- Russia and France served notice yesterday that they would
not be steamrollered into lifting United Nations sanctions against Iraq.
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- The leaders of the anti-war camp remain a force to be
reckoned with because of their veto power within the UN Security Council.
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- The US President, George Bush, set the scene for weeks
of negotiations on Wednesday when he called for the 12-and-a-half year
old economic sanctions to be lifted. Although it must pain his administration
to do so, America is obliged to go through the UN to legitimately exploit
Iraq's oil revenues and to secure international recognition for the post-Saddam
government that will eventually emerge in Baghdad.
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- Russia's Foreign Minister, Ivan Ivanov, reacted to Mr
Bush's demand by retorting yesterday: "This decision cannot be automatic.
It demands that conditions laid out in corresponding UN Security Council
resolutions be fulfilled. For the Security Council to take this decision,
we need to be certain whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not."
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- The French President, Jacques Chirac, also hinted of
the battle to come by stressing: "Now it is up to the United Nations
to define the modalities of the lifting of sanctions."
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- Russia, backed by France, has long called for the sanctions
to be lifted on the ground that Iraq no longer holds enough weapons of
mass destruction to constitute a threat.
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- France and Russia can play the spoilers on two fronts.
They can set their terms for the lifting of sanctions and, in the meantime,
continue to argue over contracts for the humanitarian oil-for-food programme
which is administered by the UN pending any change to the embargo.
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- A virtual guerrilla war is going on in the UN sanctions
committee, which decides which humanitarian contracts can be honoured,
with the UK and US on one side, and Russia and France on the other. The
current phase of the programme runs until 12 May, at which point the Security
Council will have to take an urgent decision on whether the roll the programme
over for another few weeks or months or whether to bite the bullet and
lift the sanctions.
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- Until now, it has always been the US which argued that
sanctions needed to be kept in place. Now that France and Russia's views
must be sought for a new UN resolution, they are likely to argue for the
return of UN weapons inspectors to certify that weapons of mass destruction
have been eliminated, in line with international law as enshrined in UN
resolution 687. That will put them at loggerheads with the US which has
already despatched a parallel team of US experts to Iraq to hunt for banned
weaponry.
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- Under the sanctions regime that has been in place since
the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the oil embargo can only be lifted when the
Council is satisfied that all weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated.
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- When the Council is united, it can rewrite its own decisions
with hardly a backwards glance, as it did when it suspended sanctions against
Libya. But with tension in the UN so high, such a scenario smacks of wishful
thinking.
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- France and Russia, which have pushed for the UN to retain
a central post-war role in Iraq, may use the opportunity to address the
post-war situation, and to push for a resolution authorising the UN to
rule the country through a special representative, as happened in Kosovo
and East Timor.
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- The US Ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, said officials
in Washington are still discussing the specifics of lifting sanctions.
"We visualise some kind of a step-by-step procedure with respect to
post-conflict resolutions," he said. "Certainly one of the issues
we're going to have to deal with early on is sanctions."
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- France and Russia also have financial considerations
to be settled, stemming from Iraq's pre-war debt to them which runs into
billions of dollars.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=398255
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