UNITED NATIONS, 10 May 2003 — The UN Security Council met yesterday for initial discussion of a draft resolution which would lift sanctions against Iraq and put the country’s oil-rich economy under US control for one year.

The US-backed draft also proposes cutting the proportion of Iraq’s oil sales set aside to compensate Kuwait for a 1990 invasion and comes one month after US tanks rolled into Baghdad and Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed. Anti-war council members including France and Russia are expected to challenge some of the draft’s proposals.

Britain’s ambassador to the UN Jeremy Greenstock said the initial discussions in the Security Council over the draft had taken place “in a constructive atmosphere” and he had sensed a “wish to look forward, not back” among Council members.

The ambassador of Germany, which along with France and Russia fiercely opposed the US-led war, agreed. “The general trend of discussion is that this draft does not fight the fights of the past,” Gunter Pleuger said.

The meeting at the United Nations came as Iraqi opposition leaders meeting in Baghdad laid out plans for a new democratic government, insisting that officials from Saddam’s Baath Party be banned from political life.

In northeastern Iraq, US officers said their forces had taken over all the checkpoints held by the armed Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mujahedeen, as part of a previously arranged cease-fire agreement.

Senior officers said that a US Army general had held disarmament talks with leaders of the group.

Despite the positive comments at the opening of the Security Council talks, the US bid to have UN sanctions lifted faces a diplomatic challenge from other Council members, reflecting a damaging prewar showdown at the world body.

Russia particularly has insisted that the United Nations must declare Iraq free of weapons of mass destruction — in line with previous UN resolutions — before the sanctions can be lifted. This threatens to embarrass the United States, which has yet to turn up any of the banned weapons that it said Saddam’s regime was developing, and which it used to justify going to war. France yesterday also insisted on a central UN role in rebuilding Iraq, amid concern that the United States will minimalize the world body’s influence in reconstruction efforts and reserve lucrative contracts for US firms.

French President Jaques Chirac said his country would be “constructive” during the UN discussions, but did not elaborate.

“At this stage I confirm France’s willingness to broach discussions on the future of Iraq in an open and constructive spirit,” Chirac said while on a visit to Poland.

Washington has insisted that a long UN debate is not required. “The president wants the Security Council to act quickly and there is no need for a lengthy debate,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher promised transparent management of the country’s potentially vast oil revenues if the UN Council approves the draft. “How this money can be used to benefit the Iraqi people, by the Iraqis, with transparency, and in consultations with the international finance institutions and others is fairly well specified in the resolution,” he said.

The 15 UN Security Council members are due to hold a weekend retreat with Secretary General Kofi Annan and to hold new consultations on Iraq.

Meanwhile, Iraqi leaders and US officials in Baghdad late Thursday held their first talks aimed at forging an interim government since a new US official was named to run the war-battered nation.

Two new seats were added to the Council of Five, a core group of leaders tapped by the United States to oversee the birth of a democratic government after Saddam’s fall.

Ahmad Chalabi, from the US-backed Iraqi National Congress, said the five had agreed to ban former members of Saddam’s Baath Party from political life, but there was no word on the initiative from US officials.

And in the southern city of Basra, the chief of Iraq’s main Shiite opposition group was expected to return home after 23 years of exile in neighboring Iran to take up the struggle for an Islamic Iraq.

Mohammed Baqer Al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Assembly for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was expected to arrive today, aides said.