The dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over the payment of UN-mandated war reparations appears to be deepening. Iraqi Premier Nuri Al-Maliki is pressing his claim that all UN sanctions be dropped, a proposal that has won the backing of US President Barack Obama.
This is not, however, simply a dispute over continuing to pay for the $52.4 billion damage that Saddam Hussein inflicted largely on Kuwait during the seven-month Iraqi occupation in 1990. Baghdad is supposed to be devoting 5 percent of its annual oil revenues to this end and has so far paid some $27 billion.
It is far more about confidence. The Kuwaitis need to believe that Iraq has abandoned for all time its claim on their country and that they do not need to fear an aggressive revanchist leadership in Baghdad at some point in the future. There ought to be no better time than now to extract such assurances from an Iraqi government. Unfortunately these have not been forthcoming. In 1994 Saddam was persuaded to recognize a UN-defined border between the two countries, which gave 11 oil wells to Kuwait. But hoped-for landmark deals for joint production from fields straddled by the frontier have never been reached. The concern among Kuwaitis is that such production-sharing arrangements would have been represented a de facto recognition of the “facts on the ground” which neither Saddam nor his successors in Baghdad have been prepared to countenance.
And it goes further than this. The Kuwaitis claim that the Iraqi authorities have given minimal cooperation to the search for abducted Kuwaiti citizens. Kuwaiti investigators have discovered the mass graves of 236 Kuwaitis, most of whom were shot in the head. There are still 369 people unaccounted for. Despite the chaos since the US-led invasion, it is surely extraordinary that greater efforts have not been made by the Iraqis to track down soldiers involved in the Kuwait occupation and find out what happened to the relatively large number of unfortunate Kuwaitis.
Then there is the question of Kuwait’s precious national archives, carried off by Saddam’s looters and still held by Baghdad, despite repeated Kuwaiti and UN requests for their return.
In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that the Kuwaitis remain suspicious, as well as inflexible, over reparations including the repayment of some $15 billion of Saddam-era loans, granted in part to help sustain Iraq in its war with Iran.
Sadly, this is a dispute that is not going to get any better unless both sides compromise. Iraq still has an economic mountain to climb in order to recover its prosperity. Kuwait could offer to stretch the repayment period for Iraq’s debts. It might even consider granting new credits, aimed at bilateral or Gulf regional trade. In return, Baghdad must return the national archive, vastly increase its help in finding abducted Kuwaitis and offer a binding commitment on the frontier, best sealed with cooperation on the development and production from cross-border fields. This quarrel is a boil that must be lanced before it poisons relations even more between two important Arab states.
