The United States and Britain will keep up their efforts to impose "smart" sanctions on Iraq despite the opposition of Russia, official newspapers predicted on Saturday, July 7.
"Despite the failure of their project, the United States and Britain will not keep quiet nor give up on their hostile schemes," said Babel, a paper run by President Saddam Hussein's elder son, Uday.
The US-backed British proposals for a revision of sanctions against Iraq were due to have been put to the vote in the UN Security Council by July 3 but have been shelved in the face of a threatened Russian veto.
Instead, the Security Council on Tuesday passed a five-month extension of an oil-for-food program, which allows Iraq, under sanctions since invading Kuwait in 1990, to export crude in return for imports of essential goods.
Babel said Washington and London would make the most of the next five months to try "to turn the situation around, bring the positions closer and overcome the Russian position." Their aim is "to maintain the embargo", it said, but Iraq will "continue to combat this project ... because it will not accept anything less than an unconditional lifting of sanctions".
Another official daily, Al-Jumhuriya, said "the battle continues". The United States, Britain and France "only withdrew their colonialist project in the hope of being better organized to make progress in their efforts to place Iraq under tutelage", it said.
Iraq suspended more than two million barrels per day of oil exports on June 4 in protest at the proposed reforms. It is now expected to resume exports under the five-month extension of the UN program.
The retooled sanctions regime would scrap the 11-year-old UN embargo on trade with Iraq while tightening controls to prevent oil smuggling out of Iraq and illegal arms imports into the country. ― (AFP, Baghdad)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
