The list in Iraq's 1998/current chemical weapons declaration contains 31 "major suppliers", 14 from Germany. The 1996/current nuclear suppliers list has 62 company names on it, 33 from Germany. As Iraq claims that since 1991 it has not engaged in WMD production, the lists name no post-Gulf War suppliers. Call it old news. So much the sillier that the UN refuses to make them public. But since the BND claims that deliveries did not stop at the end of the Gulf War as well as simply as a matter of record of German complicity in arming Iraq, the issue remains an urgent current concern.
Leading the honor roll of chemical agents and production equipment suppliers (in this case nerve gas precursors and manufacturing) to Iraq is the German firm Preussag, now a subsidiary of Europe's largest travel agent and tour operator TUI - happy holidays! And Preussag has long been a firm dear to Schroeder's heart. In early 1998, when Schroeder was running for re-election as prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony which he had governed for eight years, he had the state buy 51 percent of Preussag's troubled steel division to the tune of US$500 million, claiming that 12,000 jobs were at stake. It was a characteristic Schroeder move: he knew that the Social Democrats would appoint him chancellor's candidate if he won in Lower Saxony. Win he did - first in Hannover, later in 1998 at the federal level to become chancellor. What did he know about the Preussag conglomerate's Iraq poison gas dealings? Don't ask.
Included on the Iraqi suppliers' lists are other world-renowned (eg, Hoechst, Daimler-Benz, Siemens, Kloeckner, Carl Zeiss, Schott Glas, etc) and smaller German firms. Notable are Karl Kolb/Pilot Plant and WTB (Walter Thosti Boswau) who built and equipped Iraq's two major "pesticide and detergent" plants which, said a WTB employee, produce "detergents to exterminate two-legged flies" (Spiegel 4/1989, p 24). The WTB undertaking was supported by a credit guarantee for several hundred million German marks by Hermes, a German government export and credit insurer. Noteworthy also is Rhein-Bayern, which supplied Iraq with eight mobile toxicological labs housed in sand-colored, camouflage-painted Magirus trucks.
Chemical agents? Biological agents? Machine tools and parts and materials for uranium enrichment and missile production? You name them and the Germans delivered them - and not only that: they supplied the plants and know-how for Iraq to make its own "pesticides" ("to protect the date harvest"), "vaccines" ("to eradicate smallpox and other contagious diseases"), and "x-ray machines".
Karl Kolb told investigative reporters following up the Pitts and Associates law suit that it has done business with Iraq for 35 years, but had no connection to its weapons programs. Preussag claimed that accusations it had supplied precursor chemicals for Iraqi weapons were untrue. Schott Glas said it was "a manufacturer of glass and glass components, not of weapons".
If Herr Schroeder had his way, one assumes, then that's where things would end. Happily, with some nasty American trial lawyers on the case, that's unlikely. And happily, though he tried once more in advance of last Sunday's state elections in Lower Saxony and Hesse to rally Germans to his party's cause with anti-Iraq war rhetoric, Schroeder was dealt a humiliating defeat in both states. He should have bought re-privatized Preussag once again. Even the most gullible of German voters saw through his miserable Iraq-war ploy this time around, blamed him for over 10 percent unemployment, and threw his candidates and party into the trash bin.
Asia Times
:lol:
