UNITED NATIONS: Kofi Annan has said that the United States and Britain bear part of the blame in the Iraq oil- for-food debacle because they allowed unsupervised oil exports that Saddam Hussein exploited.
The UN secretary-general, addressing a seminar on the UN and the media, said most of the money Saddam earned was by oil sold to Jordan and Turkey outside of the $67 billion UN programme to Jordan and Turkey.
Only countries such as the US and Britain had interdiction forces that could have stopped it. But, he said, they "decided to close their eyes to Turkey and Jordan because they are allies".
Mr Annan said he understood the reason for it: no one had the money to compensate neighbours of Iraq for their losses under UN sanctions, imposed in mid-1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Under the oil-for-food programme, which began in December 1996 and ended in 2003, Saddam was allowed to sell oil to buy civilian goods to ease the impact of 1990 sanctions on ordinary Iraqis.
CIA weapons inspector Charles Duelfer found that corruption within the UN oil-for-food programme amounted to $1.7 billion. But, he said, Iraq made most of this money, another $8 billion through kickbacks on oil exports outside of the programme.
"The bulk of the money Saddam made came after smuggling outside the oil-for-food programme," Mr Annan said. "It was on the American and British watch." This lapse was often ignored by the media and he believed some in the US media would never produce a balanced picture on ideological grounds.
His comments came as three people were charged in the US with corruption over their involvement in the programme. A Texas businessman and two of his companies were charged with paying secret kickbacks to Iraq.
David Chalmers jnr, his oil company Bayoil of Texas, and Bayoil Supply & Trading Ltd, based in the Bahamas, faced US federal criminal charges as part of the scheme to pay millions of dollars in secret kickbacks to Iraq. Two others also were charged in the plot: Ludmil Dionissiev, a Bulgarian citizen living in Houston, and John Irving, a British citizen, according to the indictment.