POLITICS-IRAQ: Battle Lines Drawn for U.N. Debate on Sanctions

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 24 1998 (IPS) - For nearly eight years, every U.N. Security Council review of sanctions has had the same result: the automatic extension, often without comment, of a tight embargo which excludes all non-humanitarian commerce with Iraq.

When the Council debates Iraq’s fate anew on Monday, however, the stakes will be higher than ever, with Baghdad threatening unspecified consequences if sanctions are not immediately lifted, and the United States vowing that such threats will only delay any end to the embargo. With Washington holding veto power in the 15- nation Security Council, few diplomats believe Iraq can expect any sanctions relief next week.

For the United Nations, the coming week also will be a key test of whether the agreement negotiated two months ago by Secretary- General Kofi Annan and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein can hold. The agreement, which successfully opened Iraqi presidential palaces to U.N. weapons inspections, halted a looming U.S. attack on Iraq – but officials here warn the respite may be only temporary.

In recent days, Iraqi officials have warned that there may be a time limit on further inspections of the presidential complexes, contrary to the terms of the February agreement. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has stepped up its invective against sanctions and warned that the United States may “pay dearly” for their continuation.

“Iraq demands that the Security Council implements paragraph 22 of resolution 687 (which allows the lifting of sanctions) immediately without any new restrictions or conditions,” Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz wrote Thursday, in a letter to Security Council President Hisashi Owada.

“This implementation is considered as a legal and moral responsibility which the Security Council must meet without further delay,” Aziz said. “The states which prevent that must bear full responsibility for their unjust position and its subsequent consequences.”

To trigger any lifting of restrictions, however, the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) must have verified the scrapping of Iraq’s biological, chemical and long-range weapons, which it is not prepared to do, according to the latest report by UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler.

Butler’s most recent report offerered little hope for any change in sanctions policy, as it detailed gaps in Iraq’s reporting of all of its weapons programmes and noted that, in recent months there had been “virtually no progress in verifying disarmament…”

Aziz, however, wrote that Butler’s report contained “a large volume of tremendous and flagrant fallacies and lies,” and repeated Iraq’s claims that it had destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction.

The tussle between UNSCOM and Iraq has gone on for years, with the weapons inspectors only slowly being able to investigate Iraqi reports of its destruction of its pre-1991 military arsenal. By common consensus, Iraq is believed to have largely complied with the destruction of its chemical weapons and long-range missiles, but has yet to disclose fully its programme to produce toxins like anthrax and botulinum.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, by contrast, in its latest report was satisfied with Baghdad’s cooperation in clarifying its nuclear capabilities, and worries about Iraqi nuclear weapons are all but resolved, diplomats say.

The crucial problem, however, is that Baghdad’s cooperation in recent months has periodically stopped – in part because each crisis adds to the clamour to end the sanctions, and also because the embargo is now hitting even the relatively middle-class sectors of Iraqi society.

“I don’t think the sanctions will last for another year,” said one U.N. official involved with the Iraq programme, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If it does, Iraq will just collapse. If it hadn’t been such a rich country in the first place, with the highest-quality infrastructure, everything would have fallen apart by now.”

The United States, however, remains unwilling to consider lifting the sanctions, despite pressure from other Security Council members, notably Russia and France, to reward Baghdad for its cooperation.

Although Annan in recent months has stepped up the call for “a light at the end of the tunnel” if Iraq complies with UNSCOM, the United States maintains, as State Department spokesman James Rubin said Thursday, that “sanctions will stay on, as long as Iraq continues to flout U.N. resolutions.”

Technically, the Council should lift the embargo, in accordance with resolution 687, when UNSCOM has verified that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have been fully dismantled. But U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson has added other conditions – including improved human rights and accounting for missing Kuwaitis from the brief 1990-91 Iraq invasion – for any lifting of sanctions.

Instead, Washington has allowed an increase in an exemption from sanctions that would allow Baghdad to sell 5.2 billion dollars of oil during a six-month period to pay for food, medicine and infrastructure repair. But Iraq’s foreign minister and oil minister – respectively, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf and Amir Mohammed Rashid – have been negotiating that “oil-for-food” deal in New York over the past week without indicating Baghdad’s acceptance of it.

One U.N. report recently argued that, unless the Security Council provides for repair of Iraqi oil wells and pipelines, Iraq is not even capable of pumping out and selling 5.2 billion dollars of oil in six months. In any case, Baghdad has rejected the expanded oil deal as a violation of its sovereignty.