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UN, Iraq to Resume Dialogue in January
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Iraqi officials plan to begin talks at the beginning of the coming new year on how to break a two-year impasse on weapons inspections, the key conditions for lifting UN sanctions, UN officials said Wednesday, November 29.
The decision to start the dialogue was made Tuesday at a meeting between Annan and Iraqi Permanent Representative to the United Nations Saeed Hassan, the officials said. UN arms inspectors have not been permitted to return to Baghdad since December 1998.
A high-level Iraqi delegation is expected to travel to New York in January following the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The meetings are a follow-up to Annan's talks with Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Council, during an Islamic summit in the Gulf State of Qatar on November 17.
Although Baghdad has repeatedly stated in public that UN weapons inspection teams would never return, Ibrahim agreed to a review of the solution "without preconditions."
The arms inspectors left Iraq on the eve of a December 1998 US-British bombing raid, conducted because Baghdad allegedly had not cooperated with the UN arms experts investigating its program of weapons of mass destruction.
Until the inspectors return, sanctions against Iraq, imposed a decade ago after the Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, cannot be eased or lifted.
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