WASHINGTON, April 13: The International Monetary Fund’s policy-setting committee has said that the IMF and World Bank will help in the reconstruction of war-ravaged Iraq once a United Nations resolution gives them a mandate.

All 184 members of the International Monetary Fund, who are meeting in Washington this weekend, supported a concerted global efforts to get Iraq back on its feet.

But for a direct involvement of international financial institutions to help rebuild Iraq, they demanded a mandate from the UN, said Gordon Brown, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and the chairman of the IMF’s committee during the institution’s spring meeting.

The committee wanted the UN Security Council to give a formal mandate by adopting a resolution endorsing international reconstruction plans for Iraq, he added.

Muslim countries including Iran, Pakistan, Egypt and Syria, have said they too wanted the UN to lead the rebuilding effort.

“Pakistan will naturally be interested in helping Iraqi people once a proper government is established,” Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz told Dawn.

The US-UN relationship has been strained since the United States and Britain went into Iraq without UN backing. The US wants the World Bank and IMF to take the leading role in the Iraq rebuilding. European nations, including Germany, France, Russia and Britain, however want the UN in charge.

Finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of Seven industrialized nations (France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, Canada and the United States) are meeting to discuss Iraqi reconstruction and the world economy ahead of the IMF meeting.

The two Washington-based lenders — the IMF and World Bank — have firmly resisted all efforts to drag them into a political wrangle over who would lead a rebuilding effort and whether it would be done under a UN banner.

Some countries, particularly France and Germany, have been concerned that the United States — as the lenders’ largest shareholder — would use the institutions to bypass the UN while still claiming multilateralism.

The United States, however, has urged the World Bank to send a fact-finding mission to Iraq even before a UN resolution was reached, so the situation in Iraq could be assessed more quickly and accurately.

But the IMF and the World Bank apparently refused to play along and instead said they would help only if all their shareholders were on board.

The IMF and World Bank said they’d “stand ready to play their normal role in Iraq’s redevelopment at the appropriate time,” thus reiterating World Bank President James Wolfensohn’s comments on Friday that the international financial institutions wouldn’t get involved in Iraq without the full approval of the UN.

Committee leaders appeared relieved at the willingness of finance chiefs to agree on the need for a UN resolution.

“It’s an enormously positive step forward,” said Britain’s Gordon Brown. IMF Managing-director Horst Koehler called the decision “a wonderful outcome.”

US Treasury Secretary John Snow had said earlier that the world’s richest nations had “agreed that the international financial institutions should provide technical assistance and expertise in Iraq and undertake a preliminary requirements’ study,” thus suggesting that the IMF and World Bank could at least send in a fact-finding mission even without a UN resolution.