Legal Corruption

Guess who, now occupying a nation of desperate poverty, is sucking the marrow from its bones.

...well, this is a Republican Administration:

Since Saddam was toppled in April, Iraq has paid out $1.8 billion in reparations to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), the Geneva-based quasi-tribunal that assesses claims and disburses awards. Of those payments, $37 million has gone to Britain and $32.8 million to the United States. That’s right: In the past 18 months, Iraq’s occupiers have collected $69.8 million in reparation payments from the desperate people they have been occupying. But it gets worse: The vast majority of those payments, 78 percent, have gone to multinational corporations, according to statistics on the UNCC website.

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Away from media scrutiny, this has been going on for years. Of course there are many legitimate claims for losses that have come before the UNCC: Payments have gone to Kuwaitis who have lost loved ones, limbs, and property to Saddam’s forces. But much larger awards have gone to corporations: Of the total amount the UNCC has awarded in Gulf war reparations, $21.5 billion has gone to the oil industry alone. Jean-Claude Aimé, the UN diplomat who headed the UNCC until December 2000, publicly questioned the practice. “This is the first time as far as I know that the UN is engaged in retrieving lost corporate assets and profits,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 1997, and then mused: “I often wonder at the correctness of that.”

But the UNCC’s corporate handouts only accelerated. Here is a small sample of who has been getting “reparation” awards from Iraq: Halliburton ($18 million), Bechtel ($7 million), Mobil ($2.3 million), Shell ($1.6 million), Nestlé ($2.6 million), Pepsi ($3.8 million), Philip Morris ($1.3 million), Sheraton ($11 million), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321,000) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In the vast majority of cases, these corporations did not claim that Saddam’s forces damaged their property in Kuwait — only that they “lost profits” or, in the case of American Express, experienced a “decline in business” because of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait.