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Kuwait accused of stealing Iraqi oil and land

8/2/2005 - 5:22:31 PM

Following a series of incidents along the Kuwaiti border, Iraqi legislators today accused Kuwait of stealing their oil as well as chipping away some of their national territory.

The allegations were similar to those used by Saddam Hussein to justify his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. This time, both sides want to resolve the dispute peacefully.

The latest comments were made a day before an Iraqi delegation was scheduled to head to Kuwait to discuss the situation.

“There have been violations such as digging horizontal oil wells to pump Iraq oil,” legislator Jawad al-Maliki, chairman of the parliament’s Security and Defence Committee, told the National Assembly today. “There have also been violations by taking Iraqi territories as deep as one kilometre (0.6 miles).”

“We believe that we have overcome the past and that we opened a new page of positive relations. These relations have to be respected by Kuwait,” said al-Maliki, a member of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s Dawa Party.

On Saturday, a Kuwaiti official said a number of Iraqi homes and farms have slightly “encroached” into Kuwait at the border area of Umm Qasr in southern Iraq.

Some farms that belonged to Iraqis were razed when the United Nations redrew the border in 1993, two years after a US-led international coalition fought the Gulf War that ended a seven-month Iraqi occupation of this country. The Iraqi owners were compensated.

Legislator Hassan al-Sunneid said a four-member delegation, comprising three legislators and deputy foreign minister, Mohammed Haji Hmoud, will head to Kuwait Wednesday and to try to find a solution.

“There has been a border problem with Kuwait since the Iraqi state was established,” legislator Mansour al-Basri said. “We hope that these border problems will be solved according to historical and geographical basis.”

He accused Kuwaitis of even taking the deep water side of the Umm Qasr port where giant ships dock.

Hundreds of Irais demonstrated at the frontier last week to stop Kuwait from building a metal barrier between the two countries. Shots were fired across the border into Kuwait, but no one was injured and Kuwaiti border guards did not return fire.

Kuwait insists the pipeline barrier, meant to stop vehicles from illegally crossing through the desert, is on its side of the frontier. The UN demarcation also gave Kuwait 11 oil wells and an old naval base that used to be in Iraq.

Relations between Iraq and Kuwait resumed after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam and border points were reopened.

When Saddam was still in power, Kuwait built a defensive trench along the 130-mile border to stop border infiltration from both sides. UN peacekeepers patrolled the frontier until just before the invasion of Iraq.

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