Free Republic

While United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was patently ignoring a President Robert Mugabe oppressed Zimbabwe, his son, Kojo was making money building the Zimbabwean capitol’s airport. Mugabe runs the ZANU-PF, a regime that Condoleeza Rice labels an outpost of tyranny. Why Kojo Annan’s business activities in Zimbabwe have not surfaced in the ongoing probe of the Oil-For-Food Program should surely raise concern about both the integrity and sincerity of the investigation. It’s a global village as far as Kojo’s business agenda is concerned. First came West Africa where Annan’s youngest son was working for the Swiss-based Cotecna with ties...

January 30, 2005 Kofi Annan’s son admits oil dealing Robert Winnett and Jonathon Carr-Brown THE son of the United Nations secretary-general has admitted he was involved in negotiations to sell millions of barrels of Iraqi oil under the auspices of Saddam Hussein. Kojo Annan has told a close friend he became involved in negotiations to sell 2m barrels of Iraqi oil to a Moroccan company in 2001. He is understood to be co-operating with UN investigators probing the discredited oil for food programme. The alleged admission will increase pressure on Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who is already facing...

After the price of oil quadrupled in 1973, Syria and other Arab states put pressure on Saudi Arabia to use its new wealth against Israel. Part of the Saudi government's response was to lead a campaign against support for Israel in the U.S. On their own, however, the Saudis lacked the connections and savvy to affect American-Israeli ties. To make up for this, the Saudi state recruited help. In "The American House of Saud" (Franklin Watts, 448 pages, $18.95), Steven Emerson, a journalist and former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chronicles anti-Israeli activities undertaken in recent years...

GENEVA - President Saddam Hussein wants to die in Iraq and will resist pressure from other Arab nations and the United States to go into exile, former Saudi oil minister and co-founder of OPEC Sheikh Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani said Sunday, AFP reported. "The message (from Saddam) that I see in his television declarations is unequivocal. He wants to die in Iraq," Al-Yamani told the Swiss newspaper Dimanche in an interview. "People that know him have told me that for Saddam life without power is not life," he added. Kuwaiti State Minister for Foreign Affairs Mohamed al-Sabah had Wednesday described Saddam's...

Click to view caption Sheikh Yamani Did the organisers of the Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF) know what they were signing up for when they invited Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's former oil minister, to speak about the coming war, oil, United States President George W Bush, his "lackey" British Prime Minister Tony Blair and "Arab regimes that do not derive their power from the people"? Under normal circumstances Yamani's talk would not necessarily stand out, except that these days, political dissent vis-à-vis the war on Iraq is not tolerated. Not only are anti-war activists hounded by the...

Yamani: oil may hit $100 a barrel By George Trefgarne, Economics Editor (Filed: 25/09/2002) Sheikh Yamani, the former head of Opec who terrorised the West with threats over oil supplies in the 1970s, returned to the fray yesterday when he warned that the price of crude could triple to $100 a barrel if there is a war against Iraq. His comments contributed to another torrid day on financial markets, where shares tumbled. The FTSE 100 index closed down 68.3 at 3,671.1, a level unseen since December 1995. In an interview in a German magazine DM Euro, Sheikh Yamani - who...

May 14, 2002, 8:45 a.m.The Saudi’s Con GameWhat “special relationship”?By Jerry Taylor audi Crown Prince Abdullah's recent visit to the Bush ranch and the leaked Saudi threat of turning the oil weapon against America prompted politicians and pundits to worry about whether our "special relationship" with the House of Saud could survive the ongoing violence in the Middle East and about the catastrophic consequences that might accrue if it didn't. This "special relationship," however, is a self-serving fiction that has governed American foreign policy for far too long. In short, the Saudi regime has pursued a policy of economic...