Iraq Offers Peace to Iran : Tehran Says It Will Study Proposal ‘With Optimism’

Saddam Hussein today declared Iraq will withdraw from territories occupied in Iran and free Iranian prisoners of war, offering an olive branch to Iran while international isolation of Iraq intensifies.

Iran said it will review the proposal “with optimism.”

Hussein, the Iraqi president, appeared to accept a 1975 border treaty that he had rejected in earlier peace talks with Iran, Iraq’s foe in the 1980-88 Persian Gulf war. He also said Iranian prisoners will be freed at border posts.

“Our withdrawal . . . will begin on Friday, while the prisoner release also begins then. We will be the ones to take the initiative in this (prisoner release) respect,” Hussein said in a letter to Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

In a clear reference to the Western naval quarantine of Iraq, Hussein asked Iran to cooperate in turning “the gulf into a lake of peace free of foreign fleets and forces that harbor ill intentions against us.”

Iran said an Iraqi diplomatic delegation was en route to Tehran to deliver Hussein’s message. It said it welcomed the proposal and felt it would establish a “lasting and just peace” between the two countries.

The International Committee of the Red Cross welcomed Hussein’s declaration to release its POWs and offered to assist in their repatriation.

The Red Cross has registered about 17,000 Iranian POWs and about 50,000 Iraqi POWs. But the United Nations and other officials have estimated the total number at 100,000, some of them held since the early days of the war.

In the Iraqi message, read on Baghdad radio by a broadcaster, Hussein did not specify the size of territory his troops will evacuate. Iran claims Iraq still holds 772 square miles, occupied in the final weeks of the Iran-Iraq war. But the United Nations says the area is half that size.

The exact number of Iraqi troops on the territory is not known, but removing them would give Iraq more manpower in the confrontation with U.S. and Western forces deployed in Saudi Arabia.

The Iraqi broadcast disclosed for the first time that there had been contact between Tehran and Baghdad amid the escalating regional crisis triggered by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2.

Hussein said he had received a letter from Rafsanjani last Wednesday, adding he had decided to “accept your suggestion” to consider the 1975 border demarcation treaty as part of a settlement based on the U.N. Security Council Resolution 598.

That resolution halted eight years of hostilities between the two countries on Aug. 20, 1988.

Hussein earlier had rejected the 1975 treaty as a basis for a land demarcation agreement in peace talks after the cease-fire.

He has been demanding full sovereignty over the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, which was divided between the two countries by the 1975 treaty. Shatt-al-Arab, a confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, is Iraq’s key outlet to the gulf.

Faced by U.N. Security Council sanctions and a Western-led military force in Saudi Arabia meant to protect that oil-rich kingdom from Iraq, Hussein has tried to rally Arab nationalists and Muslim fundamentalists.

Saddam said he was “looking forward to a new life of cooperation on the principles of Islam and respect of each other’s rights . . . so we can deter all those fishing in dirty waters and cooperate to turn the gulf into a lake of peace free of foreign fleets and forces that harbor ill intentions against us.”