Flights to Iraq Carry a Message to U.N.

After a decade-long U.N. embargo on air travel to Iraq, the Saddam International Airport has started to bustle again, with planes carrying few passengers but packed with political significance.

On Sunday, a Palestinian Airlines flight became the 36th of a new breed of arrival to touch down in Baghdad since a Russian Yak-42 carrying oil executives first challenged the embargo in August. The flurry of flights from European and Arab nations has followed to show support for the Iraqi people, who these nations say have been unfairly hurt by the economic sanctions imposed by the U.N. after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

“It is the beginning of the collapse of sanctions,” Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz told reporters in Baghdad after a few aircraft had landed in the capital last month. “People all over the world are saying, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”

The challenges have grown increasingly brazen and bizarre. While some nations initially exploited a gray area of the sanctions by notifying the U.N. that they would be sending humanitarian delegations, groups such as the Palestine National Council are simply showing up in solidarity. And rather than bringing aid, Sunday’s Palestinian flight landed with a number of Palestinians wounded in clashes with Israeli forces and took off again with five tons of medical supplies donated by President Saddam Hussein--the very provisions the Iraqi regime says its people are struggling without.

France and Russia were the first countries to test the boundaries of the sanctions. Both are veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council who have long argued that broad sanctions are hurting Iraq’s people, not the regime. And the effort has gotten off the ground at a time when looming national elections and high oil prices have made the U.S., Iraq’s staunchest foe, reluctant to confront Baghdad.

While the ban on flights has been only a small part of sweeping sanctions intended to isolate Iraq until Baghdad proves it has stopped making weapons of mass destruction, the show of solidarity to defy it may hasten changes to the sanctions, diplomats say. Even the hard-line U.S. is quietly moving toward what have become known as “smarter sanctions,” in a more pragmatic approach to forcing change on the regime it once led a war against.

With the notable exception of Yugoslavia, the U.S. experience in Iraq and elsewhere has provided evidence that broad, untargeted sanctions may be too blunt an instrument to compel change. A case-by-case study of sanctions released by the U.N. in April found that such restrictions are often ignored but that when they do strike home, it is often innocents who are hurt, not the rogue regimes the sanctions are aimed at.

“We don’t have a grand policy decision reorienting sanctions,” said James Cunningham, who handles the Iraq issue for the U.S. mission at the United Nations. “But in general, we agree with the other members. We want to make sanctions as effective and targeted as possible.”

The opportunity to do that may come in December, when Resolution 1284--which mandated the sanctions--is up for its annual review. The time will be ripe politically for the outgoing Clinton administration to quietly explore different ways to compel change. The Security Council will have heard the recommendations of a U.N. panel due to report in late November on how to improve the effectiveness of sanctions while sparing civilians. That may mean tightening clamps on Iraqi leaders’ air travel and bank accounts.

Iraq, too, is anticipating change, with growing support from sympathizers and perhaps an incoming American president who may want to move policy in a new direction. Emboldened by an increasingly active black market and more visits from executives preparing to do business with Baghdad once sanctions are lifted, Aziz, the deputy prime minister, urged allies to break the embargo and resume trading with his country while he was at U.N. headquarters for the Millennium Summit in September.

France, Russia and China hold the most contracts under the current oil-for-food program, which allows Iraq to buy nonmilitary supplies with oil revenues through the U.N. While French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine insists that his country’s foreign policy is not swayed by commercial considerations, France tops the list with $2.61 billion in contracts, followed by Russia with $2.14 billion and China with $1.94 billion.

France, Russia and China, however, are careful to point out that they still support the U.N.’s core demand: that Iraq must allow U.N. inspectors to verify that the country has no weapons of mass destruction. The current resolution requires Iraq to prove it has a clean slate before it can receive a temporary suspension of sanctions. But Baghdad has barred inspectors from returning since they left in December 1998 just before Western warplanes bombed the country in retaliation for its alleged obstruction of the inspections program.

The country’s people are suffering because of the stalemate, opponents of the sanctions say. Vedrine recently called them “cruel, outdated and economically absurd” and is pushing for a partial easing of the embargo in return for Iraq’s gradual cooperation.

For the U.S. and Britain, though, it’s all or nothing.

That’s what led some members of the Security Council to begin chipping away at the edges of the policy, hoping to cause the whole enterprise to crumble. Last month, France, Russia and China pressured the U.S. and Britain to reduce the share of U.N.-handled oil profits that Iraq pays to Persian Gulf War victims, from 30% to 25%, so the country can spend more of that money on its own people.

At the same time, the number of countries eager to send symbolic aid flights to Iraq is taking off. Indonesia’s president, Abdurrahman Wahid, has scheduled a visit to Baghdad in November.

“The flights have a psychological effect,” said Peter van Walsum, the Dutch ambassador to the U.N. and chairman of the Sanctions Committee. “But they also have an unfortunate effect of leading Iraq to think a revision of the entire sanction regime is coming. The council is united on [Resolution] 1284. That is clear.”

The ban on air travel is meant to politically isolate Baghdad and keep any money, equipment or technology that could be used for weapons from being smuggled into the country. The embargo has been so thorough that even Iraq’s top ministers and foreign diplomats must enter and leave the country by traveling overland to the Jordanian capital, Amman, a 10-hour car ride from Baghdad.

There have been exceptions to the no-flight rule. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan landed at a military air base when he visited Hussein in 1998. And the pope would have been allowed to fly directly to Baghdad had his planned pilgrimage to holy sites in Iraq this year not been canceled.

It was preparations for the pope’s trip that uncovered the gray area in the resolution that the recent aid flights have exploited.

The rules allow humanitarian flights as long as the cargo is inspected for contraband and the U.N. Sanctions Committee approves the journeys in advance--in part to prevent the passenger planes from being mistakenly shot at by U.S. and British military forces enforcing “no-fly” zones over Iraq. France and Russia both flouted the rules by notifying the committee but taking off before receiving its authorization. But as more flights arrive, fewer countries are even bothering with notification.

As support for the continuing isolation of Iraq withers, the U.S. is trying to avoid being left alone in its Iraq policy.

“Washington is losing the battle of public opinion, and people are beginning to consider alternatives,” said Henri Barkey, chairman of the International Relations Department at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a former Iraq analyst at the State Department.

“If the U.S. were to get out of the box, it would have to be part of a bigger deal,” Barkey said. “Each side must trade something. Now they are exploring what are the parameters of that trade.”