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Iraq flouted sanctions, report says

iraqi oil
Illegal oil sales have allowed Iraq to boost its weaponry in the 1990s, the report says  


UNITED NATIONS -- Previously unpublished U.N. weapons inspections reports reveal Iraq imported defence supplies despite U.N. sanctions prohibiting the country's armament, says the Associated Press News Agency.

The U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) report reveals that Saddam Hussein obtained military equipment in the 1990s to build missiles and nuclear weapons from companies in Eastern Europe and Russia.

The UNSCOM report, which comes from sources outside the United Nations, was released by Gary Milhollin, director of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a non-profit watchdog group, and researcher Kelly Motz.

It discloses that Iraq purchased ''full-sized production lines, industrial know-how, high-tech spare parts and raw materials.'' The goods were flown into Jordan and smuggled across the Iraqi border via truck.

The U.N. Security Council met last week in Paris to discuss a potential overhaul of 11-year old sanctions regime against Iraq and is expected to vote on July 4 on a draft resolution.

The AP agency said Milhollin and Motz are sceptical that tougher sanctions would stop the Iraqis from building up their weaponry.

"The new proposal -- whether adopted by the U.N. or not - has little hope of stopping the Iraqis from sneaking in what they need to rebuild their weapons sites and sneaking out the oil to pay for it," they wrote in an article to be published in the July-August issue of Commentary magazine.

"Even when the U.N. inspection regime was in place, the Iraqis had already figured out how to do just that."

Iraq is currently only allowed to sell oil for the purchase of food, medicine and other humanitarian needs, as allowed by the U.N.-approved oil-for-food programme.

The researchers believe that the U.S.- British sanctions proposal, which calls for the control of all cargo being imported and oil being exported, is the way Iraq's contraband importation can be stopped.

France, China and Russia, the remaining three members of the Security Council, support the abolition of the sanctions, which were imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, preceding the Persian Gulf War.

According to the current policy, the embargo can only be ended after U.N. weapons inspectors verify that Iraq has taken apart its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs, along with its long-range missile programme.

The report says Iraq decided in the early 1990s to take advantage of the fall of the Soviet empire and participate in its wholesale weapons market. Milhollin and Motz describe trips to companies in Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and Russia by groups of high-level Iraqis. Taiwan was also frequented by the Iraqi delegations.

The U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, UNSCOM's successor agency, confirms that the Security Council had been informed that Iraq had been attempting to buy items outside of sanctions, including missiles throughout the 1990s. UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 after the country failed to co-perate with them, and the U.S. and U.K. launched missile strikes to punish Iraq for their non-compliance. Since then, Iraq has barred the admission of the U.N. inspectors, insisting that sanctions be dropped.





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