Iraq, Kuwait begin talks after four years

Iraqi and Kuwaiti officials opened crucial Red Cross-sponsored talks yesterday in Jordan on the fate of hundreds of their citizens who have been missing since before the 1991 Gulf war.

With war drums again beating against Baghdad, the meeting at the Amman headquarters of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) got underway at 0700 GMT with the participation of Saudi and ICRC delegates.

"The meeting started behind closed doors and let's wish them good luck in their endeavor," ICRC information officer Moin Qassis told reporters gathered outside the white-stone building in west Amman.

"The fact that this meeting is taking place is very encouraging," Qassis said. "They are resuming the dialogue so we hope that this eventually will lead to a conclusion with results," he added.

The Amman meeting is the first of its kind in four years since Iraq boycotted in 1998 meetings of a technical sub-committee formed by the Red Cross in 1994 to deal with the humanitarian issues resulting from the Gulf war.

It was not immediately clear who was heading the Iraqi delegation, which was the last one to arrive at ICRC headquarters in Amman.

Kuwait's seven-member delegation was headed by Ibrahim Majid Shahin, the deputy chief of a national committee for prisoners and missing persons while Saudi ambassador to Jordan Abdel Rahman bin Nasser al-Ohali led a five-member team.

The ICRC delegation is being chaired by George Comninos, head of operations for Middle East and North Africa in Geneva.

Wednesday's meeting in Amman comes as the United Nations on Monday said that the UN coordinator on people and property missing since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Yuli Vorontsov, will visit Baghdad for the first time on January 17.

In December, Iraq promised the Arab League it will cooperate at the Amman meeting, which it was the first to announce earlier that month in a gesture of goodwill.

Kuwait has repeatedly charged that Iraq, which occupied the tiny Gulf emirate in 1990 before being driven out by a US-led coalition in the Gulf War, is holding 605 people, most of them Kuwaitis.

Baghdad has rejected the accusations and said it wants clarification about more than 1,000 of its nationals who are still missing or allegedly detained in Kuwait.

The ICRC has said, however, that it has no "accurate" figures on the number of Iraqi and Kuwaiti nationals missing since the 1991 US-led Gulf war that ended Iraq's seven-month occupation of Kuwait.

"The figures that exist have been submitted by the two parties but have not been verified," he told AFP.

The Iraqi foreign ministry said in December that the meeting was the result of an agreement reached by the three Arab countries, as well as France, Britain, the United States and the ICRC.