China Says Holds of Iraq's Contracts Exacerbates Humanitarian Crisis

Coupled with the underlying weakness of the oil-for-food program, the increasingly serious problem of holds of Iraq's contract applications has exacerbated the miserable humanitarian situation in the country, China stressed on March 25.

Speaking at the meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Iraq, Chinese Permanent Representative to the U.N. Wang Yingfan said that according to a weekly report of the United Nations Office of Iraq Program (OIP), as of March 6, 2000, the number of contracts put on hold from Phase IV to Phase VII had already exceeded 1,150, with a total value of more than 1.7 billion U.S. dollars.

In less than half a year, the number of contracts on hold doubled while the total value more than doubled, Wang said. These figures by themselves reveal the very seriousness of the problem and present the Council with a very alarming picture, Wang said.

As a matter of fact, this problem is not a complicated one at all, and nevertheless, despite repeated debates by the Security Council, it remains unresolved and is even worsening, the ambassador said.

"We believe that all contracts scrutinized by OIP and submitted for approval by the sanctions committee should be considered as conforming to all the relevant stipulations of the Security Council resolutions," he stressed.

"But some members of the sanctions committee still ask for extra technical specifications and other information from the exporting companies," he said.

Wang said many contracts in the petroleum, power-generating, water sanitation and other sectors are interrelated, and under such circumstances, one contract on hold with the others approved amount to nothing but the disapproval of all the contracts. Up to now, the total amount of funds made available for the implementation of the oil-for-food program has reached 13.2 billion dollars but the total value of the supplies delivered to Iraq is only 6.7 billion dollars, and in other words, almost half of the available funds has not been really utilized for the program, he added.

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