Global Policy Forum

By Farouk Choukri

Iraq resumes talks with the United Nations on May 1 under the threat of US military action if UN arms inspectors are not allowed back into the country to verify Baghdad's claims to have no weapons of mass destruction.

"We want to conduct a direct dialogue with the United Nations without US interference in order to reach positive results," Salem al-Kubaissi, head of the Iraqi parliament's foreign affairs committee, said Wednesday. "The upcoming dialogue is sure to be successful if the US administration of evil stays out of it," he told AFP. Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri is due to meet UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York from May 1 to May 3. The two already met on March 7, the first talks between the two sides in a little more than a year.

Two days of talks had been set to start on April 18 but were put off at the request of Baghdad, which said it did not want to divert attention from the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Annan's spokesman Fred Eckhard said on Tuesday that the head of the UN arms inspectorate for Iraq, Hans Blix, and the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammad el-Baradei, would attend the meeting.

The United Nations wants Iraq to readmit arms inspectors who pulled out of the country on the eve of a December 1998 US-British bombing blitz, and the United States has threatened to take military action and try to overthrow the regime of President Saddam Hussein unless Baghdad obliges. Iraq maintains that it no longer has prohibited weapons or the means to develop them, but Sabri hinted in late March that Baghdad might nonetheless allow the inspectors back.

"We are discussing this issue (of the inspectors' eventual return) with the United Nations. We held a meeting on March 7 and another is planned for April," he said in a Kuwaiti newspaper interview of the talks, now rescheduled for next week. "The (inspectors') return hinges on the United Nations meeting Iraq's demands," Kubaissi told AFP.

He listed these as an end to "no-fly zones" enforced by US and British warplanes over north and south Iraq, the lifting of UN sanctions in force since Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the implementation of paragraph 14 of UN Security Council resolution 687 calling for ridding the Middle East, including Israel, of weapons of mass destruction.

"Annan is supposed to reply to the (19) questions" put forward by Sabri during their March meeting concerning the inspectors' return, Kubaissi added. But where Washington is concerned, there is nothing to discuss with Iraq: Baghdad must simply readmit the inspectors. The review of Iraq's "oil-for-food" program with the UN due at the end of May could prove a complicating factor in the upcoming talks with Annan.

The United States plans to seek once more to revise the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq when the UN Security Council meets to extend the program. But Baghdad, which thwarted a US bid to introduce so-called "smart sanctions" last summer with Russian help, has given no indication that it will play ball this time round.

Sabri will hold talks in Moscow on April 28-30 before heading for New York, even though Russia's rapprochement with the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks could translate into greater agreement on the Iraq issue at the Security Council.

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