UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said last night the United States and Britain bore part of the blame in the Iraq oil-for-food debacle by allowing unsupervised oil exports that Saddam Hussein exploited.
Mr Annan, addressing a seminar on the United Nations and the media, said most of the money Saddam earned was by oil sold to Jordan and Turkey outside of the $67 billion UN program.
Only countries such the United States and Britain had 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 the reason for it was understandable: 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 Hussein 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, such as inflated prices for goods shipped to Iraq, amounted to $1.7 billion.
But he said Iraq made most of his money, another $8 billion through kickbacks on oil exports outside of the programme. "It was on the American and British watch."
US federal prosecutors in New York have charged several people, including a Texas businessman, with paying kickbacks in exchange for oil allocations.
Agencies