Annan Used Tact, Tactics in Negotiations With Hussein

After weeks of increasingly bellicose rhetoric, the maneuvering of hundreds of attack planes and dozens of warships, and diplomatic shuttling across tens of thousands of air miles, it may have come down to two leaders in a room accompanied only by an interpreter.

One was Kofi Annan, the trim, dapper career bureaucrat who administers the United Nations and rarely raises his voice above a whisper. The other was Saddam Hussein, the feared dictator of a nation of 22 million who is so secretive it is said that only a dozen people know where he sleeps each night.

Their talks later were described as surprisingly candid, businesslike and without the rhetorical flights of propaganda Iraqi officials often employ with U.N. representatives.

Whether Annan left here a genuine peacemaker or naive appeaser will be determined by events over the next few months or even years, but at this point it appears that Hussein has rolled back his demands that U.N. weapons inspectors stay out of presidential compounds that the Iraqis have portrayed as symbols of national sovereignty and dignity. He agreed to new procedures for permitting inspectors into buildings previously declared out of bounds, and the Iraqi government signed a two-page agreement that includes no time limits on inspections, according to U.N. officials.

In cautiously accepting the pact--which goes before the U.N. Security Council this afternoon--U.S. officials asserted that Baghdad’s reversal largely stemmed from the fearsome threat posed to Hussein by an American-British air and naval strike force in the Persian Gulf. Annan even paid tribute of sorts to the armada when he told a news conference here Monday that “you can do a lot with diplomacy, but of course you can do a lot more with diplomacy backed up by firmness and force.”

But those close to him also credit Annan with stitching back together the battered, stretched and frayed international coalition that drove Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait in 1991 and has worked to contain and disarm the Iraqi leader in the years since.

That alliance could unravel again if the agreement crafted by Annan fails to meet the stringent standards set by the United States.

But in any event, the renewed unity at least held long enough to get Hussein to alter his stand in negotiations that took on the theatrical quality of a cliffhanger. Until Hussein’s shift in the Sunday afternoon meeting with Annan in a central Baghdad palace--one of those at issue in the talks--it appeared the U.N. leader might have to fly home to New York without agreement.

Annan had laid the groundwork for negotiations here in earlier meetings in New York with ambassadors of the powerful five permanent members of the Security Council--the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia. Those countries form a sort of international judicial panel enforcing the terms of the 1991 Persian Gulf War cease-fire, including the requirement that Baghdad rid itself of its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Sources said there was uncharacteristic anger and shouting among the five in the New York sessions--elements notably absent from Annan’s meeting with Hussein. But, gradually, Annan coaxed them into what an aide described as “near consensus” behind a formula to resolve the confrontation short of war.

He then used that to persuade Hussein that he could push the Security Council no further and that if the Iraqi leader rejected the proposed deal Annan was offering, that refusal would broaden international support for a military strike against Iraq, sources said.

A telling moment in the talks appeared to come before the meeting with Hussein as the U.N. party and the Iraqi delegation, led by Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz, neared an impasse over the question of whether there should be a 60-day time limit on U.N. weapons inspections at the eight presidential compounds.

For Annan, Iraq’s continued insistence on time limits was a deal-breaker. Unless the Iraqis relented, aides insisted, he was prepared to leave Baghdad empty-handed, despite any blow to his standing and prestige and the fact that his departure would have cleared the way for a military strike.

Aziz kept arguing that only the Americans opposed time limits, officials here said. To counter that, Annan used a break in the talks to telephone Moscow and ask Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov to call back and remind Aziz that even the Russians--who are Iraq’s best friends on the Security Council--opposed the 60-day restriction. Annan was able to make that call because the previous week he had helped persuade the Russians to change their position on time limits in the interest of Security Council unity.

Even with Russian backing, getting Hussein to agree to the final deal was a tightrope walk.

Discussions began Friday night and continued through the day Saturday and into the first hours of Sunday morning.

Annan was accompanied by three advisors and his security chief but spent two of the three hours alone with Hussein, except for an interpreter.

Annan’s negotiation with Hussein followed a session in Paris on Thursday with French President Jacques Chirac and French diplomats familiar with the Iraqi strongman. It relied on flattery, an appeal to the publicity value of reaching an agreement, and a blunt assessment of the military and political strength arrayed against Baghdad, a source said.

In what a senior U.N. official termed a face-saving device for Hussein, Annan committed himself to new procedures for inspecting the presidential sites--though he said they will not impinge on the independence of the professional inspection staff--and to playing a greater role personally in monitoring Iraq’s progress toward removal of economic sanctions imposed after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

But only the Security Council can lift the sanctions, and only after the inspectors have certified that Iraq no longer has illegal weapons, Annan has said.

Annan’s visit in itself was a gesture to Hussein, for it once again put the Iraqi leader at the center of the world stage, bargaining one-on-one with the chief of the United Nations. Aziz declared that that alone was a major gain for Iraq.

After the deal was done, U.N. officials were more relieved than triumphant, perhaps aware of the pending American scrutiny and knowing how close the mission had come to collapsing in public failure.

When a British reporter asked Fred Eckhard, Annan’s press secretary, if he would be celebrating with a bottle of champagne, Eckhard, aware of the Muslim attitude toward drinking, replied with the kind of diplomatic answer his boss would have been proud of: “This,” he said, “is a nonalcoholic country.”