UNITED NATIONS: Kuwait Wants its Stolen Fighter Planes Returned

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 23 1996 (IPS) - Can a country brazenly steal its neighbour’s fighter planes, battle tanks, and missile batteries and get away with it?

The Kuwaitis say the Iraqis did just that — and now they want all their military equipment back.

In a letter to the Security Council Monday, Kuwait insists that Iraq is still holding onto hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment it stole from its oil-rich neighbour during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis.

The stolen property includes eight Mirage F-1 fighter planes, 200 BMB-2 armored personnel carriers, six M84 battle tanks, 90 M113 armored personnel carriers, one Hawk missile battery, 483 Strela 3 missile batteries, 206 Osa missile batteries and five Amon anti-aircraft missile batteries.

The weapons are mostly those supplied by the United States, France, and the former Soviet Union, three major arms suppliers to Kuwait.

In the letter, Kuwait also provides a long list of items that Iraq had returned to the Gulf state in accordance with the Security Council resolution that laid down the terms of surrender, ending the Gulf War in January 1991.

But Kuwait says there are still hundreds of items not accounted for, including those stolen from the archives of the offices of the Emir of Kuwait, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and the Foreign Ministry.

“These items have been brought to the attention of representatives of the Iraqi government on a number of occasions,” but to no avail, says the letter.

Five months after the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a coalition of forces led by the United States attacked Iraq. In late 1992, the Iraqis began returning some of the military equipment that were looted from the Kuwaiti arsenal. But Kuwait, even then, insisted that most of the weapons were militarily ineffective because helicopters had been returned without their navigation equipment and tanks without firing controls.

The post-war reconstruction of Kuwait, including the rebuilding of its armed forces, cost more than 40 billion dollars, according to official Kuwaiti estimates.

Stripped off its sophisticated weapons, Kuwait has purchased more than seven billion dollars’ worth of new weapons systems since the January 1991 war, primarily to fill the vacuum created by the stolen arms. These weapons were purchased mostly from countries that politically or militarily supported Kuwait against Iraq, including the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China.

Meanwhile a U.N. Compensation Commission last week awarded 610 million dollars to the Kuwait Oil Company for dousing some 700 oil wells started by retreating Iraqi troops back in 1991. The money is coming from the sale of Iraqi oil after the temporary lifting last month of the U.N. economic embargo imposed on Baghdad in 1990.

Under an oil-for-food formula worked out by the United Nations, Iraq has been permitted to sell about two billion dollars’ worth of oil over six months. Some 30 percent of the proceeds will go to the Compensation Commission to settle war reparations.

U.N. spokeswoman Sylvana Foa says the Commission will initially compensate some 56,000 people, mostly Third World expatriates who lost their jobs and their belongings during the Gulf crisis.

Other claimants include the Kuwaiti government and Kuwaiti families whose homes were looted by Iraqi troops. The total value of Kuwait’s claim is a little over 100 billion dollars. But much of the claims have not been decided yet by the Commission.

The 30 percent earmarked for reparations, Foa said, “is a drop in the bucket when you consider that the claims out there are for 200 billion dollars.”

The bulk of the monies from the oil sales is to be used to buy food, medicine, and other relief supplies for Iraqis who have been hard hit by the seven-year-old embargo imposed by the Security Council.

A total of 2.6 million claims — contained in 28 million pages of claim forms and documents — was submitted to the Commission. The bulk of the claims was from corporations and governments.

“They would have covered 20 soccer fields,” said Carlos Alzamora of Peru, the Commission’s Geneva-based Executive Director.

But the Commission has given priority only to individual claims, mostly from expatriate workers from Egypt, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jordan, and Sri Lanka. The Commission also had to verify claims before deciding on the justification for compensation.

“We had a rich Kuwaiti claiming millions for his wife’s jewels that he said had been in the basement. But he had no papers and no receipts,” Alzamora said.