POLITICS-IRAQ: Canada Compromise Seeks to Bridge Council Gap

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 1999 (IPS) - The UN Security Council is set for a major struggle this week to find common ground on how to deal with the disarmament programme and sanctions regime against Baghdad, one month after U.S. and British attacks on Iraq shattered the Council’s unity.

With France and Russia issuing proposals that would in effect end the eight-year-old UN embargo against Iraq and limit arms monitoring of Baghdad’s arsenal, some diplomats are looking to a Canadian compromise to bring sanction supporters and critics together.

The Canadian compromise seeks two Council meetings to bring experts together to discuss Iraq’s progress over the past eight years. “The first would consider the status of disarmament in Iraq, and the second would consider the humanitarian situation and other issues,” the Canadian proposal states.

Those meetings – which the Canadian proposal suggests could be chaired respectively by UN Under-Secretaries-General Jayantha Dhanapala and Sergio Vieira de Mello – would “assess not only the current situation, but also look to the future, indicating how shortcomings could be addressed.” In that way, the proposal contends, “the Council could be provided with the kind of expert advice it will need to move forward again.”

“We hope that this proposal will help to bridge the gap to get the Council moving forward,” Canadian Ambassador Robert Fowler said Friday.

Several diplomats, including Council President Celso Amorim of Brazil and British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock, said Friday after debates began on the Canadian compromise that there was a growing effort to find common ground on Iraq.

Greenstock argued that, although there remains what he called “rhetoric” about the future of UN weapons inspectors, all 15 nations sitting on the Security Council agreed on the need to prevent Iraq from building an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Yet Council unity on the Iraq question is likely to be elusive, as it has been ever since the United States and Britain began four days of attacks on Iraq last Dec. 16 following a report by U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) chair Richard Butler criticising Iraq’s cooperation with weapons inspectors.

The attacks, which came at a period of relative harmony between Baghdad and the UNSCOM inspectors, have led some of Iraq’s defenders, notably France and Russia, to voice the need to abandon UNSCOM and sanctions altogether.

The mood has worsened in recent weeks amid revelations, admitted by the U.S. government, that some of the data acquired by UNSCOM was shared by U.S. intelligence officials – including information about the whereabouts of President Saddam Hussein and sensitive military data.

Butler has repeatedly denied that UNSCOM abused its trust through relying on other governments, including the United States, for intelligence about Iraq’s weaponry. But the fragile trust that has allowed UNSCOM to carry out its disarmament work despite divisions between the five permanent Security Council members – Russia, China, France, Britain and the United States – on Iraq has been broken.

French and Russian proposals now call for the lifting of most UN sanctions on Iraq – although an arms embargo would still be enforced – and advocate that most of UNSCOM’s work be performed by other UN bodies specialising in nuclear, chemical and other disarmament affairs.

Privately, many diplomats believe UNSCOM cannot possibly carry out its work as before, with both the attacks and the intelligence reports tainting the inspectors’ reputation.

Amorim is confident that Council efforts to foster a joint approach on Iraq can make progress, with the Canadian proposal and others helping to underscore the need for some momentum to be established. But many countries besides France and Russia are weary of sanctions, and it is likely that any step forward will have to include some assurances that measures be taken to address the dramatic consequences of the UN embargo.

So far, the U.S. government is willing only to allow Iraq to sell an unlimited amount of oil under an existing Security Council exemption to buy food and medicine for Iraqi civilians with UN monitoring. But that proposal may be largely symbolic, since the disrepair of Iraq’s oil-producing machinery and pipelines and the low price of oil worldwide mean that Baghdad is already pumping out as much oil as it can to buy humanitarian goods.

UN officials say that some 5,000 Iraqis die every month from starvation, preventable diseases and other consequences of the sanctions regime. That fact has loomed over Council deliberations for months – and any full review of UN-Iraqi relations will have to deal with it.