Iraq says Kuwait distorts facts on summit

Iraq yesterday accused Kuwait of distorting the facts by apportioning blame on Baghdad for failed efforts to lift UN sanctions on Iraq at last month's Arab summit. "...The Kuwaiti rulers are trying feverishly to reverse facts and spread lies alleging that Iraq had caused these efforts to fail," Iraq's Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed Al Sahaf said in remarks published by Iraqi newspapers yesterday.

Baghdad and Kuwait have traded accusations over the past weeks, blaming each other for the failure to resolve the sanctions issue, billed as one of two main talking points at the summit alongside the conflict in the Middle East. Officials from Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Syria tried in vain to produce language acceptable to Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in meetings that delayed the final session of the Amman summit by two hours.

But the summit failed to achieve a compromise between Baghdad and Kuwait on the conflict which has been festering since the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. A final communique after a two-day summit of the 22-member Arab League said a committee led by Jordan's King Abdullah would pursue discussions on the situation between Iraq and Kuwait. Sahaf said: "This is the fact...Iraq had approved the final draft but heads of the Kuwaiti and Saudi delegations drove efforts at the summit to failure."

Baghdad wants the Arab world to help it throw off 11 years of sanctions and get rid of U.S-British air patrols enforcing "no-fly zones" in north and south Iraq. It said this week that some 10,000 people, mostly children, had died during February alone because of diseases it blamed on the sanctions. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which still distrust their Gulf neighbour, want Iraq to comply with Security Council resolutions, including those that demand the scrapping of its weapons of mass destruction.