Iraqi Assails U.N.’s Sanctions; Council Members Are Annoyed

Tarik Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, accused the Security Council on Monday of committing “a crime of genocide against the people of Iraq” with its punitive sanctions. But his plea to lift the sanctions only irritated council ambassadors clearly fed up with Iraqi intransigence.

Even before Aziz spoke, Ambassador Andre Erdos of Hungary, the council president this month, read a statement declaring the world body had found that the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has fallen short of complying with the U.N. resolutions that ended the Persian Gulf War.

The resolutions required the regime to eliminate all its weapons of mass destruction and refrain from producing such weapons ever again.

The display of drama--with Aziz, Hussein’s most trusted negotiator, flying from Baghdad to face the council--did not seem to move the impasse in one way or another.

The Iraqi denounced the strictures upon his country as “arbitrary, iniquitous . . . peculiar and unjust.” He made it clear that Hussein had no intention of submitting to perpetual inspections designed to ensure that he not resume production of the weapons. “Iraq will never tolerate any act that threatens its dignity and sovereignty,” Aziz said.

U.N. officials in charge of inspections reported to the council that while there had been more cooperation since March, Iraq had still failed to fulfill the demands.

Rolf Ekeus, chairman of the U.N. Special Commission charged with overseeing the destruction of the weapons, found the Iraqis lacking in two main areas:

* Iraq, claiming it has destroyed the pertinent files, has refused to give the United Nations its list of foreign suppliers, its production statistics and its account of the missiles and other weapons used up in the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars. Without these, the United Nations cannot be sure if all weapons have been destroyed.

* Iraq still refuses to accept the system of future monitoring and inspections that are required by the resolutions ending the Persian Gulf War.

In his speech to the council, Aziz seemed to allude to a Bush Administration pronouncement that the United States would never allow the lifting of sanctions so long as Hussein remained in power.

“No matter what Iraq does in fulfillment of obligations imposed upon it, the unjust sentence passed by the council to starve the people of Iraq . . . will remain in place simply because this is the will of certain influential governments,” Aziz said.

But neither U.S. Ambassador Edward J. Perkins nor any other envoy brought up the Bush Administration condition. And Ekeus went out of his way to say that he and his commission would support the lifting of sanctions if Iraq complied with the resolutions.

Aziz said that “dire shortages of food and medicines” created by the sanctions had been the direct cause of the death of 3,821 children under age 5 and of 6,309 adults so far during 1992. In both cases, Aziz said, these were about twice the number who had died because of the sanctions in 1991.

But Perkins, in a statement read even before Aziz spoke, described Iraq’s record of trying to circumvent the U.N. resolutions as “shameful.”

“We regret that Baghdad’s performance to date indicates that the outlook for Iraqi cooperation is not promising,” Perkins said.

The council will continue its session with Aziz today. It is expected to extend the sanctions without even putting the matter to a vote.