Iraq has received only $13 billion out of a possible $47 billion generated through oil revenues in a UN-supervised humanitarian program, Oil Minister Mohammad Mehdi Saleh said Thursday.
The United Nations had deducted $16 billion from revenues generated by sales of oil under the oil-for-food program introduced in December 1996, Saleh said, quoted by the official INA news agency.
The deductions go towards financing UN activities in Iraq and paying compensation to the victims of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Saleh said the remaining $12 billion represent unrealized revenues from contracts Iraq signed with foreign companies but blocked by the US and British representatives on the UN sanctions committee.
The humanitarian program had "failed to bring about humane objectives and ease the suffering of the Iraqi people," he charged. But the UN office administering the program said Tuesday that the total value of contracts on hold was around only $3 billion.
On August 6, 1990, four days after Iraq's lightning invasion of Kuwait, the UN Security Council imposed the toughest economic, financial and military sanctions in the history of the world body.
Iraq argues that the UN oil-for-food program—launched to allow Baghdad to export oil in exchange for food and other essentials such as medicine—does not meet the 22-million population's most basic needs. — (AFP)
© Agence France Presse
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
