The sanctions regime against Iraq suffers a setback as several nations, including Russia and France, send medical teams and humanitarian supplies to the country without seeking the prior concurrence of the U.N. Sanctions Committee.
WHEN oil prices touch $30 a barrel, "rogue states" cease to exist. The two basic premises of United States policy towards the Arab world have been cheap oil and unlimited licence for Israel to satiate its territorial ambitions - the one stated unabashedl y, the other more subtly. The "rogue state" appellation - or its recently sanitised version of "states of concern" - serves the latter object but could run counter to the former. Many of the nations designated as villains by U.S. diplomacy also happen to be rather well endowed with petroleum resources. Occasionally, their ostracism has the uncalled for effect of sending international oil markets into a tizzy of under-supply and over-speculation.
Since Iraq came under comprehensive economic sanctions in 1990, the oil markets have been successfully contained by the exertions of the U.S.' faithful allies in the Arab world, notably Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. But over the past few months, the markets h ave slipped off the tightrope. The seemingly unending economic boom in the U.S. has pushed oil consumption levels skywards. Moderate prices have encouraged oil companies to run down their inventories. And with prices responding in the expected fashion to this dual stimulus, the western economies have suddenly awoken to the possibility that the idyll of high growth and low inflation that they have enjoyed for close to a decade may be drawing to a close. The first breaches have opened up in the sanctions regime against Iraq. And by an uncanny coincidence, it comes even as a renewed uprising in Palestine shatters the illusion that the joint U.S.-Israeli imposition of a "peace process" was in prospect of a final breakthrough.
On September 22, a French airliner landed at Baghdad's newly reopened international airport, carrying a team of doctors, sportsmen and a cargo of humanitarian supplies. France is a member of the United Nations Sanctions Committee that oversees the permis sible range of interactions Iraq can have with the outside world. But it did not seek the prior concurrence of the U.N. body for this particular flight, arguing that a civilian flight carrying medical supplies could not be construed by any definition to be subject to the embargo.
The following day, a Russian aircraft touched down in Baghdad, the third in just over a month. Apart from five tonnes of humanitarian supplies, the aircraft carried 100 passengers, comprising parliamentarians, oil industry officials and a football team. Again, prior sanction was not sought from the authorised U.N. body. In fact, the Russians have gone much farther than the French in announcing that scheduled civilian air services to Baghdad will resume before the end of October.
The Russian argument that commercial air services do not constitute a breach of economic sanctions may seem slightly implausible. But it does considerably less violence to the spirit of various U.N. resolutions than the interpretations that have been pla ced by the U.S. and its ally, the U.K. For instance, the two trans-Atlantic partners have maintained an air-exclusion zone over north and south Iraq ever since the end of the Gulf War, with no sanction from any multilateral body. And so too have they ext rapolated from U.N. resolutions, demanding the dismantling of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), to insist on a change of regime as a precondition for the lifting of sanctions.
On the day the Russian aircraft reached Baghdad, an Indian delegation led by Minister of State for External Affairs Ajit Kumar Panja also arrived in Baghdad. The Indian team did not take the spectacular sanctions-busting route of landing by air in Baghda d, but chose instead the arduous 15-hour drive from the Jordanian capital of Amman. Panja had a brief meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and delivered a letter from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. His other interlocutors from the Iraqi side included Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and Foreign Minister Mohammad Said Al-Sahaf.
The content of the letter delivered by Panja, as also of his discussions with the Iraqi leadership, remain shrouded in mystery. In his only public statement since the visit, Panja declared his solidarity with the Iraqi people and expressed the hope that their privations would soon be over. He committed India to renewing economic cooperation with Iraq as soon as conditions permitted. And perhaps departing from the script, he also asserted that India too would think of sending an aircraft with humanitaria n supplies to Baghdad, emulating the French and Russian examples.
However, the Ministry of External Affairs soon put out the clarification that all of the country's dealings with Iraq would be through the duly authorised channels of the U.N.
But as India dithered after Panja's seeming decisiveness, other nations were taking the bit between the teeth. On September 27, Jordan became the first Arab nation to send an aircraft to Baghdad. Far from seeking prior sanction, it chose only to inform t he U.N. about its intent. Yemen, which has been consistent in its opposition to the sanctions, followed two days later, though after securing the consent of the U.N. body.
Awaiting clearance for sending their own flights with medical teams and humanitarian supplies are Iceland, Morocco, Syria and Turkey. What began as a trickle is clearly turning into a torrent. The ethical and moral foundations of the U.N. sanctions again st Iraq are now under challenge as never before. Salah al-Mukhtar, Iraq's Ambassador in India, confidently predicts that the sanctions will not survive the tenth anniversary of the Gulf war, in January 2001.
The rash of breakouts from the sanctions regime is a manifestation of the growing impatience of the world community with the diktat of the U.S., which would condemn an entire people to distress while it pursues its conflicting and wildly irreconcilable g oals in the region. A symptom of the paralysis that afflicts American policy, as it struggles to square the circle between Israeli intransigence and legitimate Palestinian rights, was the discrete signal it sent late in August to the chief of the U.N. in spection team entrusted with the task of disarming Iraq. After years of raising phoney alarms about Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) capability, the U.S. has now advised Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commissi on (UNMOVIC), not to insist on an early resumption of weapons inspections, for fear of setting off another confrontation within the U.N.
Two weeks later, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright specifically disavowed the use of force as a means of securing Iraqi cooperation with UNMOVIC's inspection programme. Until now, there has been no further effort to set under way the ambitious d isarmament plans that UNMOVIC has been entrusted with. Inspectors, who were inducted and put through an intensive six-month process of training, have quietly left for their home countries without any indication of when they would be summoned.
The U.N. Security Council also witnessed a serious rift over a compensation claim made by the Kuwait Petroleum Company for damages allegedly suffered during the Gulf war. Since the special dispensation of oil export for essential subsistence requirements was approved by the U.N. in 1996 (the so-called "oil-for-food" programme), Iraq has generated a total of $32 billion as sales revenue. But only $20 billion has been made available for the Iraqi people with no less than 30 per cent (that is, $9.6 billion until now) being reserved for compensation claims. For a population of 22 million, this works out to an annual per capita entitlement of just over $225.
By these standards, the Kuwait Petroleum Company's recent claim of $20 billion in compensation must seem excessive. After due scrutiny, the Claims Commission of the U.N. approved a pay-out of $16 billion from Iraq's scarce petroleum revenues. When the ma tter went up to the Security Council, France, Russia and China baulked at the iniquity of it all. The former two in particular served notice that they intended to ensure that the quantum of Iraq's oil revenues that would be earmarked for compensation wou ld be reduced to 20 per cent.
The two main patrons of Kuwait - the U.S. and the U.K. - were in no mood for confrontation. Late in September, the Security Council unanimously resolved to reduce appropriations to the compensation fund from Iraq's oil revenues to 25 per cent. As a recip rocal gesture, France and Russia agreed not to make an issue of Kuwait's compensation claim. But this could only be the beginning of a series of skirmishes in the near future. Claims lodged by Kuwait with the U.N. Compensation Commission total no less th an $168 billion. The figure reportedly shot up in the recent past after the Kuwait Investment Authority submitted a claim for $86 billion to account for "lost investment returns".
The idea is clearly to keep Iraq in permanent debt for the folly of its 1990 invasion of Kuwait - an episode in the continuing saga of inter-Arab rivalry, in which the purported victim had a less than scrupulous role. But the Kuwait stratagem is likely t o encounter serious resistance within the Arab world for reasons that the kingdom of Jordan today seems to epitomise.
All through the 1980s, Iraq was the largest market for Jordanian produce. In fact, the Hashemite regime of Jordan was perhaps the most vigorous advocate of a peaceful resolution of the crisis that began with the occupation of Kuwait. All through the host ilities, at the popular level Jordan offered unstinting support to the Iraqi people. And the regime responded to the depth of popular sentiment by opposing the military action against Iraq in principle.
In 1995, the Hashemite monarch, King Hussein, abruptly changed tack. Obviously responding to U.S. blandishments, he concluded a peace treaty with Israel and publicly endorsed the vivisection of Iraq into a Kurdish north, a Sunni Muslim centre and a Shia south. Simultaneously, he raised the pitch of his rhetoric against the Iraqi regime and offered the hospitality of Amman for covert American operations to topple Saddam Hussein.
A number of coup attempts since then have come a cropper. But unmindful of the machinations of the Hashemite regime, Iraq sustained its historic role of supporting the fragile Jordanian economy, supplying at highly subsidised rates virtually all the oil its neighbour needed.
The strategic shift effected by Jordan in 1995 brought it no dividends. Increasingly, the Jordanian King Abdullah was being pressured by the U.S and Israel to sell out the Arab interests in Jerusalem for the illusory benefits of peace and economic integr ation with the west. It was a bargain that even the staunchest of U.S. allies in the Arab world - Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia - could not quite bring themselves to conclude. At the same time, the spiralling of oil prices in the l ast few months put Iraq in a unique position to throttle the Jordanian economy. There were obvious dividends to be gained from a dramatic gesture of autonomy from the West and solidarity with Iraq. The Jordanian aircraft that recently landed in Baghdad p oses a fresh headache for the Anglo-American policy of containment of Iraq. But it has proved enormously popular within Jordan and the larger Arab world.
Where India is concerned, the overtures to Iraq mark a perceptible dilution of the ardour with which it has lately rushed to embrace the West. The recent visits to Turkey and Israel by External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh were seen with concern in the Arab world. Several Arab commentators believe that the bonhomie of Vajpayee's visit to the U.S. marked India's formal entry into the geopolitical alliance of Turkey, Israel and Jordan, that is being designated by the U.S. as the axis around which the ne w world order will revolve in the volatile region stretching eastwards from the borders of Europe. Jordan now seems to have signalled its reservations over the role it is being cast in and India's own deep-seated ambivalences have surfaced. Clearly, the new world order that was announced in 1991 after Iraq had been devastated by several weeks of terror bombing, is in imminent danger of coming unstuck.
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