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But while Washington was appealing to, and
bullying, the world to provide development funds for Iraq as fast as
Halliburton and its pals could siphon them off, the new, de-Ba'athed Iraq
has been paying 5% of its oil revenue in reparations. Or rather
"compensation", since reparations, rightly, got a bad press
after Versailles.
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In fact, that 5% was a big
reduction from the original 30% that the Security Council imposed. Indeed, the
biggest diversion of funds from the Oil for Food programme, even more than the
$10 billion surplus that it handed
over to the US-run Iraq development fund, was the $16 billion that went to
the UN Compensation Commission in
reparations - mostly to major companies and the Gulf States.
The cut went down to 25% over the
course of the OFF programme and, after the invasion, the Security Council
reduced it to the 5% that Iraq still pays.
But there is much irony in the fact
that Iraq has to pay anything at all.
At about the time that the first
Bush administration was being incredibly vindictive in its resolutions against
Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and ordering these reparations, a little known report
landed very quietly in the UN put the blame for the Iran-Iraq war on
Baghdad.
The report existed because, as part
of the peace deal the conflict, Iran insisted that a commission establish
responsibility for the war.
Accordingly, in December 1991, UN
Secretary General Perez de
Cuellar reported that Iraq's attack on Iran "cannot be justified under
the charter of the United Nations, any recognized rules and principles of
international law or any principles of international morality and entails the
responsibility for the conflict."
And so one would have thought that
Iran had multiple liens on any compensation going around.
Not only had Iraq launched the war,
it had breached numerous international conventions in its use of chemical
weapons and mistreatment of prisoners.
What is more, it was the Gulf
States who had bankrolled Saddam's war were now to be the chief beneficiaries of
the Iraqi compensation - while the UK and USA, who were the main movers of the
sanctions and compensation resolution against Baghdad, had provided overt
diplomatic and covert military backing for the Iraqi attack.
At the time I actually went to
Iran's UN Ambassador and asked why Tehran was not raising a claim for
compensation, and he said that Iran was satisfied with the moral
vindication.
Easily satisfied indeed: the report
apportioning blame must have been one of the least publicised UN reports ever!
But the reparations were still
going to the wrong people. It could be argued that the Ba'athist regime's
reparations meant that they had less money to build WMDs with - but that money
was coming from the Oil for Food coffers.
(And one notes that the
conservative columnists who howled about the 2% that the UN took from the mouths
of Iraqi children for administering the fund never once mentioned the 30% going
to Kuwait or Iraq.)
Since Saddam was overthrown, Iraq
has paid out another $5 billion, and now has looming over it a further $30
billion that the Commission has awarded.
Whatever sliver of justice there
was in the original reparations has surely completely evaporated by now.
The Iraqi people had neither votes
nor voice in picking Saddam or directing his policies. Such collective
punishment is exactly what the ICJ ducked
in its recent decision on Serbia.
It really is time to stop these
atavistic reparations. But someone has to mention them first - and there is
still an uncanny silence in diplomatic circles.
IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com
This article was first published in The
Guardian.
~~~~~
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