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Iraq Urges U.N. to Approve Plan to Aid Palestinians
BAGHDAD, Aug 18, (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Iraq has called on the United Nations to approve its plan to provide financial assistance in the amount of one billion euros (about $930 million) in support of the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, against Israel, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported Saturday.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri sent a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urging an immediate agreement to allow 11-year sanctions-slapped Iraq, via the U.N. oil-for-food program, to purchase medical and humanitarian supplies for the suffering Palestinian people.
"The Palestinian people, who endure the worst forms of racist colonialism, have urgent need for rapid humanitarian assistance, especially after the dangerous escalation in the [Israeli] repression," INA quoted Sabri as saying.
Sabri accused the United States and Britain of "inflicting more suffering on the Palestinian people and encouraging the Zionist entity to pursue its policy of collective punishment and assassination," by blocking Iraq's wish to transfer U.N. supervised oil revenues to the Palestinians.
"The Palestinian people's crisis resulting from the daily Zionist (Israeli) aggression needs to be supported by the international community," Sabri said in the letter.
Despite being under sweeping U.N. sanctions since 1990, Iraq's President Saddam Hussein had announced his intention in December 2000 to deliver, from Baghdad's supervised U.N. oil-for-food program, one billion euros to support the Palestinian uprising.
Iraq has been subjected to U.N. supervision of its oil sales since late 1996, as an antidote to the debilitating effects of economic sanctions slapped on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.
The U.N. humanitarian program, launched in 1996, allows Iraq to sell oil and use part of the revenue to buy food, medicine and other basic needs to offset the impact of the sanctions.
Under the "oil-for-food" program, approximately 72% of Iraq's petroleum revenues finance the humanitarian program, 25% goes to a fund set up to pay damages arising from Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, 2.2% covers U.N. costs for administering the program, and 0.8% covers the administration of the U.N. Monitoring and Inspection Commission.
Baghdad has said the program fails to cover medical and food shortages that have been instigated by the sanctions.
Iraq has shown vehement support for the Palestinians' anti-Israeli occupation uprising that erupted last September.
According to Western estimates, more than 700 people, the vast majority of whom are Palestinians, have been killed in the nearly 11 months of violence between the well-equipped Israeli army and a largely civilian, unarmed Palestinian population.
Iraq is itself suffering under an 11-year-old United Nations sanction regime, which, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry, has brought the country's death toll to 1,508,006 - including thousands of children - since August 1990.
The high mortality rate is primarily the result of malnutrition and severe medicine shortages caused by the sanctions.
Iraq has long urged the U.N. to totally lift the crippling sanctions, as have human rights workers in the West.
Under U.N. resolutions, the sanctions cannot be lifted unless Iraq proves it has no more weapons of mass destruction, and has fulfilled other conditions regarding its invasion of Kuwait.
Former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter has accused the United States of deliberately provoking confrontations with Iraq, which he says was almost fully disarmed by 1995.
In his new documentary film, "In Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq", Ritter says his team was satisfied Iraq had destroyed 98% of its weapons by 1995.
But, he says, the U.S. government deliberately set new standards of disarmament criteria to maintain U.N. sanctions against Baghdad and justify bombing raids.
In the film, Ritter said Washington used UNSCOM to spy on Iraq almost from the time inspections began.
Ritter called for an end to sanctions imposed on Iraq, saying he did not feel the country posed a danger any longer.
"Iraq is a de-fanged tiger," he said.
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