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.