Kurds, Hussein Agree to Terms : Iraq: Rebels will abandon revolt in exchange for a promise of political autonomy, their leader says. Talks with the president will continue.

Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, after a face-to-face meeting with President Saddam Hussein, declared in Baghdad on Wednesday that they have struck a deal for peace in northern Iraq.

The Kurds will abandon their shattered revolt in exchange for promises of political autonomy and democratic reform, said Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the major Kurdish opposition groups.

“The agreement affirms the principle of democracy in Iraq, press freedoms and . . . allowing all Kurds to return to towns and villages,” Talabani told reporters in the Iraqi capital. Details still have to be nailed down, the veteran Kurdish politician and guerrilla chieftain cautioned, saying talks will continue next week. Exiled Kurdish spokesmen said Talabani had insisted on U.N. guarantees for the autonomy plan, but Talabani did not mention a U.N. role in his Baghdad announcement.

The apparent breakthrough came after five days of negotiations between a Talabani-led delegation and Iraqi officials led by Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Hussein’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council and steadfast ally of the politically beleaguered president.

In other developments:

* U.S. officials and Middle East experts in Washington generally welcomed the Baghdad announcement, with one commenting that the tentative agreement represents “the sanest thing the Iraqi government and the Kurds could do.”

* Three hundred British marines moved into the Iraqi border town of Zakhu to protect Kurdish inhabitants there from armed Iraqi police. British officers told reporters that they had issued a 48-hour deadline for the police to clear out. The U.S. military denied that any ultimatum had been issued, but President Bush said his government is concerned about the Iraqis’ continued presence in the town.

* About 100 German soldiers were flown into the northern Iranian air base of Bakhtaran to help set up a food distribution point for Iraqi Kurds seeking shelter across the Iranian frontier. The deployment was one of the first major movements of German troops outside Europe since the end of World War II.

In Baghdad

A midday dispatch by the Iraqi News Agency was the first official confirmation that the Hussein-Jalabani talks were taking place. But exiled Kurdish spokesmen disclosed last Saturday that Talabani and three other Kurdish leaders had gone to Baghdad for political talks.

Later Wednesday, Baghdad Television, monitored in Amman, showed Hussein and Talabani in conversation, seated and smiling, the president in military fatigues and the Kurd in a traditional outfit of baggy pants and a short jacket. Reporters in Baghdad said the Iraqi strongman, who brutally put down Kurdish revolts in the 1970s and ‘80s and again last month, ceremoniously kissed each of the Kurdish delegates on both cheeks.

Hussein, hanging on to power despite his calamitous defeat in Kuwait and twin rebellions by the Kurds and Shiite Muslims, seems to be making political compromises almost daily, reducing his own power and that of the central government, at least on paper.

Except for his political base among Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, he has lost a large measure of authority, especially since his army and security forces no longer have the manpower to cover the country.

But until he is out, he remains resourceful. Exiled Kurdish spokesmen continued Wednesday to insist that Talabani can be trusted not to be trapped in a Hussein ruse. The Kurdish leader apparently will stay on in Baghdad until he is satisfied with the details of the agreement.

Talabani was accompanied by Sami Abdel Rahman of the People’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan, Rasoul Mamand of the Socialist Party of Kurdistan and Nechirvan Barzani of the Kurdish Democratic Party.

“The final agreement will be signed by Masoud Barzani,” uncle of the KDP representative and son of the late Mustafa Barzani, the longtime Kurdish warlord, Talabani said.

The Kurdish leaders assembled in Baghdad represent most of the Kurdish political parties of Iraq. Talabani and Masoud Barzani, probably the two best-known Kurdish figures worldwide, command sizable militias.

Details of the autonomy deal were murky. According to some exile reports, the agreement in principle was based on a 1970 autonomy plan for the Kurds, which gave them--on paper--a regional government with powers over education, culture and other areas. But Baghdad’s pledge was never fully enacted, and within a few years the Kurds were fighting the central government, which Hussein, then chief of security, already effectively controlled.

Hussein’s war with his Kurdish minority came to the world’s attention in 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, when the Iraqi military attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja, near the Iranian border, with chemical weapons, causing thousands of deaths and touching off outrage at the United Nations.

In this week’s negotiations, according to Kurdish spokesmen abroad, Talabani and his delegation sought not only U.N. guarantees, which the participants were not in a position to assure, but also the inclusion of the oil center of Kirkuk in an autonomous region for the country’s 3.5 million Kurds; a political federation with Baghdad, and government pledges that Kurdish refugees would not be harmed if they returned to the country.

The government claims that nearly 200,000 have already come back over the past two weeks.

No fighting has been reported in the north since the talks began. According to one report, the safety of Talabani and the other Kurds in Baghdad was assured when the Hussein regime turned some of its own officials over to the Kurds as hostages.

In Washington

The U.S. State Department had no immediate official comment on the agreement. However, one Bush Administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that in the short term, the agreement “could help facilitate confidence-building measures for the Kurdish refugees” and convince them that it will be safe to head for the allied-protected enclaves being established in northern Iraq.

But, he said, the Administration remained skeptical about the prospects for a long-term agreement between Kurds and Hussein, based on the Iraqi president’s “past performance.”

“He has a tendency to say one thing and act in a contrary manner,” the official said.

Further assessment by the Administration, he said, would be based on what was actually agreed to and how it will be implemented.

The tentative agreement, however, was seen in a more positive light by Middle East analyst Christine Helms, who said, “It’s the sanest thing the Iraqi government and the Kurds could do.”

She said the tent camps offer no long-term hope for the Kurds and that Talabani recognized that his clans could count on neither Iran nor Turkey for assistance for anything beyond immediate problems posed by the flight from Iraq.

Havens in Iraq

President Bush said the Administration was looking at the problem posed by the continued presence of Iraqi authorities--either soldiers or police--in the haven of Zakhu, the Iraqi border town where U.S. troops are building tent encampments for the Kurdish refugees now clinging to sanctuary near Turkey.

Asked specifically whether a deadline should be set for the Iraqis to leave the town, Bush told reporters: “We’re working on that problem, and we’ll have more to say about it later. It’s a serious problem, but I think we’re getting it under control.”

While some officials denied an Associated Press report from Zakhu that a 48-hour deadline had been set and delivered to the Iraqis, others portrayed it as an option that was being discussed with the British and the French as the coalition partners seek a way to secure the area for the refugees.

On Wednesday, it appeared that the Administration was content to wage a war of nerves with the approximately 300 Iraqis, said to be lightly armed, on the streets of Zakhu--while holding out the possibility that an ultimatum would be given later today for their removal.

“Their purpose appears to be to establish a presence. It’s a matter of concern,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said.

The U.S. troops are “confronting them . . . and they have moved aside,” Fitzwater said.

“Our interest is in helping the refugees. We will continue to do that whatever the circumstances, and we’ll continue to try to make it as safe as possible,” the press secretary said.

The camps are being erected to coax roughly 850,000 refugees, most of them Kurds, to return from their flight to the mountainous region of the Turkish-Iraqi frontier, where they are subsisting in generally filthy conditions and without sufficient shelter, food and water.

State Department spokesman Mark Dillen said that U.S. and coalition forces had delivered 5,915.5 tons of relief supplies to the refugees. He said that more than 1 million refugees are now in Iran, with another 500,000 near the Iraqi-Iranian border.

Dillen said that, according to “rough estimates,” one-third are sheltered in tents, another one-third had found makeshift shelter in cars, mosques, private homes or public places, and one-third are without any shelter.

Dillen praised Iran’s efforts on behalf of the refugees, saying the “Iranian authorities have been making considerable efforts, and they face huge problems.” One source said that the U.S. supplies being offered to Iran for the refugees were mostly blankets.

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang, in Washington, contributed to this story.