09/22/2002
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-10144

IRAQ AND MISSING CAPTIVES

After U.S.-led coalition forces expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991, Saddam Hussein agreed to a number of conditions demanded by the United Nations. These included U-N Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687, that require the Iraqi dictator to release immediately any Gulf War prisoners and to cooperate in accounting for missing and dead Kuwaitis and others from the Gulf War.

Saddam Hussein remains in violation of those resolutions. As President George W. Bush pointed out in his speech to the United Nations on September 12th, more than six-hundred people remain unaccounted for from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. They include Kuwaiti, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals, and one American pilot.

U-N Secretary-General Kofi Annan has criticized the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein's refusal to cooperate with the U-N on this issue. Baghdad has also ignored requests from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to account for those who disappeared during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.

Those missing as a result of Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait are just one part of the story. The Iraqi regime has the world’s worst record overall for numbers of persons who have disappeared and remain unaccounted for. It continues to ignore the more than sixteen-thousand disappearance cases conveyed to it by the U.N, most of them Iraqi Kurds. In August 2001, Amnesty International estimated that one-hundred thousand people disappeared during the Iraqi regime’s 1988 military campaign against Iraqi Kurds. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims disappeared from 1980 to 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. Iran, meanwhile, reports that Baghdad has still not accounted for five thousand Iranian prisoners of war missing since the Iran-Iraq war.

As President Bush said in his speech to the United Nations, Iraq has answered a decade of U-N demands with a decade of defiance. It is time for Saddam Hussein to stop flouting the will of the United Nations and account for those who remain unaccounted for.