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France wants aircraft to fly to Iraq without UN authorization |
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September 27, 2000
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - France proposed that aircraft be allowed to fly to Iraq with just a simple notification of the U.N. committee monitoring sanctions against Baghdad -- but the United States protested that the committee must authorize all flights. Coming on the heels of unauthorized flights to Baghdad by French and Russian aircraft, the proposal marked another step in the campaign by Iraq's U.N. supporters to end what they contend is an illegal air embargo against Baghdad. It also put the spotlight again on the deep division within the U.N. Security Council 10 years after it imposed trade sanctions to punish Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait. While France, Russia and China have launched a new campaign to try to chip away at the sanctions, the United States and Britain are determined to maintain the embargoes until U.N. inspectors certify that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated. At Monday's sanctions committee meeting, France submitted a proposal that would end the committee's practice of requiring 24 hours prior notification of any flight so that members had time to register objections, said the Netherlands' U.N. Ambassador Peter van Walsum, who chairs the committee. The French proposal, he said, "is based on the assumption that it is a notification procedure only." Under the proposal, the committee would be notified of all flights to Iraq and the route to be flown. Aircraft would be inspected at departure, at any stopover, and at arrival in Baghdad by independent inspection agents to ensure that no unauthorized cargo was on board, Western diplomats said. The committee - which includes all 15 members of the Security Council - decided to discuss the proposal at its next meeting, "presumably next week, in any way soon," van Walsum said. But it is unlikely to come to any agreement. As van Walsum noted, the issue of whether U.N. resolutions require authorization or notification of flights has been discussed many times before, and "we have never been able to agree." Nonetheless, by authorizing flights in the last four days, France and Russia appear to have adopted the proposal unilaterally, to the annoyance of the United States. U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher called Friday's Paris-to-Baghdad flight a "blatant violation" of the sanctions and U.N. procedures. And U.S. diplomats spoke out strongly against the new French proposal at Monday's sanctions committee meeting, Western diplomats said. Still, France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-David Levitte has promised that there will be more flights. Van Walsum said the committee currently has two or three other flight proposals before it, which diplomats said came from Jordan, Iceland and Russia. Since the French proposal has not been discussed and adopted, van Walsum said he will continue his past practice of giving committee members 24 hours to register objections to the latest proposed flights. Whether Russia would pay attention to any objections to its proposed flight remains to be seen. It went ahead with Saturday's flight to Baghdad without answering questions raised by the United States and Britain.
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