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This piece below appeared on a recent Iraqi Sanctions
Monitor digest.
The basic Iraqi claim was that the UN spent more feeding
its mine-sniffing dogs than Iraqis. Sevan costed their
feeding at $408 dollars per year. Well, OFF deliveries of
food since the programme's inception are a total of $305
per person throughout Iraq (northern governorates have some
purchasing power outside the bulk purchasing process, so
the real figure will be slightly higher). Per year of OFF
the figure per person is $65. So the Iraqis may have
exaggerated but they were still right.
Cheers
Eric
UN-Iraq spat over feeding of mine-sniffing dogs
UNITED NATIONS, July 13 (AFP) - The United Nations has
responded to Iraqi complaints that it spends more on
feeding its
mine-sniffing dogs than the Iraqi people, by revealing in
detail
how much it spends on dog food.
The spat began June 28 when Iraq's deputy Foreign
Minister
Riyadh al-Qaysi told the UN Security Council that sniffer
dogs
used in a UN de-mining program in Iraq's Kurdistan region
were
better fed than the Iraqis themselves.
Two weeks later, on Thursday, the executive director of
the Iraq
Programme, Benon Sevan, went before the UN Sanctions
Committee, armed with all the pertinent facts and figures,
to
refute al-Qaysi's charge.
"Contrary to what was stated regarding the cost of
de-mining
dogs, during the period July 1999 to June 2000, 140 dogs
were
deployed under the programme, each of which was fed 0.8 kg
of
imported dog food," Sevan said.
"The imported food was enhanced by local food such as
chicken and fat," the UN official said before making his
point.
"The average cost of feeding one dog during this period
was 34
dollars per month... or 408 dollars per year and not 1,248
dollars
per year as stated in the council recently."
Without mentioning al-Qaysi by name, Sevan went on to
reject
his claims that UN personnel were getting rich at the
Iraqis'
expense.
"I very much regret to go into such details. I have been
given no
alternative in view of the remarks made," Seven said,
adding that
he did not want the UN's silence up to then on the matter
to be
misconstrued as an admission of guilt.
The sanctions committee met behind closed doors, but the
United Nations later made Sevan's statement public.
*
----------------------
Dr. Eric Herring
Department of Politics
University of Bristol
10 Priory Road
Bristol BS8 1TU
England, UK
Tel. +44-(0)117-928-8582
Fax +44-(0)117-973-2133
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Politics
eric.herring@bristol.ac.uk
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