Saddam Imports Alcohol and Cigarettes for Food and Medicine

Oct. 4 -- Saddam Hussein may be buying stockpiles of alcohol and cigarettes with the proceeds of food and medicine delivered under international aid programs.

A confidential British Foreign Office report, the details of which were released to the press, says the Iraqi president is importing large quantities of Scotch whisky and cigarettes in exchange for food and medicine destined for the Iraqi people.

The report, the details of which were confirmed by the Foreign Office to ABCNEWS.com, claims Saddam’s government has been buying an average of 10,000 bottles of alcohol — much of it Scotch — and 50 million cigarettes — mostly U.S. brands — each week for the dictator’s military and political elite circle.

The imports, the document said, were arriving as international humanitarian supplies delivered under the U.N. sponsored oil-for-food program, were being sold abroad.

The Kuwaiti coast guard, according to the report, had intercepted ships loaded with food leaving Iraq, while emergency drugs meant for Iraqis had been discovered in pharmacies in Lebanon.

A Foreign Office spokesman told ABCNEWS.com that the information, which came from sources in the region, had been common knowledge within the department for some time.

“This confirms our belief that the interests of the Iraqi regime lies in feathering its own nests and it casts doubts on its commitment to providing humanitarian relief to the people,” he said. “It undermines the efforts of governments such as Britain to provide relief for the Iraqi people under the oil-for-food program.”

The oil-for-food program was initiated by the United Nations in 1996 to help provide food and medicines for the Iraqi population, which has suffered under the sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War.

Same Old Story?

Activists and human rights organizations have expressed outrage, but not astonishment.

“This story is as old as the sanctions, as old as the oil-for-food program,” said Rend Rahim Francke, executive director of the Iraq Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit, non-governmental organization working for human rights in Iraq. “We have documentary evidence of Saddam Hussein selling medicines to Lebanon. Glaxo Wellcome [a British pharmaceutical firm] recently stated that 15,000 units of asthma medicine, targeted mainly at children, had been re-exported to Lebanon.”