Iraq sees little chance of success for a proposed new British-US plan for sanctions against Baghdad, even if the UN Security Council adopts it, a senior Iraqi official said on Wednesday.
"The new American proposal is very difficult, if not impossible, to implement," Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz told editors of Iraq's official media outlets.
Aziz said the main obstacle was that each of the countries that had resumed trade with Iraq since 1997 under an oil-for-food program stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars annually, Reuters quoted him as saying.
Aziz had spelled out to foreign diplomats in Baghdad on Tuesday Iraq's threat to halt oil exports if the British-US proposals were enacted.
Aziz, also acting foreign minister, noted that Security Council permanent member Russia and a number of Iraq's neighbors were against the new sanctions.
In New York, diplomats at the United Nations said that with Russia balking at the plan, the Security Council might be forced to delay a vote past the end of May, said Reuters.
They said that without unanimity among the five key Council members -- the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China -- Iraqi threats to cut off oil supplies could become a real possibility.
Details of an alternative proposal from Russia were not made public in Moscow, and a spokesman at the ministry of foreign affairs would say only that it was an extension of the current oil-for-food program with modifications, reported the Guardian newspaper.
Russian media reported that Aziz had called on Russia privately to use its Security Council veto to stop the US-British plan.
A Western diplomat told the paper: "The Russian behavior is absolutely absurd because the British draft moves forward, in a way that others have been looking for, and would have a real, positive impact.
"They're doing this purely to please Iraq and serve their commercial interests."
Russia is eager to recoup several billion dollars of debt that it is owed by Iraq -- unpaid bills for arms supplies and Soviet-era debts related to the development of Iraqi industry -- and officials in Moscow hope that if sanctions are lifted, some of this money may be paid back.
Russia is also keen to unfreeze a series of lucrative energy contracts with Iraq, according to the paper.
Moscow's official line on Iraq was set out yesterday by the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Vladimir Sredin, who said that Russia favored the lifting of sanctions in exchange for the resurrection of international monitoring of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program – Albawaba.com.
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
