AMMAN, 24 January 2003 — Kuwaiti, Saudi and Iraqi officials began looking in earnest yesterday into the fate of hundreds of their nationals unaccounted for since the Gulf War and agreed on more talks after two days of closed door meetings.
“The meeting ended. It lasted two days ... and we will meet again on Feb. 16,” the head of the Kuwaiti delegation to the Red Cross-sponsored talks, Ibrahim Majid Shahin, told reporters.
He said the new round of talks will also take place at the Amman headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in the presence of ICRC and Saudi delegates.
The Kingdom has a few citizens missing from the Kuwait crisis and is on an international commission set up in 1991 to look into the fate of the missing.
“This meeting was the first one to discuss details. It was meant to discuss the files of the prisoners,” listed missing since the 1991 Gulf War, Shahin said.
The ICRC remained tight-lipped on the meetings and declined to confirm or deny the forthcoming round of talks.
Yesterday’s meeting was the third of a subcommittee on the missing to be held in Amman since Jan. 8, when Iraq ended a four-year boycott of the negotiations amid US warnings it should disarm voluntarily or face war.
Shahin stressed that Iraq had not provided any information regarding the fate of 605 people, mostly Kuwaitis, who Kuwait says have been missing since the 1991 Gulf War that ended Iraq’s seven-month occupation of the emirate.
“It is too soon to evaluate the progress made in these discussions”, he said, adding that he hoped concrete steps will emerge at the next round of talks.
“Kuwait continues to hope that it will obtain information (from Iraq)” on the fate of the missing and hopes to obtain it by April at the latest when the tripartite commission meets in Geneva, Shahin added.
The commission, set up in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War, was the one which decided at a Dec. 18 meeting in Geneva to go ahead with the Amman talks.
Shahin, the only delegate at the highly secretive talks to speak to the press, said the April meeting would assess the progress made by Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the ICRC in Amman and decide whether they should continue.
Baghdad has rejected Kuwait’s accusations and said it wants clarification about more than 1,000 of its nationals who are still missing or allegedly detained in Kuwait.
Meanwhile the UN coordinator of missing property and persons, Yuli Vorontsov, left Amman yesterday for New York after meeting Wednesday night separately with Iraqi and Kuwaiti delegates.
According to sources close to the Kuwaiti delegation, Vorontsov informed the Kuwaitis that Iraq had information on some prisoners of war but it was not clear when it would pass them to the Kuwaiti side. (Agencies)
