Eurobiz is caught arming Saddam; the strident opposition in some European capitals to U.S. military action against Saddam Hussein may have roots in some bottom-line corporate considerations

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 18, 2003 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

According to the Iraqi 1997-98 declaration, one of the biggest suppliers was Exomet Plastics of Bombay, India, now part of EPC Industrie. An EPC attorney told CNN in late January that the only chemicals Exomet had shipped to Iraq were for pesticides. "There were no restrictions for exporting these chemicals at the time the exports were made," he added. But critics dismiss such corporate excuses as phony.

Exomet shipped much more than mere pesticides, according to the Iraqi documents. It supplied materials usable only for CW, such as 1,000 tons of thionyl chloride, a chemical used to make mustard gas and sarin. It shipped 300 tons of phosphorus trichloride, 300 tons of dimethylamine HCl, 250 tons of phosphorus oxychloride and 250 tons of P2S5--all for use in manufacturing satin. It shipped another 192 tons of chlorethanol used for making VX between 1988 and 1990.

At the same time these shipments were occurring, the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture purchased huge quantities of completely manufactured pesticides for agricultural purposes from ICI, Ciba Gigy, Dow Chemical, Roussel and others. "Negotiations were carried out in 1989-1990 with a number of companies to get the know-how to produce certain pesticides" the Iraqi documents state. While Iraq frequently disguised its CW programs behind pesticide production, few producers in Europe or elsewhere really were duped.

This reporter's database, compiled from U.N. documents and his investigations during the last 15 years, includes 131 companies that provided CW assistance and another 42 that aided Iraq's biological-weapons (BW) program. Iraq names 56 companies that provided chemicals and production equipment. One surprise in the Iraqi list was the appearance of Egypt's Abu Zaabal Special Chemicals Co., a state-owned conglomerate with artillery and ammunition plants run by the Egyptian Ministry for Military Production. While Abu Zaabal's involvement in Iraq's programs was revealed during the Scott commission inquiry in Britain in 1993, the quantities of nerve-gas precursors delivered by Abu Zaabal, as declared by Iraq, is a mind-boggling 1,300 tons in all. The Iraqis also state that Abu Zaabal delivered 200 tons of hydrogen cyanide, a CW agent in its own right. Iraq used cyanide agents in 1988, four years after this Egyptian delivery, when it gassed thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja.

In 1989, when the New York Times accused Egypt of transforming Abu Zaabal into a CW production plant with the help of a Swiss company, President Hosni Mubarak hotly denied the charge. The Iraqi documents INSIGHT has obtained show that Abu Zaabal already was producing chemical weapons and precursor chemicals at least five years earlier. Abu Zaabal is located in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis and is known in Egypt as Factory 18, a carryover from the days of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, when all military plants were known by number and not by name.

"Egypt was the first country after World War II to use chemical weapons, against rebels in Yemen, so we've known they've had a chemical-weapons capability for some time," says Shoshana Bryen of the Jewish Institute for National Security, a Washington think tank. "These undeclared sales to Iraq raise serious questions about Egypt's trustworthiness as a U.S. ally," she says.