side of the street. In the light of the world body's recent crop of burgeoning scandals, that clearly doesn't match the above description to even an incidental degree.

What I am talking about is the dog run in Robert Moses Park, an undeveloped plot that somehow, years ago, escaped the developers' bulldozers and has remained ever since a Mecca for East Side mutts.

At the end of every working day and well into the night, friends meet friends on the benches, where the conversation mostly sticks to bland gossip of good vets and the perennial curses of chewed shoes and soiled rugs.

Well, that is the way it was until a couple of months ago, when architect Le Corbusier's towering blue-green monolith began to cast a chilling shadow over the doggy domain.

Fifty years old and showing its age, the physical rot afflicting the UN building has apparently reached such a state that Secretary Kofi Annan and his Peace Factory foremen see no solution but to evict everything and everyone to renovate the empty building from basement to skyline.

They plan to throw up an interim headquarters, and when the work on the original site is finished, move the entire crew back in , keeping the "temporary" building as a high-rise annexe.

Trouble is, the site selected for the short-term headquarters is Robert Moses Park, and over the past few weeks the mood in the dog run has been one of fury.

"Have you signed the petition to stop this land grab?" a woman who belongs to a French bulldog asked me last week when I arrived with Smudge, my cocker spaniel.

"Those corrupt bastards," said another dog owner. "They're not going to get away with it."

Maybe you had to have spent the past year or so in Manhattan to appreciate the irony. Over that time, on those rare occasions when dog-run talk ran to politics, the presidency of George W. Bush and his invasion of Iraq were the subjects of no small amounts of derision. This is Manhattan, after all, where John Kerry trounced the President by four to one.

The invasion would have been above board, a woman with a golden retriever called Bill (neutered, unlike his presidential namesake) told me a few months ago, if the Security Council had only bestowed its blessing. Last week, however, while no more fond of Bush, she was suddenly up to speed about the UN scandals, not to mention the institution's "ethical bankruptcy".

A week ago, UN workers passed a no-confidence vote in senior management, appalled that one of Annan's offsiders had been acquitted of some particularly vile allegations concerning sexual harassment of junior female staffers. None of the complainants had been called to testify, nor were they enlightened about the sealed details of the investigation's findings, which dismissed all accusations out of hand.

Same with another probe involving allegations of nepotism. How will the UN ever fill those 30 additional floors of office space if diplomats can't get kin on the payroll?

And then there is the major scandal, the one involving billions of dollars that went missing from Iraq's oil-for-food programme, the head of which, Cypriot diplomat Benon Sevon, stands accused of taking bribes for looking the other way as Saddam Hussein pocketed what congressional investigators last week estimated to have been well in excess of US$20 billion ($28 billion). How much might Sevon have scored for his selective blindness?

While the UN has promised its full co-operation, it has so far shown no inclination to open its archives to rigorous scrutiny. What we do know is that Sevon, on what in Manhattan is hardly more than a moderate salary, somehow managed to acquire both a fine penthouse in one of the island's ritziest buildings and an imposing beach house on Long Island, where his neighbours include the likes of Billy Joel and Stephen Spielberg.

When the UN was condemning Bush, none of those ethical inconsistencies raised an eyebrow among the park's dog lovers.

Now? Well it's a different story, as a Yorkie-owning, Bush-hating corporate headhunter called Sue made clear, albeit with unintentional irony.

"How can the UN pre-emptively seize our park?" she wondered.

It must be the fault of us dog owners, obviously. If the dog run had been dominated by a murderous mongrel by the name of, say, Saddam, we might have scored a bit more consideration.

And a few bones kicked back into the appropriate bowls probably wouldn't have hurt either.