Transitional Justice Forum

Sins of the predecessors

Should the largely pauperized population of today's Iraq be held responsible for making 'reparation' payments to people and institutions in Kuwait and elsewhere that were damaged by Saddam Hussein's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait?

Should the extremely poor population of today's South Africa be held responsible for making 'reparation' payments to people and institutions in even poorer Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and elsewhere that were damaged by the apartheid regime's decades-long aggressions against those countries?

Should the largely pauperized population of today's Iraq be held responsible for making 'reparation' payments to people and institutions in Iran that were damaged by Saddam Hussein's September 1980 invasion of Iran and the very lengthy war that ensued and that also involved Iraq's largescale use of chemical weapons against Iran?

I would say that the people damaged in all three of these cases have roughly equivalent moral claims to some form of 'reparation'. But the problem is, of course, that the people now governing in South Africa (and 'governing' as best they can in Iraq) are people who were themselves majorly the targets of the earlier, abusive governments in those two places. So it is hard to see how these new successor governments can be held responsible for the sins of their predecessors... And indeed, in South Africa, the question of the country paying financial recompense to the peoples of Mozambique, Namibia, and Angola has never really to my knowledge come up.

And neither has the question of Iraq paying reparations to Iran.

All of which makes it fairly disquieting for me to have learned recently that the UN Compensation Commission that was established in 1991 with the purpose of "process[ing] claims and pay[ing] compensation for losses and damage suffered as a direct result of Iraq's unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait" has continued until now on its course of turning over to Kuwait and other claimants regular payments funded by the UNCC's expropriation of five percent of the proceeds of Iraq's oil exports.

Just yesterday, the UNCC issued a press release describing proudly how in the current quarter it has disbursed $417.8 million to claimants in seven countries. The countries that got the biggest shares of those payments? Kuwait, which got $335.5 million, and Saudi Arabia, which got came in a distant second with $30.3 million.

A factsheet issued by the UNCC some time earlier reported that "Awards of approximately US$52.5 billion have been approved in respect of approximately 1.55 million ... claims", and at that point around $21 billion had been disbursed. As far as I can see from the charts I viewed, the lion's share of that money has gone to Kuwait.

Now I know Saddam's regime was bad, and caused much damage to Saudis and Kuwaitis. And it is possible (I suppose) that there, somewhere, some indigent Kuwaitis who benefit a lot from these reparations. But Kuwait's GDP per capita in 2005 was $17,421. It seems quite crazy to me to expect that Iraq's hard-pressed people should still today-- 15 years after the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam's rule, and more than three years after Saddam's overthrow at home-- be paying these reparations to Kuwait.

Doesn't anyone in the international "community" remember the effect the reparations exacted from Germany after WW1 had in helping to incubate Nazism among the Germans? Is this a good way to build stability in the Gulf region today?

[Cross-posted at Just World News.]