ANKARA, 18 October 2004 — Turkey yesterday denied any wrongdoing in trade with neighboring Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein following a US report that mentioned the country among recipients of illicit oil exports.
The report, released by the Iraq Survey Group last week, said that Saddam’s regime acquired significant revenues from illicit oil sales to a number of countries, among them Turkey, during the period of UN restrictions. “This is definitely not true,” Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters.
Gul argued that the so-called “border trade” between Turkey and Iraq at the time — which was outside the confines of the UN oil-for-food program — was known to the international community. “It was a known, legal border trade. It was carried out within the knowledge of the United Nations,” he said. Ankara had allowed thousands of Turkish trucks to ship food and other essential goods to Iraq and bring back oil and diesel, in a bid to cover up huge economic losses from the sanctions slapped on Baghdad for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The trade had the tacit approval of the United States, which was then using an air base in southern Turkey to enforce a no-fly zone over northern Iraq to protect the region’s Kurdish population. Gul did not comment on further accusations in the report that Turkish firms helped Saddam acquire prohibited items through deceptive trade practices. The report also said that a trade protocol that Ankara signed with Baghdad provided “substantial monetary and material resources for Iraqi state institutions and procurement agencies.”
