According to BBC, today the UN Security Council lifted most sanctions on Iraq. To understand why most Iraqis would greet this announcement with a mixture of repressed anger, resignation, and cynicism, one needs to review the history of UN sanctions on Iraq since 1991.

A few days after Iraq’s August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the Security Council passed UNSCR 661, a nearly complete economic embargo against the state of Iraq.  The lifting of this embargo was contingent on Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait and a restoration of the status quo ante in Kuwait.  Up to that point, many (perhaps most) Iraqis might accept the international community’s reaction, aside from those who agree with the Iraqi government (GOI) of the time’s position that such wide ranging sanctions against one state for invading and occupying another state’s territory was clearly not being enforced equally against all states in the region.  For those who don’t get the reference, after Israel invaded and occupied territories claimed (or at least administered) by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967, UNSCR 242 enforced no sanctions whatsoever against that aggressor.  This fairly obvious double standard that the Iraqi invasion confirmed is the major reason that the Bush administration pushed for the Madrid Peace Conference in the immediate wake of the Gulf War in the spring of 1991 (which amounted to nothing, as the bilateral Oslo track — also driven somewhat by regional pressure — came to define the next stage in the Israeli-Palestinian arena).

Once Iraq was ejected from Kuwait at the end of February 1991, and after the vicious civil uprisings of March 1991, the Security Council concluded that Iraq’s government remained a threat to regional stability and passed UNSCR 687 in April 191.  The major components of this resolution were that it set up UNIKOM (UN Iraq Kuwait Observation Mission, intended to delineate the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border and maintain a peacekeeping observation mission until such time as the border delineation is complete and both parties recognize it) and UNSCOM (UN Special Commission on Munitions, intended to ensure that Iraq had destroyed all special munitions and weapons programs as per their armistice agreement to end the war).

687 called for Iraq to issue a report within 15 days declaring where all weapons and weapons programs were located.  It also enshrined a sanctions committee which would ensure that Iraq could not restart all such weapons programs in the future.  The committee, based at UN Headquarters in NYC, was empowered to prohibit trade in all items defined as dual use (civilian and military) and prevent their transport into Iraq.  These sanctions were to be reviewed by the Security Council every 60 days.

UNSCR 687 sounded reasonable enough at the time, with a 15 day report to be followed by a 60 day review.  Embargoed items were meant to be limited to military related items, and that limited embargo was scheduled for review after a couple of months.  The international community — and Iraqi society — had no idea when this resolution was passed that it would define Iraq’s economic and societal stability for the next 20 years.  How did that come to pass?

The way that 687 came to define Iraqi society says a lot about Anglo-American diplomacy in the 1990s, the uneven application of international law, and the capricious nature of what is usually referred to as “the international community” (which is often so dominated by the US and a few European partners that another moniker would make more sense).  Most importantly, 687 stated that the sanctions regime could only be ended with a positive vote of the Security Council.  In other words, the default was that the sanctions would continue indefinitely until such time as a majority of the council — and every single permanent member — agreed to lift them.

The first 60 day review was not all that contentious because GOI was not cooperating very persuasively with UNSCOM, and because their work was not done in any case.  However, by the third, fourth, and fifth reviews a clear pattern had emerged, the broad outlines of which would continue for the better part of 12 more years.  Even as most temporary security council members were ambivalent at best about continuing the sanctions, and even as China, the Soviet Union (Russia after 1993), and France were prepared to adjust or even lift the sanctions, the United States and the United Kingdom insisted on continuation of the sanctions regime until such time as UNSCOM’s work was complete.  As scandals over UNSCOM financing, corruption, and espionage emerged in the years to follow, the US and UK continued to insist on the continuation of the sanctions until such time as the Government of Iraq no longer posed a threat to its neighbors.

From August 1991 to July 1992, I lived in the Palestine Meridian Hotel in downtown Baghdad, serving as a relief worker with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) trying to deliver food and medicines to needy segments of Iraq’s population impacted by the sanctions.  Although that experience should be the subject of another extended blog post, what’s relevant here is the financing, corruption, and espionage issues that arose with both UNIKOM and UNSCOM in the early 1990s.

First of all, Iraq was obliged to pay for both institutions.  Secondly, each international staff member of these two UN agencies was provided with a per diem in dollars — pegged to the official exchange rate of the Iraqi Dinar.  At the time, the Iraqi Dinar was officially worth about $3, even though on the streets one could (with some risk) get some 200-800 Iraqi Dinars for a dollar, depending on which month we’re talking about (if my memory serves correctly).  So, in order to ensure that such international staff could get sufficient per diem to live in Iraq at the official exchange rate (since trading money at the real rate was a capital offense for Iraqis, and illegal for internationals), UN staff members received some $300 per day as per diem.  This money was received in cash, in dollars, at the Canal Hotel, which had been taken over as the UN headquarters in Iraq.  Since it was a protected economy, it only cost about $10/day to get by in Baghdad, at least for me (I was feeling flush with my $35 per diem, also paid in dollars cash, and which paid off my Columbia MIA student loan debt off within a year).

There were several hundred of these UN staff members, including UNIKOM security guards and UNSCOM weapons inspectors, as well as UNICEF and UNHCR professionals.  These staff members, some of whom were good friends of mine at the time, would routinely take cash trips to Kuwait to deposit their $10,000/month per diem winnings in an international bank branch.  This went on full steam until GOI cracked down on the abuse it implied through its own petty harassment of UN staff in the summer of 1992, reducing the numbers by at least half.  Friends of mine periodically talked about what they’d do with all that money, and it usually included buying real estate or financing further education.

The corruption inherent in this system was never a problem for the international community, since according to 687 it was part of the sanctions regime and would thus ultimately be covered by the state of Iraq.  Word gradually got out that UN staff members were making a mint off Iraq’s oil receipts, but Iraqis never complained openly because such criticism was far too dangerous for the regime to allow.  While such complaints that were aired never made it into the Western consciousness, I am fairly confident that few Iraqis mourned when the Canal Hotel in which we used to throw fantastic parties in 1991-92 was hit by a massive truck bomb in August 2003 (or the Hamra Hotel, where many staff members lived, also bombed at some point after the 2003 invasion).  I’m also convinced that the corruption which came to define the 2003-04 Coalition Provisional Authority under Ambassador Paul Bremer really got its start in 1991.

Corruption was not the only issue, however.  It quickly grew clear to all involved that UNSCOM was a Washington directed outfit.  UNSCOM officials tended to be retired military officials from NATO powers, with a noticeable over-representation of Americans and British.  These were nice enough guys on the whole, but also overpaid and carrying out a mission that went well beyond ensuring Iraq’s disarmament.   It was clear that they were literally getting their orders from DC rather than NYC, and GOI very quickly concluded that UNSCOM itself was a national security threat.  Some of the characters who led this outfit — notably David Kay, Rolf Ekeus, Richard Butler — were clearly out to ensure that the process would continue as long as possible, that Iraq would never be certified WMD free, and that their writ would be as broadly interpreted as possible.

As the months dragged into years, the Iraqi public grew ever more used to their own new normal, even as societal indicators plunged and social cohesion slowly unraveled.  None of this ever really made the news in the West, and when it did media commentators tended to discount the news as exaggerations.  I distinctly remember reading New York Times articles from the early 1990s and growing quite exasperated at their power to shape and misrepresent reality (much harder to accomplish in today’s internet world).  I personally think, as do many Iraqis, that the seeds for the unmitigated disaster of the post-2003 Iraq was laid by the sanctions regime of the 1990s.

How did sanctions ostensibly aimed at military use items come to destroy an entire society?  Through an exceedingly liberal interpretation of “dual use,” that’s how.  The sanctions committee that 687 authorized quickly turned into a mysterious and mendacious collection of faceless American diplomats in NYC demanding that no goods with even remote possibilities of “dual use” capacity would be allowed into Iraq.  This came to include lead pencils, famously.

In 1995 two key relatives of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein defected to Jordan, Hussein Kamal al-Majid and Saddam Kamal al-Majid.  Before rather naively returning to Baghdad to their deaths via tribal rough justice, these two were extensively debriefed over several weeks by Jordanian and American officials in Amman.  Years later it emerged that the brothers confirmed that the Iraqi WMD program had been completely dismantled in the first two years or so after UNSCOM had entered Iraq.  This was never revealed by US intelligence in the buildup to the 2003 invasion, and this should have been the date (1995) beyond which sanctions could no longer be justified — at least not in the all-encompassing form in place at the time.

Meanwhile, by the mid-1990s the sanctions regime had grown so vicious that a credible UNICEF report estimated that 550,000 “excess deaths” had occurred in the half decade or so since the sanctions had been imposed.   When asked about this report, US Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously responded that she thought the price in fatalities was “worth it.”  While that comment never attracted a great deal of attention in the US, no one in Iraq has forgotten it.  At about that time, the Oil for Food Program (OFP) was started to respond to criticisms that the sanctions regime was leading to widespread starvation (which wasn’t ever really the case) and deprivation (which was).  This program grew into a wholly corrupted mechanism for the Iraqi state to recover at least partial sovereignty over the use of their own oil assets.

After the Anglo-American invasion of March 2003, Iraqis might have been forgiven for thinking that the sanctions regime would be quickly lifted.  Although most of the important sanctions were lifted by August 2003, several outstanding issues prevented quick and complete lifting.

The first issue sprung from outstanding Kuwaiti claims arising from the 1990-91 Iraqi invasion and occupation of their country.  There were still missing persons, museum assets, and other issues that had never been satisfactorily resolved from the Kuwaiti perspective.  In addition, Iraq had been paying some percentage of oil export receipts to Kuwait as compensation, and the Kuwaitis had no interest in ending this revenue stream.  From an Iraqi perspective, Kuwaiti territory had now been used to launch an invasion of Iraq, so this compensation should be reversed.  However, this perspective never reached a wide hearing in the international community (as defined above), and was never pressed by any of the fragile Iraqi governments that followed that invasion.

A second issue concerned compensation to Western “guestages” and others who suffered from that same 1990 invasion.  While from an Iraqi perspective it seems somewhat surreal to be paying compensation to citizens of the countries that had imposed such hardship on them, such compensation had to be sorted out before the sanctions could be completely lifted.  It now seems as though this issue is reaching resolution, as the current Iraqi government has agreed to pay compensation (in the millions of dollars) to those who were prevented from leaving Iraq in the fall of 1990, and others.

This has been only a gross summary of the issue.  For further reading, I might suggest works by Sarah Graham-Brown, Scott Ritter, and several others.

Here’s the article link & text:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12004115

15 December 2010

UN lifts sanctions against Iraq

It was all smiles at the UN as 19-year-old sanctions on Iraq are lifted

The vote is intended as a recognition of the political progress made in Iraq.

One resolution ends sanctions that were imposed to stop Iraq building nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

The fear that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction was the main reason cited for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Sanctions were first imposed on Baghdad in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, though some relating to trade, investment and conventional weapons have been lifted since 2003.

In a statement, the Security Council said it “recognises that the situation now existing in Iraq is significantly different from that which existed at the time of the adoption of resolution 661” in 1990.

The council also voted to return control of Iraq’s oil and natural gas revenue to the government on 30 June and to end all remaining activities of the oil-for-food programme, which helped ordinary Iraqis cope with sanctions.

“Iraq is on the cusp of something remarkable – a stable, self-reliant nation,” he said.

But UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said Iraq must make efforts to agree a border with Kuwait and to agree on a dispute over war reparations if all sanctions were to be ended.

Baghdad still pays 5% of revenues from its oil sales into a fund which pays reparations to Kuwait.

Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said normalisation of relations with Kuwait would be a priority for the new Iraqi government.

“I can say that the session today is the beginning of the end,” Mr Zebari told Associated Press before the meeting.

“Today Iraq will be liberated from all sanctions caused by wars and misdeeds of the former regime,” he said.