Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

Iraq has asked for a meeting with Secretary General Kofi Annan to try to break the impasse over arms inspections in the country, United Nations officials said today. Mr. Annan said he would meet representatives of the Iraqi government at a summit-level meeting of Islamic nations beginning on Sunday in Doha, Qatar.

This is the first time since a new arms inspection plan was adopted by the Security Council last December that the government of Saddam Hussein has sought a meeting with United Nations officials. Iraq is required to cooperate with the new arms panel, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, if sanctions imposed after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait are ever to be lifted. The executive chairman of the commission, Hans Blix of Sweden, has assembled a team of inspectors and says repeatedly that the Iraqis know where to find him, but they have made no approaches.

Dr. Blix, who has been touring countries that are Security Council members and is now in Paris preparing for a training course for 58 inspectors from 23 countries, met last week with Mr. Annan to discuss Iraq. "I will have a chance to talk with the Iraqi leadership in Doha, and I suspect the discussions to be broad- ranging," the secretary general said today. "I think that the Iraqis — as many member states here in this organization — would like to see the impasse we are in broken, and for us to move forward."

But Mr. Annan, who attracted criticism in the United States for meeting with Mr. Hussein in Baghdad in February 1998, said he was not in a position to offer the Iraqis any new ideas. Aides say he is not in a hurry to make another trip to Baghdad. "Obviously, whatever proposals that will help break the impasse will have to come out of the Council — and with their support," he said.

An agreement he struck with Mr. Hussein in 1998 to allow the resumption of inspections was soon violated by the Iraqis. Later that year, the United States and Britain bombed Iraq because of its refusal to cooperate. Since then, no inspections have been permitted, except for a routine International Atomic Energy Agency check of known nuclear material. In December 1999, the Security Council, deeply divided on how to proceed, established the new commission. Iraq has refused to deal with it.

Some diplomats caution that the Iraqis may be hoping to renegotiate the terms of the 1999 Council resolution, knowing that a new American president will have to rethink policy on Iraq, since support for comprehensive sanctions is eroding at the United Nations. That resolution allows for merely a suspension of sanctions and only after Iraq has made progress with inspections on the ground. Iraq wants the suspension first.

Moreover, Iraq is expected to try to win support for an end to the air patrols by the United States and Britain over no-flight zones in the north and south of the country. Since those patrols are not United Nations- backed, countries supporting Iraq would have to persuade the United States to suspend the flights in the hope that Iraq would promise to be more cooperative on arms inspections.

Iraq, profiting from high oil prices and without limits on the amount it can sell to raise money for civilian needs, is using its better position internationally to encourage the easing of sanctions.

Today, Saudi Arabia said it was opening a border trading post with Iraq to deliver civilian goods it is selling. Dozens of flights have landed in Iraq in recent weeks, bringing in relief goods and proponents of an end to sanctions. Ministers attending a trade fair in Baghdad have also been arriving by plane — technically permissible if they are not trading in prohibited goods, but nonetheless effectively ending a de facto embargo on all commercial flights to and from Iraq that had held for a decade.