U.N. OKs New Iraq Restrictions

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to impose new import controls on Iraq, overhauling a 5-year-old sanctions system that has been derided by the right as ineffectual and by the left as unfair to ordinary Iraqis.

The new system features a catalog more than 300 pages long of products with potential military use that the Persian Gulf nation will not be allowed to purchase without specific approval. At the same time, the United Nations will expedite import permits for food, medicine and other humanitarian items, as well as for oil industry equipment.

The U.S.-backed plan was designed in part to mollify critics in Europe and the Middle East who blamed Iraq’s rising rates of infant mortality and malnutrition on existing U.N. import controls.

“It will facilitate greatly the movement of humanitarian and purely civilian goods to the Iraq economy,” U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte said. “By simplifying this export regime and focusing it more on products and services that could contribute to a weapons of mass destruction program, I think the regime has been made more effective.”

Western diplomats also said they hoped that the council’s unanimous support for the sanctions plan will increase pressure on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to readmit U.N. weapons inspectors. Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri has met twice this year with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to discuss sanctions and arms inspections and is expected back here this month for a third round of talks.

Syria, the lone Arab representative on the 15-member council, had raised objections during the last week to the new sanctions system, but it joined in the unanimous vote.

Diplomats here representing Hussein’s government condemned the passage as further “harassment of the Iraqi people” and reiterated their demands for the complete removal of trade controls.

Iraqi officials contend that the inventory of items the U.N. says could be used for weapons development includes hundreds of products needed for legitimate industry, such as high-powered computers and pharmaceutical equipment.

As before, the U.N. will continue to collect all of Iraq’s declared oil revenue, which is placed in an escrow account and used to pay for approved imports.

“This will prevent any development of the Iraqi economy for the future,” said Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Douri.

The U.N. imposed sanctions after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and has kept measures in place since, in part because it wants proof that Baghdad has given up all efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The new sanctions plan’s lengthy “goods review list” was negotiated during the last three months between Russia, which has become Iraq’s biggest supplier of advanced industrial equipment, and the United States.

Under the existing sanctions system, adopted in December 1996, Iraqi import orders are reviewed on a case-by-case basis by a U.N. monitoring committee. An Iraqi purchase can be halted by any Security Council member that suspects the item could be used for military purposes.

The United States, backed in some instances by Britain, is using this power to block $5.2 billion in Iraqi orders for machinery and other goods, some of them dating back years.

Several affected supplier countries--including Russia, France and China, all permanent members of the Security Council--have accused Washington of stopping civilian imports that the sanctions system was designed to permit and punishing foreign companies that sell to Iraq.

The complaints were cited by Iraqi and other Middle Eastern critics as evidence that sanctions were being used not to thwart Iraq’s military programs but to cripple its industry and public services.

U.S. Accused of

Political Delays

“There were grounds for suspicion that the U.S. was indulging in highly political delays on products that did not really represent that kind of threat,” said Richard Murphy, an expert on the region with the Council of Foreign Relations and a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia. “We had played with things just to stick it to the Iraqis.”

The new catalog of “dual use” goods was conceived by the Bush administration as a way of avoiding these frictions while maintaining tight constraints on the Iraqi military. Though many import orders halted by the United States might now be denied permanently, about $700 million in blocked sales of Russian goods will be allowed in under the new system, according to diplomats here.

Syria had asked last week that the authorizing resolution acknowledge Iraq’s right to self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter--a move intended to signal opposition to U.S. military action and to bolster Iraq’s arguments that it should be allowed to buy or build conventional weapons. But none of the other 14 council members supported the Syrians and the motion was withdrawn.

Alleged Conspiracy

to Circumvent Sanctions

Though Syria joined the 1991 Persian Gulf War coalition that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, it recently has been accused of conspiring with Baghdad to circumvent U.N. sanctions. In the most serious charge, Syria is said by Western diplomats and independent oil industry analysts to be illegally importing about 150,000 barrels of oil a day by pipeline from Iraq, providing Hussein’s government with petroleum income outside U.N. control and freeing up Syrian oil for the export market.

“Syria has a reason to join the consensus of the council because otherwise she is looking very exposed as a country that is not fully following the resolutions on the export of Iraqi oil,” Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s U.N. ambassador, said after Syria had won a one-day delay in the sanctions vote Monday.

But the Syrians and other Arab nations continue to blame U.N. import controls for health problems in Iraq. Many leaders of the European left also have become vocal opponents of the sanctions. Last month, a group of 120 Western European activists, including French members of the European Parliament, flew to Baghdad to protest the impact of sanctions on Iraqi children.

The child mortality rate in Iraq has almost doubled since the 1980s, and malnutrition--once rare--is now endemic in the rural south and in the capital’s poorest suburbs, according to surveys by local and foreign health professionals.

But trade sanctions are not the cause of the crisis, according to U.N. experts familiar with the country. The precipitous decline in health indicators began during the final and most intensive stages of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, continued during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and accelerated as a result of U.S. bombing raids during the Gulf War, they say.