Evidence emerging from the Australian government-appointed commission of inquiry, headed by Terence Cole, into whether or not AWB Ltd, Australia's wheat export monopoly, had violated the rules governing the UN's "oil-for-food" program, has revealed the staggering hypocrisy of the Australian government's stance on Iraq.
From 1996 to 2003, PM John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer publicly backed Washington's demands that all UN member-states strictly abide by the crippling economic sanctions imposed on Iraq for 13 years prior to the March 2003 US-British-Australian invasion of the oil-rich Middle Eastern country. The sanctions led to the deaths of more than a million Iraqis, the majority of them children.
Between 2000 and 2002 though, Australian government officials either turned a blind eye to or approved payment of $300 million in bribes by AWB Ltd, Australia's privatised wheat export monopoly, to secure export contracts from the Iraqi government against AWB's US competitors. The payments violated the UN-enforced economic sanctions imposed on Iraq from 1990 to 2003, which barred any direct financial transactions between the Iraqi government and foreign companies involved in the UN's oil-for-food program.
While the UN's oil-for-food program, begun in 1996, was presented as a "humanitarian" gesture to allow Iraq to export some oil in order to import food to feed its people, government officials in both Canberra and Washington viewed Iraq's wheat imports as a strictly commercial issue.
Prior to the 1991 US-Iraq war and the US-initiated imposition of a UN trade embargo on Iraq, the US exported almost 1 million tonnes of wheat annually to Iraq. Through the "oil-for-food" program, US capitalists sought to not only re-establish their position in the Iraqi wheat market but capture the lion's share of it.
Through its "kickbacks" to the Iraqi government, however, the government-run Australian Wheat Board (privatised as AWB Ltd in 1999) captured two-thirds of Iraq's wheat imports of 3 million tonnes a year, earning the company $840 million annually. Evidence presented to the Cole inquiry indicates that senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade knew of, and were complicit in, AWB's systematic "kickbacks" to the Iraqi government.
These were not confined to Iraq. The Cole inquiry was told on January 30 that AWB paid a Pakistan government official $15.9 million in "secret commissions" to secure sales contracts, and a former AWB sales manager told the February 3 Age that the then-government-controlled AWB was involved in "innovative arrangements" during the 1980s to secure wheat export contracts to Indonesia, Mexico and Bangladesh.
For all the corporate media criticism of the AWB wheat-for-bribery scandal, there has been very little criticism of the UN-sanctions regime itself, which was supported by both the Howard government and the ALP. Indeed, the sanctions were introduced while Labor was in government.
The sanctions, combined with repeated bombing raids by the US and British air forces, devastated Iraq's economy and social infrastructure, leading to a massive increase in poverty, child malnutrition and deteriorating health care.
Ostensibly aimed at punishing Saddam Hussein's government for its invasion of neighbouring Kuwait in 1990, they were then maintained for 13 years on the supposed grounds that they were necessary to force Iraq to dismantle its arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction" (even though Iraq had done this immediately after the 1991 war). In reality, the sanctions were maintained to impoverish and demoralise ordinary Iraqis so as to weaken their resistance to US-led invasion and occupation of their country.
The US-led occupation of Iraq, like the UN food-for-oil program, is driven by commercial interests — the US capitalist rulers' desire to take control of Iraq's vast oil reserves, thus extending US corporate domination over the highly lucrative Middle East oil exports. To achieve this, the US capitalist rulers and their junior imperialist partners in Australia were willing to sacrifice any number of Iraqi lives.
From Green Left Weekly, February 8, 2006.
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