Over the last few weeks it has been confirmed by the government-initiated commission of inquiry that AWN Ltd, Australia's wheat export monopoly, paid $300 million in bribes to the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein between 1999 and 2003 to secure several billion of dollars in contracts to supply wheat to Iraq under the UN's "oil-for-food" program.
The inquiry into AWB's wheat-for-bribes followed an investigation last year, headed by former US Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker, into alleged corruption in the UN-supervised "oil-for-food" program. Volcker found that at least 2000 Western companies had paid a total of US$1.8 billion in bribes and kickbacks to the Iraqi government before it was overthrown in April 2003 by a US-led invasion force. The AWB was the single largest bribe-maker.
Under the oil-for-food program, AWB supplied two-thirds of the three million tonnes of wheat imported by Iraq annually.
The bribes, which mainly took the form of annual payments to the Iraqi government via Jordan-based trucking company Alia supposedly for the transportation of wheat, violated the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the UN Security Council after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1991 and maintained until the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2003. These banned any direct payments to the Iraqi government by foreign companies involved in oil-for-food program transactions.
The 1996-2003 oil-for-food program was set up by the UN to allow Iraq to export a limited amount of oil, with the proceeds being used to purchase food and medicine to lessen the impact of the economic sanctions on its population. The dramatic decline in Iraqi living standards caused by the 1990-2003 UN-imposed trade embargo on Iraq is estimated to have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of up to 1 million Iraqis, most of them children.
Prime Minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer have repeatedly denied that the government had any involvement, or knowledge of, the AWB's bribes. However, all of AWB's contracts under the "oil-for-food" program, including those with Alia, were approved by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
What DFAT and government ministers knew about AWB's wheat-for-bribes program will not be examined by the commission of inquiry, its terms of reference being confined to uncover only AWB's illegal activities.
In 2002, as the Howard government escalated its rhetoric in support of Washington's accusations that Iraq had a secret arsenal of banned biological and chemical weapons, and a secret program to produce nuclear weapons, Iraq said it would stop importing wheat from Australia. With Canberra's backing AWB sent a delegation to Baghdad and, as ALP shadow foreign minister Kevin Rudd put it on ABC TV's 7.30 Report on January 19, "Miraculously, it all gets fixed. Interestingly there's an AAP report at the time which says when the delegation of the AWB came back to Canberra they met separately with [Downer and with Howard]".
Rudd added: "I'll be interested to know from both those gentlemen as to whether those meetings occurred and what was in it, but what we do know from the outcome is this: John Howard's war-like language to Iraq not only continued, it got worse. But guess what? Our wheat sales to Iraq continued and in fact the prices seemed to have gotten even better."
From Green Left Weekly, January 25, 2006.
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