-Caveat Lector-
>From Associated Press
Tuesday February 23 10:02 AM ET
Iraqis Fire on Protesters in Tehran
<Picture: AP Photo>
AP Photo
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Thousands of Iraqi demonstrators converged on Iraq's
embassy in the Iranian capital today, and witnesses said Iraqi guards
opened fire as some protesters scaled the fence around the compound.
Ten protesters entered the embassy grounds, but were quickly expelled, the
witnesses said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Witnesses said they saw
no sign of injuries, but that Iranian riot police arrested several
protesters outside the embassy.
The Iraqis, who numbered more than 3,000, came to the embassy to protest
the killing of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sader, a senior Shiite
Muslim cleric who was gunned down in Najaf, Iraq, on Friday.
About 100 Iranian riot policemen battled with the demonstrators, who threw
stones at the embassy.
There was no word of any injuries.
The protesters had earlier demonstrated peacefully in front of the United
Nations office in Tehran, accusing the Iraqi government of murdering
al-Sader and two of his sons.
There are hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Iran. Most of them are
Shiite Muslims who were expelled from Iraq after President Saddam Hussein's
Baath Party came to power in 1968. The Baath Party, which is dominated by
Sunni Muslims, accused them of being of Iranian origin.
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Monday blamed Iraq for
al-Sader's death.
The Iraqi government says unknown gunmen in a passing car killed the cleric
and his sons as they were driving home.
Al-Sader was highly respected among Shiites, who comprise about 65 percent
of Iraq's 22 million people. Iran is predominantly Shiite.
Al-Sader was thought to be close to the Iraqi government, which appointed
him a grand ayatollah. But his relations with the government began to sour
after he issued an edict last year calling on the Shiites to attend weekly
Friday prayers in mosques.
The Iraqi government disapproves of big crowds, which al-Sader frequently
drew. His edict, or fatwa, was seen as an attempt to establish himself as
an independent leader.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From Wash DC Post
Iraq Dilemma Erodes Annan's Bond With U.S.
By John M. Goshko
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 23, 1999; Page A13
UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 22�The Clinton administration plucked Kofi Annan from
the ranks of U.N. career diplomats and steered him into the job of
secretary general primarily in hopes of gaining a forceful advocate for
reforming U.N. bureaucracy. But as Annan approaches the halfway mark of his
five-year term, his reputation has become tied instead to his differences
with the United States over how to deal with President Saddam Hussein of
Iraq.
Although Annan serves a constituency of 185 member states, the political
and financial support of the United States is so important to giving the
United Nations relevance in world affairs that the secretary general cannot
afford to ignore what is on Washington's mind. At present, that is Iraq,
where Clinton administration officials seem fixated on eliminating what
they see as the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. But Annan -- backed by what
increasingly seems to be a majority sentiment among other U.N. members --
has moved farther and farther from the administration in judging how best
that can be done.
"Managing the ties with the United States always has been one of the
secretary general's most important jobs, and this split on an issue of such
centrality to American interests shows how precarious the U.S. relationship
is with the United Nations," said John R. Bolton, who served as assistant
secretary of state for U.N. affairs in the Bush administration.
"We're not talking here about conservative Republicans who always have been
skeptical of Annan. We're talking about the vast difference traveled by the
Clinton administration from a man with whom it originally had an
identification closer than that between Washington and any previous
secretary general."
No one expected it to be that way when Annan moved to the top job here in
1997. But in the past year, what to do about Iraq has overwhelmed just
about everything else on the world body's agenda. Inevitably, frustrations
generated by the failure to find an answer have caused the relationship
between Annan and the United States to go into free fall.
Despite the chill, Annan still has more entree than his predecessors. Where
past U.S. administrations dealt with U.N. leaders through their ambassadors
here or second-rank State Department officials, Annan talks frequently,
sometimes two or three times a week, to Secretary of State Madeleine K.
Albright and national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger.
Annan plans to be in Washington Tuesday and Wednesday, giving a speech at
Georgetown University on peacekeeping, meeting with House and Senate
majority and minority leaders, seeing Berger and attending a White House
dinner for President Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, his homeland.
Still, sources say, these exchanges appear limited to non-Iraq issues, such
as the crisis in Kosovo. On the central issue of Iraq, it is clear that
beneath the surface politeness, there no longer is much trust between the
White House and Annan's executive suite on the 38th floor of the U.N.
secretariat building.
That is in marked contrast to the situation last February, when Annan
electrified the world with an 11th-hour intervention in a dispute that saw
Iraq blocking arms inspections and the United States threatening to attack.
With the blessing of the Clinton administration, which realized belatedly
that it had little domestic or international backing for military strikes,
Annan flew to Baghdad and convinced the Iraqis to cooperate in exchange for
some largely cosmetic restrictions on the inspectors.
The situation has gone steadily downhill ever since, not the least because
of Washington's air strikes last December. Annan's thinking, as he has
described it to intimates in recent months, is that Baghdad's unyielding
opposition to intrusive U.N. inspections inevitably will prevent the world
from learning whether Iraq is fully disarmed. He believes a realistic
fallback is to concentrate on ensuring that Iraq has disarmed sufficiently
to no longer pose a danger to its Persian Gulf neighbors and that it is
unlikely to produce new weapons of mass destruction.
To make that possible, Annan advocates lifting the U.N. embargo in place
since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and taking other steps to end Iraq's
decade-long isolation in exchange for cooperation with a more limited, less
confrontational inspection system. With this view, Annan is in step with
most U.N. members, including permanent Security Council members France,
China and Russia.
Annan, a Ghanaian educated at Macalester College in Minnesota and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent most of his adult life
climbing the rungs of the U.N. career bureaucracy. As secretary general, he
started out much as U.S. officials had hoped and was in line with the
administration's goals of improving the United Nations' sagging image on
Capitol Hill. During his first year and a half, he concentrated on
institutional reform and trying to win the confidence of suspicious
congressional Republicans who blocked payment of more than $1 billion in
U.S. back dues.
He was keenly disappointed when antiabortion Republicans tied payment to
President Clinton's acceptance of restrictions on how U.S. aid money is
used in overseas family planning programs. The president refused to go
along, the dues remain unpaid and the United Nations continues to teeter on
the edge of bankruptcy.
"Kofi feels that he kept his end of the bargain by pursuing reform and then
was met with bad faith from all sides in Washington," one senior aide said.
Nevertheless, he has continued to heed the admonition to be "more secretary
than general." In that light, he put a lot of effort into streamlining the
top-heavy and unwieldly U.N. bureaucracy. That involved some personnel cuts
-- although fewer than congressional Republicans called for -- but his main
emphasis was on reorganizing the secretariat into a cabinet-style system
intended to promote clearer lines of authority and quicker responses to
events.
That has encountered opposition from some members who see the reforms as a
threat to their patronage and priorities. Generally, though, his reform
efforts have been given good grades by most U.N. diplomats. Some add that
an even more enduring part of his legacy may rest in some of the more
intangible things he has done.
In particular, they cite his appointment or support for the election of
women to important U.N. positions -- among them Louise Frechette of Canada
as deputy secretary general, Mary Robinson of Ireland as U.N. high
commissioner for human rights and Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway as head
of the World Health Organization -- as establishing a strong female
presence in the top ranks of the formerly male-dominated bureaucracy.
Less impressive is the balance sheet on U.N. work in major crises during
his tenure. That is, first and foremost, the fault of the most powerful
U.N. organ, the 15-nation Security Council, where intractable policy
differences among the five permanent members with veto powers -- the United
States, Russia, China, France and Britain -- have paralyzed the council to
the point where it is unable to agree on anything but marginal and
noncontroversial subjects.
Where most global flashpoints are concerned, the United Nations casts
little or no shadow. This dichotomy is particularly evident, for example,
in Annan's home continent of Africa, where his calls for the United Nations
to take a leading role in helping African nations realize long-frustrated
hopes of modernization have run up against increasingly bloody and
pervasive civil wars.
It is the same in other areas of tension, from Kosovo to Cambodia. That is
one reason Iraq looms so large in the U.N. scheme of things. It is the only
active hot spot where the United Nations still has a chance to demonstrate
that it can confront and defuse a threat to international peace. And for
Annan, it could well be the last chance to show that he can play a leading
role in the effort.
But first Annan and Washington have to smooth over such nasty rifts as the
one caused by recent leaks that the United States had been using the U.N.
Special Commission (UNSCOM), created by the Security Council to oversee
Iraqi disarmament, as a cover for gathering intelligence to further its
campaign against Saddam Hussein.
Although Annan categorically denied any knowledge or responsibility for the
leaks, they are known to have come from his advisers, as furious U.S.
officials were quick to point out during attempts to assert that U.S.
intelligence help to UNSCOM had been intended primarily to aid the search
for prohibited weapons.
For his part, Annan has adopted a strategy of hugging the background. There
seems no chance for movement on Iraq, he says, until the council finds a
way to bridge the chasm between U.S. insistence on a continued hard line
and the Russian, French and Chinese advocacy of ending intrusive
inspections and easing sanctions.
Annan also has dodged discussion of his problem with Washington, refusing
to talk about it or blandly waving it aside as he did recently in an
interview with Irish TV. "I have solid and good relations with the U.S.
government and the U.S. authorities," he said. "And I'm not too worried
about what the press is saying."
His one effort to meet the issue head-on came last month in a speech to the
Council on Foreign Relations. Although he did not mention the differences
over Iraq directly, he asked pointedly: "By what standard does one measure
the words or the deeds of a secretary general? By that of a head of
government or a minister of foreign affairs? Surely not, for their duty is
prescribed by the interest of their state, and their state alone. . . .
They are the servants only of their cause and not of the 185 member states
that make up the United Nations."
� Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From Times (UK)
February 23 1999 MIDDLE EAST<Picture: Line>
<Picture>�
Sadiq: murdered with sons in holy city
'300 killed' as Saddam battles to quell unrest
BY MICHAEL THEODOULOU IN NICOSIA
ANTI-GOVERNMENT riots in Iraq, ignited by the murder of a senior Shia
Muslim cleric, entered a third day yesterday, despite a draconian crackdown
by Special Republican Guards who had killed 300 people in Baghdad,
dissidents said last night.
The most serious unrest since a failed Shia uprising in the wake of the
1991 Gulf War appeared spontaneous and leaderless, but there were
predictions that it could evolve into a full rebellion. "The security
forces are operating very brutally, but there is a situation of latent
revolution," a spokesman for the opposition Iraqi National Congress said.
President Saddam Hussein's regime seemed confident that it would soon
restore total control, rejecting reports of unrest as imaginary and
promising to take foreign journalists today to towns that opposition groups
claimed were in rebel hands.
Restive areas were said to be flooded with units of the Special Republican
Guards, recruited mainly from minority Sunni Muslims whose members control
the Government. Units of the regular Army, whose rank and file draws
heavily on the disaffected Shia population, were not called on to help to
quell the rioting. The clashes broke out in Baghdad and several other
cities on Saturday morning, hours after the assassination of the leader of
Iraq's Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sader, who was
shot with two of his sons in the holy city of Najaf.
His killing stoked tension with neighbouring Iran, a predominantly Shia
country, which immediately said it held Saddam's regime responsible.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, said: "The strangulation of
Shia Muslims in that country [Iraq] has now reached a climax."
In the meantime, US and British warplanes bombed air defence sites in the
no-fly zones of northern and southern Iraq yesterday in response to
violations of the zones by Iraq's military forces. The US Central Command
said in Tampa, Florida, that US F15s and British Tornado jets, operating
from bases in friendly Gulf states for the second day in succession,
attacked four radar and military communications sites near Basra in
southern Iraq after two Iraqi MiG23 jets violated the southern zone. All
the allied planes returned safely. Iraq said that one person was killed and
several wounded.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
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