Iraq’s ‘Oil-for-Food’ Plan Extended

UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council on Friday extended Iraq’s “oil-for-food” program for six months and set the stage to suspend sanctions if Saddam Hussein’s regime allows U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country.

The moves are part of a yearlong effort to revive a U.N. program ensuring that Baghdad eliminates all weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems.

The Security Council ordered Iraq to disarm after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and has maintained an embargo until it does. But U.N. weapons inspectors who left Iraq ahead of a U.S.-British bombing strike a year ago have not been allowed to return, and Iraq continues to struggle under the sanctions.

The only relief for the country has been the oil-for-food program, which allows Iraq to sell $5.2 billion in oil over the next six months to buy food, medicine and humanitarian goods. After the vote, Iraqi Ambassador Saeed Hasan said the country will resume oil exports, which were halted three weeks ago to protest the council’s short-term extensions of the program.

Oil prices, which had reached a nine-year high after the Iraqi cutoff, fell more than $1 on futures exchanges in response.

On Monday, the Security Council is expected to vote on a compromise measure that will temporarily lift sanctions in return for Iraqi cooperation with the weapons inspectors. After a year of wrangling, the five permanent Security Council members are closer than ever to agreement concerning the broad terms of the resolution, diplomats say, but they still disagree about key details.

The resolution would set up a new U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, a group of international experts who would be guaranteed “immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access to any and all areas . . . they wish to inspect.” UNMOVIC would draw up a list of “key disarmament tasks” for Iraq.

Russia has objected for weeks to placing conditions on suspending sanctions--it wants credit for Iraqi “progress” on key disarmament tasks, but the U.S. insists on full cooperation before the restrictions are lifted. Moscow has threatened to veto the resolution, sending the council back to the drawing board.

“The criteria for full cooperation is entirely unrealistic,” Ambassador Sergei V. Lavrov said after the council meeting broke up Friday.

Key sections of the sanctions resolution were written with deliberate ambiguity to accelerate consensus. But Lavrov complained that the text is too ambiguous and said he suspects that details will be added later that Iraq cannot hope to fulfill. “We don’t know yet what we are agreeing to,” he said.

But no matter what the council comes up with, it appears that if it involves weapons inspectors, Iraq will not accept it. Iraq accused the previous team of inspectors of providing cover for U.S. spies.

“We’d rather have sanctions, even an attack, than more inspectors,” an Iraqi official said Friday.

U.S. officials say the presence of inspectors is their bottom line and voiced concerns that Iraq has tried to rebuild weapons systems in the year that the team has been frozen out.

“We have our own technical means of trying to monitor what goes on in Iraq,” U.S. representative Peter Burleigh said. “But nothing is as good as having independent, aggressive and conscientious inspectors on the ground in Iraq.

“The record and the history of the Iraqi regime is very clear. Saddam Hussein is committed to maintaining weapons of mass destruction. That is what this debate is all about,” Burleigh said.

Officials in five capitals will spend the weekend on the telephone, conducting high-intensity negotiations, as a result of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s lobbying of her counterparts in Russia, France, Britain and China.