DUBAI, June 16 (News Agencies) - Iraq's Trade Minister Mohammad Mehdi Saleh charged Saturday that the "smart" sanctions proposed by Britain and the United States aim to hamper commerce between Baghdad and other Arab capitals.
"Among the objectives of the so-called smart sanctions is to block commerce between Iraq and Arab states so as to deprive the Arabs of bilateral cooperation and serve American-Zionist interests," he told reporters in Dubai.
"The contracts between Iraq and 15 Arab countries since 1997 under the (U.N.) oil-for-food program amount to 10.645 billion dollars," said Saleh.
On June 7, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Syria signed an agreement in Baghdad to establish a common free trade zone. Iraq has since January also sealed bilateral free trade accords with Egypt, Syria and Tunisia.
Saleh, who met with Dubai's crown prince and Emirati defense minister Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashed al-Maktoum, said that Baghdad would defeat efforts at the U.N. Security Council to impose smart sanctions.
"Iraq will foil the U.S.-British project and any other project which does not live up to Iraq's key demand for a lifting of the embargo" in force since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, he said.
Britain, with U.S. backing, has circulated a Security Council draft resolution that would abolish curbs on civilian trade with Iraq but tighten a weapons ban and controls on smuggling outside a U.N. oil-for-food deal.
Iraq on June 4 suspended more than two million barrels per day of oil exports under the U.N. oil-for-food deal in protest at the plan, which the Security Council aims to put to the vote by early July.
The United States is counting on Iraq's neighbors to implement tighter controls on the oil trade.
In the meantime, deputy Prime Minister Tarek Aziz had warned Turkey that British and U.S. proposals to impose "smart" sanctions on Iraq would damage the Turkish economy, in talks in Baghdad on Monday with Turkish envoy Faruq Logoglu.
Aziz warned of "the negative consequence on Iraqi-Turkish economic relations if Ankara implements the resolution" on which the U.N. Security Council is expected to vote at the start of July, the official news agency INA reported.
Iraq halted on June 4 for at least one month its U.N.-supervised oil exports of 2.2 million barrels a day in protest at the proposal to impose the so-called "smart" sanctions.
