U.S. Cease-Fire Plan Intends to Cripple Iraq, Baghdad Says

President Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad regime Sunday lashed out at American-proposed conditions for a permanent cease-fire in the Persian Gulf conflict, accusing Washington of “intent to rob Iraq of its sovereignty and to mortgage Iraq’s resources.”

The harshly worded criticism came from the official Iraqi News Agency, which published the text of a 12-page document under discussion by the U.N. Security Council in New York.

Beset by rebellion and desperate shortages of food, water and medical supplies in the postwar chaos, Hussein’s government has little influence left, but it nevertheless dug in against conditions aimed at removing its inventory of mass-destruction weapons and forcing payment of war damages.

The cease-fire document would fix the long-disputed border between Iraq and Kuwait, establish a U.N. truce observer force and set up a mechanism to deduct the costs of war reparations for Kuwait from future earnings of Iraqi oil exports. It also demands the destruction of Iraq’s remaining ballistic missile forces and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons facilities and stockpiles.

Even if those conditions are met, some Bush Administration officials have argued, the economic embargo against Iraq should remain in place so long as Hussein is in power. “The U.S. draft resolution,” the Iraqi news report said, “demonstrated the U.S. intent to rob Iraq of its sovereignty and to mortgage Iraq’s resources.”

Oil is Iraq’s only important export resource, accounting for more than 90% of the government’s foreign exchange revenues before the invasion of Kuwait led to the embargo on Iraqi petroleum sales.

Nearly $80 billion in debt from its eight-year war with Iran, Baghdad had stretched its credit to the limit before the Gulf crisis and now has no hope of more. Food is the immediate problem--the Security Council lifted the embargo on foodstuffs late last week--and Baghdad is looking for humanitarian shipments.

“It is important that there should not be any delay . . . because delay would inflict harm on the Iraqi people,” Taha Muhi Maruf, a top Iraqi official, said Sunday of the need for prompt food deliveries. Last week, Iraqi Trade Minister Mohammed Mehdi Saleh accused the United States of trying to starve out the Hussein regime and said that Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq are burning food stocks.

“It started with the economic blockade, followed by the military aggression and then the acts of sabotage,” Saleh said. “The acts of sabotage, looting and fires are the third chapter in the aims of the American-Zionist aggression against Iraq.”

In Jordan last week, an official of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), which recently completed a survey of the food situation in Iraq, said Iraqi crops will probably fail this year because of bomb damage affecting irrigation. “I don’t think you will see a single vegetable this summer,” said Ezio Gianni Murzi.