IRAQ: Security Council Wrangling Will See The Sanctions Lifted

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Cherif Cordahi

CAIRO, Mar 18 1995 (IPS) - The United Nations Security Council this week voted to maintain crippling sanctions on Iraq for another three months, but there is much less support today for the economic and oil embargoes imposed on Baghdad, than there was four years ago.

France in particular wants to see the sanctions lifted or at the very least eased and along with Russia and China, has led a campaign among the Security Council’s permanent members to this end.

They have however come up against strong opposition from the other permanent Security Council members — United States and Britain — whose campaign has seen the sanctions extended until the next review in mid-June.

French officials are now suggesting that in the case of the United States, among the underlying reasons for its hardline stance is election concerns.

Alain Juppe, the Foreign Minister, has suggested that U.S. President Bill Clinton is concerned about losing the next election, due in 1996, and has adopted a hardline stance on a foreign policy issue close to North American hearts.

“The French, without necessarily being cynical, tend to be skeptical about the moralism that America traditionally attaches to its policies,” says former French ambassador, Eric Rouleau.

“The (American) notion that there are rogue states, then, has no equivalent in the French political vocabulary and continues to be a source of puzzlement. In European eyes, Washington’s criteria for a categorising good and bad states would, if applied rigorously, significantly lengthen the list of the latter.”

France maintains that the Council’s decision leaves too little room for nations other than the United States to interpret international decisions such as U.N. resolutions.

Paris believes that at the very least the oil embargo against Baghdad, which lies at the heart of the sanctions policy, should be lifted because, in its view, Iraq has met resolutions that deal with it.

These include four resolutions that call on the U.N. to “destroy, remove or neutralise” Iraqi centres for weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological and nuclear.

They also include U.N. demands that Iraq destroy ballistic missiles it possesses with a range of over 150 km.

“If the Security Council were to respect the commitment it had clearly made, the oil embargo would have been lifted immediately, or, at most, after a probational period set by the Security Council,” says Rouleau, who served in Tunisia and Turkey.

Instead, in 1994, the United States, backed by Britain, decided to “change the rules” linking the oil embargo to other resolutions where no link had previously existed, Rouleau says.

Iraq had met demands that the U.N. be allowed to install permanent surveillance and control systems at Iraqi centres to prevent it from rearming to pre-1990 levels.

Now, it had to meet the remaining 26 resolutions that dealt with Iraq’s human rights record and its refusal to recognise Kuwait — which it invaded in 1990 — as an independent state within clearly defined international borders.

France and Russia complain that despite Iraq’s decision in November 1994 to recognise Kuwait, the United States and Britain continue to insist the sanctions remain in place.

U.S. officials however argue that pressure from Paris and Moscow to lift the embargo emanate from greed. They accuse both of trying to snap up lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq’s shattered infrastructure.

Analysts say that U.S. threats before the 1991 war over Kuwait to “bomb Iraq back into the preindustrial age” have been fulfilled. U.N. sanctions have kept it there.

“Iraqis understood the legitimacy of a military action to drive their army from Kuwait but they have had difficulty comprehending the Allied rationale for using airpower to systematically destroy or cripple Iraq’s infrastructure and industry,” says Rouleau.

According to available statistics, Allied bombers destroyed 80 per cent of Iraq’s electricity production capacity, 135 telephone networks, more than a hundred bridges, as well several roads, railways and factories, to the tune, according to the Arab Monetary Fund, of almost 200 billion dollars.

Iraq’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is now lower than it was in 1962 before its oil started to come on line in vast quantities. Its population then was seven million. It is now 19 million.

Its currency, the dinar, has collapsed.

Over the last four years, cumulative inflation has been 5,000 per cent. Salaries remain static.

Its middle class is being destroyed. It now takes a month for middle level bureaucratic to earn enough money to buy a kilo of meat, two months for a pair of shoes.

Across the country, new street markets have sprung up dealing in the personal belongings of millions of middle-class Iraqis. They are selling their jewelery, their furniture, their television sets to make enough money to eat properly.

With average Iraqis suffering, the diplomatic wrangling seems a cruel game. But ultimately, that wrangling will see the sanctions lifted.