Iraq offers to cooperate with UN after lifting of sanctions
Iraq offers to cooperate with UN after lifting of sanctions
BAGHDAD (Agencies): Iraq will be ready to cooperate with the United Nations Security Council once the decade-old embargo has been lifted, an official newspaper said on Wednesday.
"Iraq is not refusing to cooperate with the Security Council and is not the stubborn and aggressive country it is made out to be in the Western media," said the ruling Baath party's mouthpiece, Ath-Thawra.
It said Baghdad was ready "to resolve all the outstanding issues but they must first lift the embargo and deal with Iraq as the sole party to have been wronged by this whole affair".
While rejecting Security Council resolution 1248, it said Baghdad "has the right to discuss all the details of this resolution and not to be treated as an accused person who has to serve his sentence, especially when the judge is the enemy".
The daily was referring to the United States, a strong advocate of keeping in place the sanctions imposed on Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Resolution 1248, which Iraq has rejected, calls for its full cooperation with a new arms control panel in return for a renewable suspension of the sanctions regime.
Meanwhile, the former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck, said on Wednesday that the international community should re-evaluate its policy towards Baghdad and "not shun the Iraqis" in discussions.
"The time, in my view, has come for a conference around the table where you do not shun the Iraqis and where you don't ask them to stay outside and wait until the meeting is over when you have finished your reflections on Iraq as it is happening all the time in New York," von Sponeck told a press briefing in Geneva.
Von Sponeck resigned from the post in February in protest against continued sanctions against Iraq.
Speaking to reporters here, he said preventive diplomacy should be given a greater chance, adding he believed things had already gone too far when the Security Council had reached the point of considering imposing sanctions on a country.
"We have to talk more, we have to sit around the conference table, we have to accept each other in that circumstance as equals representing different nations," he said.
Shortly after resigning, von Sponeck said UN sanctions had led to an "intellectual embargo" on Iraq with education being the "prime victim" of an inadequate effort to reduce the harsh effect of the sanctions on the Iraqi population.
From 1996, the UN has allowed Iraq under the oil-for-food program to sell crude oil under UN supervision and use part of the revenue to import food, medicine and other essentials. According to von Sponeck, less than four percent of the funds under the program reached education.
Sanctions gave economic, political and military advantages on the international side, he said, while the people's suffering created in Iraq a "unifying effect" which was of benefit to the Baghdad regime.
Separately, a prominent Iraqi journalist who was close to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his eldest son, Odai, has fled Iraq with his family to a European country, an Iraqi opposition group said on Wednesday.
The London-based General Union of Iraqi Writers and Journalists said Madhar Arif, a former editor of Odai's newspaper, Babil, was in touch with the union for several months before the defection.
In a statement faxed to The Associated Press office in Cairo, the journalists' union said Arif "possesses very valuable information about the internal problems that face Saddam Hussein and the ruling clique."
The statement said Arif, who once was a press adviser to Saddam, plans to write about Saddam and the effects of his policies on the Iraqi people and on writers and journalists in particular.
No other details about Arif or his family were available. The statement did not say when or how he defected. Officials at the journalists' union, contacted by telephone from Cairo, refused to reveal the name of the country where he fled to, fearing for his safety.