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Iraq, U.N. Set For New Crisis Over "Smart" Sanctions
BAGHDAD, May 24 (News Agencies) - Iraq and the United Nations are heading for a new crisis as Baghdad steps up its rejection of a U.S.-British draft proposal to ease a decade-old U.N. embargo and target the Iraqi leadership.
"Iraq will fight any decision the U.N. Security Council takes to impose new conditions on Iraq," said Salem al-Qabissi, head of Iraq's parliamentary committee for foreign affairs.
London and Washington are working to have the proposals amending sanctions to maintain strict controls on military goods while easing those on consumer goods approved by June 3rd when the U.N. oil-for-food program comes up for renewal.
But the Iraqi regime has firmly rejected the so-called "smart" sanctions and has even gone so far as threaten any neighbors that cooperate to help make them work.
"The proposal is worse than previous resolutions and Iraq will never accept it," Qabissi warned, announcing an upcoming international campaign by the Iraqi parliament to denounce the proposal's "harmful objectives".
"Iraq is determined to stop any hostile initiative by the American administration," Qabissi said.
Iraq's minister of state for foreign affairs, Naji al-Hadithi, said Thursday that "the United States and Britain will fail and Iraq will win."
And the official Iraqi press said that U.S.-British efforts to amend the sanctions were "still-born", would never succeed and were intended to impose "political and economic hegemony on Iraq ... to place the country and its great people under a protectorate."
Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz has warned that Baghdad would hit back by suspending the oil-for-food program introduced in 1996 and under which Iraq exports crude under U.N. supervision to finance imports of humanitarian supplies.
"If the [U.N.] Security Council adopts the project which has been submitted, the Iraqi government will not sell a single barrel of oil under the oil-for-food program," he said.
"The Iraqis are ready for confrontation if Washington sticks to imposing new conditions on them," a Western diplomat in Baghdad said.
Russia on Tuesday stepped in with a draft resolution of its own that could block for six months the proposals to amend the program, which runs in half-yearly phases.
"But with the five permanent members of the security council divided on the draft, the council would have to prolong the current program from one week to two, or even one month, to allow a better study of the proposal and get rid of any opposition," the diplomat said.
"The United States is piling on the pressure for a majority vote," he added, warning the "proposal will be still-born, like U.N. resolution 1284, if there is any abstention among the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council."
He was referring to the December 1999 abstention by China, France and Russia during a vote on U.N. resolution 1284, which Iraq has never applied and which offers a suspension of the embargo for a return of international weapons inspectors.
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