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U.S. Draft On Iraq Sanctions As U.K. Calls For End
WASHINGTON, May 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The United States said Thursday it expected a draft resolution on modifying U.N. sanctions on Iraq to be presented in the world body next week as Britain circulated proposals to other members of the Security Council to end the 10-year-old U.N. embargo on trade with Iraq for all non-military goods, a British diplomat said Wednesday.
"We do expect a draft resolution will be circulated at the Security Council next week," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"We are working closely with the British in that regard and with other members of the council on the resolution ... We're going to have a resolution next week," he told reporters.
Boucher's comments came a day after a British diplomat confirmed that Britain had been offering informal proposals to other members of the Security Council to end the 10-year-old U.N. embargo on trade with Iraq for all non-military goods.
Circulation of the as-yet unfinished draft will come just ahead of June 3rd when the current 180-day phase of the Iraq oil-for-food program expires.
The program has since December 1996 enabled Iraq to export crude oil under U.N. supervision, using part of the revenue to import basic necessities approved by the council's sanctions committee.
The program was designed to alleviate the sufferings of the Iraqi people, whose standard of living has collapsed since sanctions were imposed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and occupied the emirate for seven months.
If the council accepts the British proposals, it will mean an end to much of the "cumbersome bureaucracy" in the oil-for-food program, the diplomat said.
"Until now, nothing has been allowed into Iraq except contracts approved by the sanctions committee," he said.
"We are going to change that, and allow in everything except a range of goods related to conventional arms and weapons of mass destruction."
Import contracts would be checked against a list of prohibited goods being compiled by the arms inspectorate UNMOVIC (for U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he said.
He said the new list would be more detailed and more precise than ones in current use and would be based in part on the July 1996 Wassenaar arrangement, signed by 33 countries and covering conventional weapons and sensitive dual-use goods and technologies.
If an import contract contained no listed items, it would be allowed to go ahead, but if some items were on the list, the sanctions committee could do one of three things, the diplomat said.
Possible options would be to reject the contract outright; to insist on deleting objectionable items; or to use officials with the oil-for-food program in Iraq to monitor the use of the goods to ensure they were not being used for military purposes, he said.
"There will be a range of items which will never be allowed into Iraq; there are some goods which no sane person would want Saddam Hussein to get his hands on," he added.
But he said the proposals would mean an end to the highly controversial practice of putting "holds" on contracts by the sanctions committee.
At present, $3.7 billion worth of contracts have been blocked, almost all of them by Britain or the United States.
This more than any other aspect of the oil-for-food program has driven a deep wedge between these two and the three other permanent Security Council members: China, France and Russia.
The five are also divided over the scope of an air embargo contained in the original sanctions resolution, and the diplomat said the draft resolution would probably lift the ban, provided means were in place to verify that Iraq could not import banned goods.
"We don't have a philosophical objection to commercial flights going to Iraq; the issue for us is not trade but inspection," he said.
He said the financial mechanism which gives the U.N. complete control of Iraq's oil revenues and allocates part of that money to compensating Kuwait for war damage, would remain intact.
The British official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the aim was to "return to the core objective" of preventing Iraqi rearmament after its defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, while depriving Baghdad of the opportunity to blame sanctions for the suffering of its people.
But he said the proposals did not replace "the comprehensive framework of Resolution 1284," which insisted that Iraq allow U.N. arms inspectors to return but offered the possibility of suspending sanctions if it cooperates with them.
The inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 on the eve of a bombing campaign by U.S. and British aircraft, and Iraq has said it will not allow them back in.
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