Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi to talk for first time in four years on Gulf war missing

19/12/2002| IslamWeb

Iraq made a new goodwill gesture, agreeing for the first time in four years to hold a meeting with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia about the fate of people reported missing since the 1991 Gulf war.Under threat of a new war from the United States, Baghdad has allowed weapons inspectors to resume work and compiled a huge arms dossier in line with UN demands to disarm.

At the same time the United Nations has been pressing Iraq to build on a melting of relations with Kuwait made public at an Arab summit last March.

The Security Council on Wednesday called for "concrete and substantive" accounting of Kuwaitis and assets missing since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and occupied the emirate for seven months until a US-led coalition drove it out.

The Iraqi foreign ministry said the agreement to resume talks was spelled out in the minutes of a meeting held by the three Arab countries as well as France, Britain, the United States and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

"The minutes ... mentioned the agreement of Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to hold their first meeting on January 8 in the ICRC offices in the Jordanian capital," said the statement.

It did not reveal where the agreement was struck but it was believed to have been at ICRC headquarters in Geneva.

Iraq had since December 1998 boycotted meetings of the so-called tripartite committee of Kuwait, Iraq and the ICRC in protest at US and British air raids on its territory.

The Gulf war allied coalition countries Saudi Arabia, Britain, France and the United States are also on the committee.
However reaction in Kuwait was cautious.

At the ministry of foreign affairs, under-secretary Khaled Al-Jarallah said: "According to our experience with the Iraqi regime it's difficult to be optimistic.

"Let's hope they cooperate positively with the new mechanism and with the sub-committee which is to be attended by Kuwaitis and Iraqis," he told AFP, confirming a face-face-meeting with the Iraqis.

"It is very hard to say it's a positive step at the moment."

In Geneva, the ICRC said it had "good hope for the process to achieve concrete results and thus ease the anguish of families who have waited too long to find out what happened to their relatives."

It confirmed that "after years of constant effort, an agreement was reached on December 18 between all the members of the tripartite committee under ICRC auspices, opening the way for a resumption of the technical sub-committee."

In a report Wednesday to the UN Security Council, Secretary General Kofi Annan noted that Baghdad had last week for the first time invited the UN's coordinator of the project to locate the missing, who was appointed two years ago.

No date was however set for a visit by Yuli Vorontsov.

Annan also noted the Iraqi authorities last October had returned a first lot of archives belonging to Kuwait, and that "positive new elements" had been uncovered on the question of missing Kuwaitis and foreign citizens.

Return of the archives seized during the occupation was recognized by Kuwait as a "positive step," although it insists on the return of all of them before considering the affair closed.

An estimated 605 people, almost all of them Kuwaitis, are unaccounted for since the seven-month Iraqi occupation of the emirate, which ended with the Gulf War against Iraq by a US-led coalition.

Iraq claims it lost track of the prisoners during a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991. It also says 1,037 Iraqis disappeared or have been detained in Kuwait.

PHOTO CAPTION

Allied helicopters prepare for action during the Gulf war