Iraq Rejects Iran Proposal Tied to POWs

The Iraqi government Saturday rejected Iran’s latest proposal for peace in the Persian Gulf, declaring that the offer to swap prisoners if Iraqi troops pull out of occupied zones along the border amounts to “human barter.”

“The position adopted by Iran over the issue of the prisoners of war is a position of blackmail. We refuse to be blackmailed,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz told reporters.

The announcement appeared to end any immediate hope for a resolution to the nine-year-old conflict and left each side again blaming the other for the protracted deadlock in peace negotiations.

Iran made its latest offer last week, even as U.N. envoy Jan Eliasson was admitting failure after a 17-day shuttle mission between Iranian and Iraqi officials that resulted in little more than plans for more indirect talks.

Iran proposed a swap of about 100,000 prisoners held by the two sides--70,000 of them still captive in Iran more than a year after the August, 1988, cease-fire--if Iraq agrees to pull out of the more than 386 square miles it occupies on the border.

Aziz, saying that international law requires immediate release of prisoners without military conditions, criticized Iran for what he said was an attempt to barter prisoners for territorial objectives.

“They want to use human beings as hostages to achieve political ends,” he complained at a news conference. “I am not surprised to see the Iranians do that. They do the same things with the hostages in Lebanon.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati had called the proposal “a move of good will and a bid to break the present artificial impasse which benefits no one.” But it was clear that his offer fell short of Iraq’s longstanding demand that Iran remove itself from the Shatt al Arab waterway, the point where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers merge and cut a wide path into the Persian Gulf, providing Iraq’s only major access to the sea.

It is the Shatt al Arab that Iran and Iraq had been fighting over for years, and Aziz affirmed Saturday that it is unlikely there will be any lasting peace in the Persian Gulf until full sovereignty over the waterway is returned to Iraq.

Though he downplayed the likelihood of resuming active hostilities along the tense, 750-mile-long border, Aziz said the failure to conclude a peace agreement leaves that possibility open.

But Iraq is not likely to make the first hostile move, he added. “After eight years of war, Iraq would not resort to the use of force to resolve a matter that can be resolved, and should be resolved, through peaceful means.”

More than 200 journalists flew to Baghdad for the press conference, most of them Egyptian reporters who had expected Iraq’s response to an exodus of Egyptian workers from Iraq, many of them complaining of poor treatment and difficulty in getting their money.

More than 20,000 Egyptians have left since the beginning of October, when a new Iraqi regulation took effect barring unskilled Arab workers from transferring more than 10 dinars a month (about $55) out of the country.

Despite additional daily flights between Baghdad and Cairo to airlift the workers home, thousands remain lined up at Baghdad’s airport seeking passage home, and tension among the workers left in Iraq is escalating.

According to unconfirmed eyewitness reports, four Egyptians were killed and three were injured Friday night when a massive street celebration over Egypt’s victory in a soccer match with Algeria erupted into a near riot.

Two Egyptians who witnessed the disturbance said that an estimated 2,000 Egyptian workers had poured into the streets near Baghdad’s Little Cairo shortly before 7 p.m. when a truck they described as an army utility vehicle bore down on the celebrants. They said the crowd attempted to disperse but was unable to get out of the way in time, and the vehicle ran over three of the workers. It stopped briefly, then moved on and struck four more people.

Iraqi officials have refused to confirm the report.