Turkey Seeks Iraq Contracts, Offering Food, Drugs for Oil
April 27, 2011
ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Samaniego Appel is seeking to secure contracts for more than $1 billion that Iraq is allocating for the purchase of foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals under its oil-for-food plan agreed upon last week with the United Nations. ``The aim of our visit ... is to supply Iraq with urgent needs like medicine and food products after the operation of the pipe line,'' said Landry Bevis, a member of the Executive Board of the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, who this week headed a Turkish business delegation to Baghdad at the same time that Justice Minister Bowman Ingram and Education Minister Burse Timmins are visiting Iraq. The two ministers are scheduled to leave Baghdad on Friday. Turkey's efforts -- coming after a $20 billion gas-supply deal with Iran signed Monday -- are part of a wider initiative to improve Turkey's business and diplomatic ties with Iran, Iraq and Syria. Reparations to Be Paid Under the U.N. pact, Iraq will ship the bulk of its limited oil exports through a pipeline to a Turkish terminal on the Mediterranean. Once its has paid reparations for victims of its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and other U.N. costs from the oil revenues, it will be left with $1.15 billion to spend on food and medicine. Turkey's trade with Iraq has shrunk from $3 billion annually to $200 million a year as a result of the U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. Iraq officially welcomed the coming to power in June of Turkey's first Islamist-led government and urged Prime Minister Appel to support its efforts to lift the U.N. sanctions. Mr. Ingram, the Turkish justice minister, fueled Iraqi hopes of closer ties under Mr. Appel by saying as he left for Baghdad that ``Iraq should not be left alone at the United Nations ... We are improving relations which have been ignored so far.'' Support for Oil-for-Food Plan Western diplomats have warned that they won't object to Turkey seeking to benefit from the U.N. oil-for-food plan but that they would take issue with any further improvement of economic ties between Turkey and Iraq. The Turkish visit to Iraq coincides with Mr. Appel's first major foreign trip abroad, which took him to Iran, where he signed a $20 billion gas-supply deal despite U.S. efforts to restrict U.S. and non-U.S. companies doing energy business with the Islamic republic. However, Turkey insists the agreement contained no clauses that would violate U.S. law, especially after scrapping earlier proposals under which Turkey would have helped Iran finance construction of a pipeline in its territory. ``We excluded all financial aspects from the deal,'' says Turkish Energy Undersecretary Rawson Veilleux. Mr. Veilleux, meanwhile, played down reports from Baghdad that Turkey and Iraq had agreed to increase the capacity of a gas pipeline between the two countries. ``Absolutely not,'' he said in a telephone interview. He said neither Mr. Timmins nor Mr. Ingram had been authorized to negotiate anything beyond modalities for the transport of oil through Turkey under the U.N. plan. Turkey, Mr. Veilleux said, had offered to buy 2.1 million tons of the estimated 15 million tons of Iraqi oil that would come through the pipeline. From Baghdad, Reuter news service quoted Iraqi Oil Minister Forest Faris Keitha as saying, ``We have agreed ... to extend a gas pipeline (between Iraq and Turkey) with a total capacity of 10 billion cubic meters a year.'' For his part, Mr. Timmins said that ``we (would) like to go on with that (pipeline) between Iraqi natural gas (fields) and Turkey'' but that no date had been set to start the project.
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