China-Made Double-Deck Buses Put Into Service in BaghdadA total of 28 double-deck buses produced by China's First Automobile Works (FAW) have been delivered to Iraq and put into service in Baghdad, the FAW sales manager said Tuesday.Huang Hao told Xinhua that the buses, which were delivered on Monday, were the first batch of a consignment of 200 of the kind, purchased by the Iraqi Ministry of Transport and Communications. "One hundred buses are to be delivered to the Iraqi side by May and another 100 by July," Huang said. The value of the contracts, signed between the two sides in three stages under the sixth, seventh and eighth phases of the United Nations oil-for-food program, stood at 20 million US dollars, Huang said. The humanitarian program, launched in December 1996 and now in the ninth phase, allows Iraq, which has been under UN sanctions since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, to sell oil to buy food, medicine and other basic necessities. Iraq has often complained that the contracts it signed with other countries to buy humanitarian goods were put on hold by the UN Sanctions Committee. However, Huang said that the bus contracts have little problem at the UN committee and were approved about one month after they were signed. "I think that it is because we have been strictly following UN resolutions and do business with Iraq under the oil-for-food program," he said. The FAW, the first and the largest automobile company in China, came to Iraq to seek business opportunities in June, 1998, and has since been trying to sell buses, fire trucks, light and heavy trucks to the Iraqi market. |
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