News-Info-Alerts

Re: UN SecGen Annan To Discuss Speicher

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: March 26, 2002

"Annan to hold talks with Iraqi minister

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is to meet Iraq's foreign minister next month for two days of talks, urging the return of arms inspectors, his spokesman said.

Annan spokesman Fred Eckhard said Annan and Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri would meet on April 18 and 19 in New York, stressing that the secretary-general felt two days of talks might be warranted. The two met for one day on March 7, in their first high-level talks in a year.

Annan is "hoping for substantive and focused discussions, specifically of the return of arms inspectors to Iraq", Eckhard said.

But the Bush administration expressed little optimism over the talks between Annan and the Iraqi delegation, whose motives US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher questioned.

"The issue is, what are they coming with? Are they coming with a clear indication that they're going to accept the UN resolutions and implement them?" Boucher said. "Are they coming with a clear indication that they're going to allow the unfettered access by inspectors that's necessary to prove their claims that Iraq is not developing weapons?"

He added that Iraqi leaders must also indicate whether they would deal with current humanitarian issues, including Kuwaiti prisoners and the fate of Lt Cmdr Michael Scott Speicher, an American pilot shot down over Iraq during the Gulf War.

"The question really doesn't belong here, the question doesn't really belong in New York. The question belongs in Baghdad," Boucher said. "What are they coming with and if it's no more than they've come with in the past, then we don't expect anything to happen."

Baghdad is under sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which cannot be lifted until UN inspectors certify that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been eliminated along with the long-range missiles to deliver them.

Iraq has refused to let inspectors back in, insisting it has complied with the resolutions and demanding that sanctions be lifted. The inspectors left Baghdad in December 1998 ahead of US and British air strikes.

Eckhard said that Iraq agreed on Friday to the talks with Annan.

Annan, Eckhard said, had passed on to the security council 19 questions from Iraq that were given to him by the Iraqi foreign minister during the March 7 talks.

The United States has said it does not want the security council to consider the questions, including whether US actions towards Saddam Hussein violate international law.

Russia's UN ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, welcomed Iraq's willingness to discuss the deployment of inspectors.

"This has not been the case for quite some time," he said yesterday. "And I believe it is a very positive sign.""