The Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said he would ask the United Nations Security Council on Friday to start exploring ways to protect his government from an avalanche of financial claims from people harmed by Saddam Hussein’s government. Iraq has been immune to such lawsuits under the terms of the Security Council mandate that kept foreign forces there, but that mandate is to expire Dec. 31. The financial question is considered particularly complex, not least because there is no precedent for extending protection from claims indefinitely, diplomats here said. Iraq is trying to push solutions for such outstanding issues by the end of July in hopes of preventing various treaty negotiations from becoming entangled in the American presidential elections, Mr. Zebari said in an interview on Thursday. “The coming months are critical,” he said. “If this can’t be realized, we have to consider other options.” Those options include extending the Council mandate beyond 2008 while the claims issue is sorted out. That would also give more time for the complicated, unresolved talks over the bilateral treaty between Baghdad and Washington that will govern the presence of American forces there outside the United Nations framework once the Council mandate expires. Iraq had said that the current mandate would be the last such request.
Critical unresolved bilateral issues include any presence of American bases, arrests and detentions carried out by United States forces, whether American contractors or soldiers could be taken to court under Iraqi law and control of IraqÂ’s airspace. There has been some domestic debate in Iraq whether the government should push for a treaty under the Bush administration, or stall until after the November election in case a deal more favorable to Iraq could be possible.
It is possible for Iraq to ask that the mandate be maintained solely for financial reasons, said Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations. “They are nervous that they will lose this protection,” he said, while at the same time on the military front, “They want to move from a Security Council framework to one where they have more of a say about how the forces behave.”
It is unclear how the Council might respond to such an extraordinary request. A few people contacted Thursday said they would have to wait to hear the specific Iraqi proposals before deciding how to react, but diplomats from at least two countries thought it would be possible to let the troop mandate expire while extending the protection forever against the financial claims. FridayÂ’s session is formally just a standard, six-month review of the situation in Iraq under the mandate, but Mr. Zebari said Iraq wanted members to start weighing what its expiration would mean. He said there would be untold financial claims from all those who might have been killed or held hostage by the government of Mr. Hussein, for example, in addition to those harmed by disasters like the ignition of Kuwaiti oil fields in February 1991. The United Nations Compensation Commission governed damages from the Persian Gulf war. But Mr. Zebari said Iraq was concerned about unfiled claims from the entire period dating from IraqÂ’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 when Security Council resolutions first came into play.