US and Britain authorised to run Iraq

7.45am - By EVELYN LEOPOLD

UNITED NATIONS - The UN Security Council has voted 14-0 to end 13-year-old sanctions on Iraq and gave the United States and Britain extraordinary powers to run the country and its lucrative oil industry.

Despite misgivings by many council members, the vote was a victory for the Bush administration, which is struggling to bring order to Iraq and improve its devastated economy after invading in March to oust President Saddam Hussein.

Washington made last-minute concessions opening the door to an independent, albeit limited UN role and the possibility of UN weapons inspectors returning to post-war Iraq.

Syria, Iraq's neighbour and the sole Arab member of the Security Council, did not cast a vote and left its seat empty. Its UN ambassador, Mikhail Wehbe, told Reuters in Damascus, he had not been given enough time to consider the resolution.

Diplomats said it would have been difficult for Syria to endorse a US-British occupation of Iraq, which is made legitimate in the resolution.

"The lifting of sanctions marks a momentous event for the people of Iraq," US Ambassador John Negroponte told the council after the vote. "It is time for the Iraqi people to benefit from their natural resources."

The sanctions were imposed shortly after Saddam Hussein's troops invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Critics said they had little effect on the lifestyle of Iraq's leaders while impoverishing average Iraqis.

France, Germany, China and Russia who had opposed the US-led war voted for the resolution but had reservations.

"The war that we did not want, and the majority of the council did not want, has taken place," Germany's UN ambassador, Gunter Pleuger, told reporters. "We cannot undo history. We are now in a situation where we have to take action for the sake of the Iraqi people."

The resolution transfers legal control over Iraq's oil immediately from the United Nations to the United States and Britain. Oil revenues will go into a new Iraqi Development Fund for rebuilding the country, controlled by the two countries and overseen by an international board.

The resolution exempts Iraq's oil revenues from claims by foreign creditors until an internationally-recognised Iraqi government is established.

Without UN action to lift the sanctions the United States would have been in a legal no man's land, with many firms unwilling to engage in trade with Iraq, which has the world's second largest oil reserves. Some 8.3 million barrels of Iraqi oil stored at the Turkish port of Ceyhan can now be exported.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he would name a special representative for Iraq shortly. The United States has signalled it prefers Sergio Vieira de Mello, currently the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

After weeks of wrangling, the final compromise in the resolution was an agreement by Washington for a Security Council review within 12 months on the implementation of the resolution.

The United States resisted demands by many countries, including Britain, for the return of UN weapons inspections to Iraq to ascertain whether it had weapons of mass destruction, as charged by the United States.

Washington has signaled willingness to have inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, responsible for nuclear materials, return to Iraq but just to check a known nuclear site after reports of looting.

Britain's UN ambassador, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, however, told reporters he saw a "strong potential" for the use of UN inspectors to confirm "Iraq has reached its full state of disarmament and perhaps in the future, in the long-term, monitoring and verification."

US President George W Bush cited what he called evidence of Saddam's biological, nuclear and chemical weapons programmes as one reason for the invasion. US teams searching for the dangerous weapons have not yet found any.

In Paris, at a meeting of the Group of Eight industrial nations, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "This is a wonderful day for the people of Iraq."

Also in Paris, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said, "We disagreed about whether military action was appropriate. It took place, Saddam has gone."

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq