Global Policy Forum

By Robert Holloway

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said yesterday he wanted "substantive dialogue" with Iraq on an end to sanctions following an approach from Baghdad, but warned that the return of weapons inspectors was not negotiable. "The bottom line for everyone is to get the UN arms inspectors back into Iraq and to finish the monitoring work that could lead to the lifting of sanctions," said Mr Annan's spokesman Fred Eckhard.

The UN revealed on Monday that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had sent a message to Mr Annan offering to reopen talks "without preconditions". The message was delivered by Amr Mussa, secretary general of the Arab League, who visited Baghdad last month.

Diplomats here said the Iraqi offer seemed to have been prompted by remarks by US President George W. Bush, describing Iraq as part of an "axis of evil" and threatening to take unspecified action against it unless it allowed the UN inspectors back in to check its claims that it no longer had weapons of mass destruction.

Speaking in Washington yesterday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the UN should not engage in a dialogue with Saddam until the inspectors had been allowed back. The inspectors were sent to Iraq under a sanctions regime imposed after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

They were withdrawn in December, 1998 on the eve of a bombing campaign by US and British warplanes and Iraq has refused to allow them to return. "There is reporting this morning that the Iraqi regime has asked the UN to have a discussion," Mr Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington.

"It should be a very short discussion; the inspectors have to go back in, under our terms, under no one else's terms, under the terms of the Security Council resolution." In Moscow, Yevgeny Yagupets, a member of Russia's commission for economic co-operation with Iraq, said the Iraqi offer was a good sign.

He added that there was "a fairly realistic prospect" that Iraq would let the inspectors back before the end of May, when the five permanent members of the Security Council have said they will reform and tighten the sanctions. One diplomat said the five had not yet discussed the latest Iraqi offer here.

Mr Eckhard said Mr Annan was "always ready to discuss with a member state about its willingness to comply with Security Council resolutions". He noted that the Iraqis had approached Mr Annan, not the other way around.

"They came to him through Amr Mussa to say they were willing to talk without precon-ditions," Mr Eckhard said. "The Iraqis conveyed their desire to resume dialogue, and we assume the general subject is Iraq-UN co-operation." Asked how urgently Annan considered the need for talks, he said: "It's as urgent as the Iraqis wish to make it."

Annan held inconclusive talks here on February 26 and 27 last year with a delegation led by Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf, Iraq's foreign minister at the time. The meeting – the first high-level contact between the two sides for more than two years – ended with an agreement to hold a second round of talks.

But the following day, Baghdad laid down five conditions for doing so, including an end to sanctions, and no new meeting took place. "The secretary general's preference would be for a more focused discussion than last year, when the Iraqis went to great lengths to state their case," Eckhard said.

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