Saddam spends lavishly while Iraqis suffer — UK

He unveiled United Nations reports, which he said, showed Iraq was importing hundreds of millions of cigarettes and hundreds of thousands of litres of alcohol every month while it complained of desperate humanitarian shortages.

“This is decadence on a truly obscene scale and contrasts again with misery which so many Iraqi citizens are suffering,” Hain told a Foreign Office news conference.

“It’s also evidence of them playing politics with the suffering — spending illegal revenues from smuggling on luxuries, rather than food and medicine for the Iraqi people.”

Hain, addressing growing international unease over a humanitarian crisis in Iraq which Baghdad blames on the economic embargo, said the solution had always been in Saddam’s hands.

Iraq was now able to spend up to 16 billion dollars a year on humanitarian needs under the UN-approved `Oil-for-Food’ deal and could get sanctions lifted within months if he let United Nations weapons inspectors back in, Hain said.

“The truth is that if he wished to and chose to support his own people, he has the choice to do so,” he said.

Hain said Saddam’s Tharthar site — “a massive luxury resort complex for his cronies” — could house up to 625 people who could enjoy the protection of the same elite security unit which looked after the President.

“We understand it also has a safari park, with deer and elephants. These animals reportedly graze on lush vegetation, grown with the latest irrigation systems, while many of his own people are denied access to proper water and sanitation.”

A satellite picture of the resort, taken 18 months ago, has been posted on the Internet by the United States, which along with Britain is struggling to hold together international consensus to maintain sanctions on Baghdad.

Hain said United Nations officials had recorded Iraqi imports of more than 300 million cigarettes, 28,000 bottles of whisky, 230,000 cans of beer, 120,000 cans of vodka and almost 19,000 bottles of wine a month.

“I think the people in the region would be interested to know that,” Hain said, referring to conservative Gulf Arab states, some of whom have called for an end to sanctions. Officials described the figures as “the tip of the iceberg”.

Hain also said a recent rush of humanitarian flights to Baghdad, which has been cut off from commercial air links by the sanctions imposed for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, did not mean Saddam’s hopes of seeing the embargo crumble were coming true.

“He’s whistling in the wind if he thinks that these minor breaches…add up to any weakening of international resolve. They don’t," he said. (U.S. Website: usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/iraq/photo2.htm)