Reparations for Iraq

September 1, 2021
New York Magazine

...This call for “reparations” has mixed antecedents. In North America, demands have been made for reparations to, among others, the victims of transatlantic slavery and Indigenous genocide. Internationally, reparations have been proposed or implemented in nations like Germany, Colombia, South Africa, and Malawi. It is worth noting that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger committed in 1973 to $3.25 billion in reconstruction aid to Vietnam — a paltry sum that came with no acknowledgment of culpability for the war and that, unsurprisingly, never materialized.

In 2013, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York–based legal-advocacy organization, called for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a body of the Organization of American States, to hold a hearing on Iraqi reparations. The request has twice been rejected. If such a demand for monetary reparations sounds far-fetched, then consider the fact that Iraq itself has paid almost $50 billion in reparations to Kuwait and other nations stemming from its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, honoring its commitments to the United Nations Compensation Commission long after Saddam Hussein was ousted.

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Last modified 

September 21, 2021