News-Info-Alerts

Re: US-UK Responsible for Safety of Irani POWs Says Iranian Gvt

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 12, 2003

In 1980, Saddam Hussein decided to invade Iran. Some view the 1980-1988 war as an extension of Arab-Persian historical conflicts, or as the result of fluid national boundaries, or even as a result of the megalomaniacal, narcissistic personality of Hussein. Some view it as Hussein exploiting the recent Revolution in Iran that seated Hussein's enemy, the Ayatollah Kohmeini. There are hundreds of other reasons, all of them valid. Whatever one's belief, the war was to ignite even further disputes, tribal, religious, boundary, waterway access, oil assets, and countless other aspects too numerous to mention. The war ended not in a victory or anyone, but with considerable human losses and a UN Security Council Resolution (598) brokering a cease-fire. After more than a million deaths, tens of thousands of POWs and MIAs and millions displaced, all the issues that were in place at the beginning of the war, remained unresolved at the end.

As late as 2002, both Iran and Iraq laimed the other held POWs from the war. Several hundred long-term POWs and remains were repariated during the late 1990's, but the issue of POWs and MIAs was one of the major stumbling blocks in normalization of relations between the two countries.

Now, Iran has stated that US and UK forces in participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom are resonsible for Iranina POWs left over from the 8 year conflict.

News Article

"Iran says US, Britain responsible for fate of its PoWs in Iraq

Tehran, April 13, IRNA -- The Islamic Republic has stressed that it considers US-British troops responsible for any threat against Iranian PoWs who may still be in Iraqi prisons.

The Persian-language newspaper `Entekhab' on Saturday quoted a ranking army commander as saying that he had asked the Foreign Ministry to notify the troops in Iraq in a formal note of Iran's position in that regard.

Brigadier-General Mirfeisal Baqerzadeh, the head of the search andrecovery committee for those missing in action, voiced concerns about the threats against Iranian PoWs after the fall of Baghdad's regime.

"Iran considers the US-British troops in Iraq responsible for the threats against Iranian PoWs, and they should live up to their commitments regarding Iranian prisoners," Entekhab quoted him as saying.

"Considering that Iraqi prisons and detention centers are under the US-British control, they are responsible for the consequences of any threat against Iranian PoWs."

Baqerzadeh further said whether there is any more Iranian PoWs in Iraq is merely a possibility, stressing that but the issue was still not definite.

"We just had certain data and documents that had been obtained from the 1980-88 war with Iraq or from the reports of Iranian troops that have seen their comrades in Iraqi prisons," the official said.

These documents, he added, show that a certain number of Iranian PoWs are still in Iraq.

Baqerzadeh said the last batch of Iranian PoWs who were released before the start of the US-British campaign against Iraq were mostly civilians that had been captured at Iran's border with Iraq, adding that this had strengthened the possibility that the rest of Iranian PoWs may have been killed.

"There is also the possibility that the remaining Iranian PoWs have been killed in Iraqi prisons, but we have no doubt that a certainnumber of PoWs were behind the bars in Iraq," he stressed.

Baqerzadeh said the Iraqi officials always rejected that there areany Iranian PoWs in Iraqi prisons, adding that despite this Iranians had seriously followed up constant debates with the Iraqis over the fate of the PoWs.

"As a result of these debates, Iraq released Iranian PoWs in several batches, with one comprising 64 soldiers," he said.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Baqerzadeh said a delegation from Iran'sRed Crescent Society is to leave for Basra to launch an expert study on the bodies that have been recently found bodies in the city and arebelieved to be Iranian soldiers.

British troops announced on Saturday that they had found the remains of as many as 200 people in makeshift coffins and plastic bagsin an abandoned warehouse near Basra, southern Iraq, along with faded photos of corpses showing signs of torture and execution.

Accordingly, Baqerzadeh had said that the remains were those of Iranian soldiers discovered over the recent months in joint recovery operations, and that they were to be repatriated to Iran before the war started.

He said he had been in close contact with the director of Basra military hospital, stressing that the official had already given him certain documents regarding Iranians that have been killed in action.

"Maybe the documents that the British troops have found in Basra are part of those documents that the Iraqi official was going to give us," he said.

Baqerzadeh said that Iran would continue the search and recovery operations for the bodies of those missing in action (MIAs) in the Iraqi territory once a democratically elected government takes power in the country.

He also put the total number of bodies of Iranian MIAs that have been found so far at 45,000.

©2000 Islamic Republic News Agency ( IRNA)"