UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan threw the ball back into Iraq's court on whether to have further talks on arms inspectors, but Baghdad said on Wednesday any agreement needed to include an end to US aggression against his country.
After three rounds of talks this year with Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, Annan told U.N. Security Council members bluntly on Tuesday that until Baghdad officials indicated they were prepared to allow the arms inspectors back into the country there would be no further talks at his level.
The last round of talks were on July 5-6 in Vienna, Austria. The inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 on the eve of a U.S.-British bombing campaign. Accounting for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is key to suspending U.N. sanctions, imposed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
As the world's top diplomat, Annan usually engages in talks without preconditions. Sarah Emerson, director of Washington-based Energy Security Analysis Inc., who follows Iraqi developments, said Annan's position showed there was little hope of the problem being solved diplomatically.
"If he is discouraged that is a fairly strong signal that this is something that won't be resolved diplomatically," she said. "To me it is worrisome that there is no optimism."
Sabri, in several interviews after the Vienna talks, including one on Wednesday, said Iraq had demonstrated "enough flexibility" in the discussions. He expected any agreement to include a route toward lifting sanctions, ending the U.S. threats of a "regime change" and an end to the U.S.-British no-flight zones over parts of the country.
"Should the inspectors return without a new solid basis, then they will operate for one, two or three months and the clash occurs again. They leave and then missiles and shells rain on Iraq," Sabri told the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper.
But Annan is not empowered to talk about any issue but the return of the weapons inspectors, without permission from Security Council members.
US AGAINST TALKS
The United States has been against the talks from the start while other council members hope further discussions will lead to the return of the arms experts and thereby delay a threatened U.S. invasion to topple President Saddam Hussein. One key reason given by the Bush administration for a "regime change" is Iraq's perceived possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Annan has not excluded future meetings on a technical level or on other issues, although Iraq has not requested any. But he told council members on Tuesday he would wait until there was some sign Baghdad was moving on the inspectors.
Later, he told CNN that Sabri, after consultations with his government, needed to "come back to me with an indication that they are prepared to allow the inspectors, and then we can resume discussions.
"If they were to say 'no', if we were to come to no agreement, then of course the situation, which has existed since December 1998 when the inspectors left will continue to prevail," Annan said.
In Vienna, Annan deliberately avoided setting a date for future talks but said "technical" discussions were possible. At the time a close aide told Reuters: "He drew the line after three meetings but he didn't pull the plug on the process."
Shortly after the talks, Sabri in numerous interviews blamed the United States for undermining the talks and said that Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, refused to discuss technical issues with Baghdad's top arms experts.
Blix, the executive chairman of the U.N. Inspection, Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, said he wanted to discuss "practical arrangements" for how the inspectors would operate.
But the Iraqi team wanted to go over outstanding weapons issues, which Blix said he could not talk about in detail until inspectors were on the ground and try to determine if anything had happened since 1998.
(China Daily July 25, 2002)
