UN Oil-For-Food Deal Fails to Meet Basic Needs: IraqThe United Nations oil-for-food program has failed to meet the basic humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, Iraqi Trade Minister Mohammad Mehdi Salah said Wednesday in Baghdad.Salah made the remark while meeting a visiting Egyptian delegation, which arrived in Baghdad by plane on Tuesday afternoon. Salah said that Iraq's oil exports have generated some 35 billion US dollars since the beginning of the UN humanitarian deal in December 1996, yet only 8.3 billion dollars worth of goods arrived in Iraq, or an average of 2 billion dollars a year and seven dollars for every Iraqi citizen. In contrast, some 11.5 billion dollars have been spent to cover the expenses of UN activities and reparations stemming from the 1991 Gulf War, he said. Meanwhile, Salah expressed Iraq's keenness to develop trade ties with Egypt, Iraq's fourth largest trading partner. Iraq has imported goods worth 1 billion dollars from Egypt since the oil-for-food deal was implemented. The UN humanitarian program, now in its eighth phase, allows Iraq to sell unlimited amount of oil to buy humanitarian supplies to ease the crippling impacts of sanctions imposed for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The sanctions will not be lifted unless UN arms experts declare that Iraq is free of all weapons of mass destruction. Egypt has been one of the leading Arab countries calling for lifting the decade-old sanctions. The visiting Egyptian delegation came to Iraq by plane to show its solidarity with Iraq as well as its defiance of the air embargo, which Iraq claimed is unilaterally imposed by the United States and Britain. The US and Britain maintain that the UN sanctions cover air embargo and flights to or from Iraq should be first approved by the UN Sanctions Committee. So far, two Egyptian planes have landed in Iraq since Iraq's Saddam International Airport was reopened on August 17, joining a growing list of foreign flights to Baghdad with only prior notifications to the UN committee. |
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