Agreement Is a Welcome Relief Throughout Mideast

In his soiled kaffiyeh, making food deliveries in a battered pickup to earn $3 a day, Abdel Karim Goma has not had the golden retirement due a former Health Ministry director-general. Still, despite his suffering in Iraq’s sanctions-choked economy, Goma was all smiles Monday on learning that his government had struck a deal with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that seems to avert the possibility of this nation being engulfed by renewed military conflict.

“It is a turning point, not only for Iraq but for the whole world,” Goma, 68, said cheerfully.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that, like Goma, millions of Iraqis and others across the Middle East breathed a sigh of relief at the news that Annan apparently brought his last-ditch mission to Baghdad to a successful end. Al’ Hamdulillah! (“Praise be to God!”) was a phrase on many lips.

The prospect of another air campaign against Iraq was, naturally, frightening to Iraqis and disquieting elsewhere in the region, even in those countries that would be most threatened if the allegations about Iraq’s continued development of chemical and biological weapons were proved true.

No one could predict how a U.S.-led military campaign might end. After weeks of increasing tension and with military forces pouring into the region, most people in the Middle East welcomed a nonviolent resolution to the standoff over Iraq’s refusal to allow unrestricted United Nations weapons inspections.

Ahmad Esmat Abdel Meguid, secretary-general of the Arab League, said the Middle East had been saved from “plunging into a dangerous crossroads,” while Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Annan’s accord had given him “great hope.”

Officials in Kuwait, occupied by Iraq in 1990, also welcomed the agreement but noted that Iraqi leaders still would need international supervision to ensure they live up to the accord with Annan. “We don’t trust Iraq. We trust the Security Council,” Sheik Sabah al Ahmed al Jabbar al Sabah, Kuwait’s first deputy prime minister and foreign minister, told Reuters news service.

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz told hundreds of foreign journalists here that Iraq had won “a great victory” because it got the world to hear its “just case,” its complaints about U.N. weapons inspections. Aziz rejected the suggestion that Iraq had buckled under the threat of U.S. military action and bridled at a reporter’s suggestion that he was having to “climb down” from repeated statements that U.N. inspectors would never be allowed into Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s palaces.

As Aziz portrayed it, all it took was reason and goodwill to carry the day. “It was diplomacy--wise, balanced, United Nations world diplomacy that enabled us to reach that agreement--not saber rattling,” he told a news conference.

But sitting at Aziz’s elbow, Annan disagreed politely and said the prospect of military action might have been persuasive--a view supported by a European diplomat here who said: “If it were not for the U.S. military forces that were engaged . . . reaching such an agreement would not have been possible at all.”

The diplomat noted that Iraq also could claim a success in its situation: The Iraqis got worldwide attention to their gripes about the weapons inspections and the continuing economic sanctions. “They were very much in the headlines, and they wanted to be in the headlines,” he said.

As for Iraqis interviewed on the streets Monday, they showed little interest in details of the latest accord, though several interpreted it as a sign of hope that the tough international sanctions, in place since 1990, might soon be lifted.

Samir Naamar, 48, owner of a bustling restaurant selling kebabs and fresh-baked bread, said “of course” the agreement will encourage a long overdue end to sanctions, which bar Iraq from selling its oil, except under close U.N. supervision, with revenue going to buy food and medicine and meet other humanitarian needs.

Naamar said the international punishments have so impoverished Iraq that power in many places is shut off, except for just four hours a day, with the situation worsening as aging equipment fails.

“Could anybody in America live even one day without electricity?” he asked.

“I want to send a message to the American people and to your president,” Naamar pleaded. “Please, please, please, we want to live in peace, really.”

Goma, who in his retirement buys up rations from families who already have enough to eat, then resells the flour, rice, sugar and oil to merchants in the main market, said things must improve. “The Iraqi people feel happy,” he said. “They hope peace will dominate in the region.”