Norway, which heads the UN's sanctions committee on Iraq, will ask the UN Security Council to lift some of the measures imposed on Baghdad after the Gulf War, Foreign Minister Thorbjoern Jagland said Friday, February 23.
"This proposal for the lifting of certain sanctions that affect the Iraqi population" comes after an analysis by the Norwegian foreign ministry of all requests to send goods to Iraq, Jagland told Norway's NRK radio. Some of those export denials were unjustified, the minister said in an interview with NRK.
A trade blockade was put in place against Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, but the sanctions regime has come under mounting scrutiny due to its ill effects on the Iraqi civilian population.
Norway also heads the United Nations commission that oversees Iraq's compensation payments to Kuwait for damage caused during the Gulf War. The payments come from a 25 percent levy on Iraqi oil revenues under UN control. — (AFP, Oslo)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
