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Straw rejects UK blame for Iraq's oil-for-food scandal

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, April 16, IRNA
UK Straw-Iraq Smuggling
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has denied the UK blind eye to the illegal trading of Iraqi oil following accusations by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that Britain and the US were partly to blame for the oil-for-food scandal.

"I regret to say that suggestions that the United Kingdom ignored smuggling of oil from Iraq to Jordan and Turkey are inaccurate," Straw said.

"The United Kingdom was consistently in the lead in seeking to enforce sanctions against Iraq. We took the necessary measures to ensure sanctions were implemented in UK legislation," he insisted in a statement released Friday.

Annan told reporters that Saddam Hussein's regime profited far more from illicit shipment of oil through Turkey and Jordan and said that the UK and US, who were on watch "decided to close their eyes to the smuggling.

But the Foreign Secretary argued that the claim was "at variance with the record of successive British governments from the end of the (Persian) Gulf War" in 1991.

"The fact that the smuggling of oil was most likely to take place to Turkey and Jordan simply reflects the geography of the area," he said, insisting, "Jordan and Turkey were primarily responsible for preventing smuggling across their borders."
Straw maintained that Britain "was active against oil smuggling in the (Persian) Gulf" and "took the lead in the UN Sanctions Committee, on a number of occasions, to get the Committee to deal with a range of sanctions-busting activities."
"Enforcing UN sanctions was the responsibility of Iraq, all other UN member states and the UN administration. There were no occasions which we can recall on which the UN made representations to the UK in regard to the smuggling," he said.

The foreign secretary also tried to deflect blame on the Iraqi regime, saying that the "culpability for undermining UN sanctions against Iraq fell principally on Saddam Hussein and those who were working with him."
But Britain's Liberal Democrats, who opposed the Iraq war, said that the government had questions to answer on the sanctions- busting, saying that it was an "open secret" that the US looked the other way while Jordan and Turkey profited from the smuggled oil.

In his response, Straw said that he encountered "an ambiguous approach by certain members of the Security Council to the Saddam regime" but that "the UK was not one of these members - far from it."
HC/1422
::IRNA No.036 16/04/2005 14:48 --End