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France, in Break With U.S., Urges End to Iraq Embargo France, in Break With U.S., Urges End to Iraq Embargo
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
New York Times
January 14, 1999
UNITED NATIONS -- France, making a formal break with the United States and Britain, proposed on Wednesday that the Security Council lift the oil embargo on Iraq and institute a new weapons monitoring system to prevent Saddam Hussein from rearming."The embargo has become the wrong tool to achieve the goals of the Security Council," said the French proposal, which circulated Wednesday to all Council members.
"It needs to be lifted."
The United States rejected most major points in the French proposal in advance at a Council discussion last month on Iraq.
Keeping Iraq under tight sanctions, including forbidding the country to sell oil freely to raise money for arms, has been central to American policy.
The State Department spokesman, James P. Rubin, said on Wednesday that the French proposals had "some positive elements," including the calls for continued arms monitoring and some supervision of oil earnings.
But he reiterated the American position that sanctions could not be lifted until Iraqi arms programs had been rendered harmless.
"We have a number of questions and concerns that we are going to address to France about the proposal," Rubin said.
The initial reaction from Iraq, which would have to agree to a new monitoring system, was largely negative. Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said at a news conference such proposals, including similar ideas floated by Saudi Arabia, "carry conditions that lead to exchanging eight-year-old sanctions with a new embargo."
The French said in their plan that the oil embargo could no longer be defended, because "it hurts the people of Iraq and keeps them hostages of their authorities."
France would lift solely the oil embargo initially, leaving in place other sanctions like a ban on international air travel. Other sanctions would be removed only if the Iraqis demonstrate cooperation and compliance with new rules. Conversely, additional sanctions could be imposed "should Iraq not comply with its undertakings and obligations."
The French propose replacing the arms inspection commission with a "renewed control commission" that would have a preventive rather than investigative role, watching for signs of illegal arms use from existing stocks or attempts to buy or produce new prohibited weapons. Long-term monitoring would replace intrusive searches for evidence of past programs.
Many tons of Iraqi weapons and ammunition have been destroyed since the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But questions remain about unaccounted materiél like biological and chemical stocks and the missiles to deliver them.
Iraq was also found to have had a secret nuclear-weapons program. But the International Atomic Energy Agency has said it can find no evidence of arms or components to assemble them, a conclusion that independent American arms experts challenge.
Using language heard frequently from Iraq and Russia, the French proposal said that the control commission should "have its independence insured and it professionalism strengthened." In the past those have been code words for shielding the inspections from American influence or pressure and putting them under the United Nations international Civil Service structure.
Under the French proposal, which was first outlined on Tuesday to other permanent members of the Security Council -- Britain, China, Russia and the United States -- a financial surveillance system would be devised to watch Iraqi expenditures from oil profits.
The plan does not call for an escrow account to keep the money under supervision, as is now the case under the program that allows Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil to buy food, medicine and other goods needed to improve living standards.
Buyers of Iraqi oil and the Iraqi Government would have to notify the United Nations Secretariat, not the Security Council, of each sale. "Oil flows should be controlled on the ground," the proposal says.
The aim of financial surveillance would be to compel Iraq to meet its obligations to pay outstanding war claims and pay for a new monitoring system from oil earnings without "diverting these resources for the reconstitution of weapons of mass destruction."
The French are suggesting that all arms sales to Iraq be prohibited and imports of other materials that could be used in weapons development be policed and restricted. All other Iraqi purchases could be made freely without surveillance.
The United States has repeatedly said the oil embargo, the most important of numerous economic sanctions imposed after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, cannot be lifted until the Iraqis have been judged to have met all disarmament requirements set out in the 1991 cease-fire resolution after the gulf war.
Those requirements have not been met. Existing resolutions governing them would, in effect, have to be annulled, a step that could paralyze the Security Council.
Although offering no proposals on salvaging the arms inspection system carried out by the United Nations Special Commission, the American delegation is expected to oppose monitoring methods that do not allow intrusive inspections, even though the Clinton Administration did not press for them for much of last year.
The French emphasize that their proposals are meant to generate debate and some action in the Security Council, which has been largely inert on the subject of Iraq since American and British bombing raids last month effectively killed the existing inspection system.
President Hussein has made it clear that the inspectors of the Special Commission, who were withdrawn hours before the air strikes, will never be allowed to return. Diplomats say they do not see how force can reimpose the work of the commission.
On Wednesday Vice President Ramadan was unequivocal, saying, "Any talk about the future of the commission, whether it has to do with beautifying its ugliness or to change one of its spies, its makeup or the role of one of its members, we say, is a waste of time."
In Paris the French Foreign Ministry said it was impossible to resurrect the Special Commission. "France thinks that it is time for the U.N. Security Council to consider that no progress can be made by an illusory resumption of previous methods," a statement from the ministry said.
The executive chairman of the commission, Richard Butler, continues to argue that the agency, known as Unscom, is not dead, and will have a new role to play in whatever system is ultimately devised.
The Iraqis will have to accept any plan imposed on them, however. Hussein has always chafed at international controls, and the French proposal maintains some significant ones.
