Iran-Iraq Wrangling Over POW Issues May Tie Up Peace Negotiations

Even assuming that the diplomatic and battlefield maneuvering between Iran and Iraq leads to a firm cease-fire in their eight-year war, the wrangling will be far from over.

According to the timetable outlined in U.N. Security Council Resolution 598, which was adopted in July, 1987, to try to force both sides to end the fighting, Iran and Iraq are required to withdraw to the international boundary and exchange prisoners.

One problem is that a border dispute was a cause of the war in the first place, when Iraq invaded Iran in September, 1980. But few problems are as potentially explosive as the question of prisoners of war.

A special U.N. team headed by Wolfram Karl, an Austrian professor of international law, is currently visiting the two belligerents in hopes of working out the mechanics of a prisoner exchange. By all accounts, it will not be an easy task.

Red Cross Prisoner Count

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is responsible for checking on the condition of prisoners worldwide, Iraq held 13,000 Iranian prisoners of war and Iran held 50,182 Iraqi POWs at the end of 1987.

But since that date, Iraq has staged a major comeback in the fighting and claims to have recaptured virtually all of its territory that had fallen into Iranian hands. Since April, Iraq claims to have seized 30,000 new prisoners, including 12,207 taken in offensives launched in late July after Iran signaled acceptance of the U.N. initiative for a cease-fire.

After the offensive was launched, Iraqi Television showed film of President Saddam Hussein speaking on the telephone to his army commanders.

“Press forward,” Hussein was shown as saying, “and take as many prisoners as you can.”

One-for-One Exchange

The apparent Iraqi goal is to have enough Iranian POWs to offer a one-for-one exchange. But under international law, warring parties are simply required to release their prisoners at the end of the conflict.

The actual numbers are hotly contested by both sides. According to Francoise Derron, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, the Red Cross halted its inspection visits to Iran in December, 1987, after thousands of Iraqi prisoners apparently disappeared.

“We noticed that 7,000 Iraqi prisoners registered on earlier trips were not seen again during the December visit,” Derron said. “We asked the Iranian authorities about the fate of these prisoners, and we didn’t receive any satisfactory response.”

She said that beginning at the end of last month, teams had gone to Iraq to register new prisoners. But the Red Cross is in an awkward position for arranging an exchange since it is apparently adhering to its decision to stay away from Iran until the mystery of the missing 7,000 is explained.

The controversy over the missing is only the latest wrangle in an especially bitter war between two countries that have fought many wars over hundreds of years.

In 1985, a report by the U.N. secretary general’s office on the prisoner issue noted: “In neither country are the POWs treated as badly as alleged by the government of the other country; nor, on the other hand, are they treated in either as well as claimed by the government of the detaining power. The existing situation on both sides is cause for serious concern.”

The U.N. report said that problems of the prisoners were similar in both countries. It listed “difficult living conditions, frequently harsh treatment--such as excessive use of force by some camp guards, particularly in Iraq--incidents marked by violence, isolation from the outside world and uncertainty about the length of their captivity.”

In addition to its complaints about physical abuse of its people in Iranian hands, Iraq has complained repeatedly that its soldiers are being subjected to political and religious indoctrination by Iran’s fundamentalist authorities.

Wants to Stay in Iran

The Reuters news agency last week quoted one Iraqi prisoner in Tehran, Ahmed Jabor Khafori, captured in 1982, as saying: “There is a general feeling in favor of the Islamic Republic (Iran) among the prisoners, and I want to stay because it is the center of Islam.”

Indeed, reporters visiting weekly Friday prayers at Tehran University are frequently surprised to find that much of the audience consists of Iraqi war prisoners, dressed in gray with their heads shaved, taking part in denunciations of the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

Whether such behavior is coerced is open to debate. But diplomats in Baghdad said they thought it likely that between 10,000 and 20,000 Iraqi prisoners would refuse to be repatriated to Iraq after the war ends out of fear that they face execution or imprisonment at home for desertion or political offenses.

Replying to some of the criticism about conditions for Iraqi prisoners, Mohammed Ali Nazaran, the Iranian official who heads a committee dealing with Iraqi POWs, said in a recent statement that “even the Geneva protocol on POWs does not include a hundredth of the hospitalities Iran provides to the POWs.”

Secret Camps Alleged

Mahmoud Aghamiri, an Iranian who heads a committee keeping track of the troops held by Iraq, repeated his government’s charges that 30,000 Iranians are unaccounted for and are being kept in secret military camps in Iraq. Aghamiri also alleged that Iranian prisoners are deprived of “even basic medical and sanitary facilities in Iraq.”

Iran maintains that during the initial invasion in 1980, the Iraqis captured “tens of thousands of civilians” who were transported into Iraq and held as prisoners of war. The civilian “noncombatant” prisoners are said to include Iranian Oil Minister Mohammed Javad Tondguyan and his staff.

Iraq has made its own accusations of mistreatment of prisoners. A report issued July 11 said that Iraqi troops taking part in the liberation of the Faw Peninsula in April found the bodies of Iraqi troops who had been bound hand and foot with ropes, “a thing which proves that they were executed after falling into captivity.” The report said “similar crimes” had been committed in the past against Iraqi POWs.

The Iraqis said as recently as July 6 that the United Nations should investigate the fate of 20,000 Iraqis taken prisoner by Iran but not registered with the Red Cross.

2 Major Incidents Cited

Two major incidents from the past are at the core of the bitterness about the prisoner issue.

The first allegedly occurred at a camp of Iranian prisoners in Mosul, Iraq, on Nov. 19, 1982. Iran charged that a “murder and massacre” of military and civilian POWs had taken place in which three people were killed and more than 80 injured.

Two years later, on Nov. 7, 1984, a riot erupted at the Gorgan prison camp in Iran where 3,400 Iraqi POWs were being held. Fighting broke out between prisoners during a visit of the Red Cross. Six prisoners were killed--including three murdered by fellow prisoners--and 35 were wounded.

The incident prompted the Red Cross to suspend its visits to prisoners in Iran for the first time. That suspension lasted more than a year and was followed later by the one still in force over the missing 7,000 POWs.