 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 April 2000 Issue No. 477 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 April 2000 Issue No. 477
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Normalisation in Washington's shadow
By Salah HemeidOn Sunday, Iran released 500 Iraqi prisoners of war (POWs), the first of some 2,000 Iraqi soldiers it promised to free as a goodwill gesture toward its old foe. By today, Iran was scheduled to have released the remaining 1,500 Iraqi POWs.
Thousands of relatives, including young boys and girls who had never seen their fathers, welcomed home the weary former soldiers, some of whom had been held for more than two decades by Iran.
The anxious relatives waited nervously near the border, many of them for as long two days before the battered prisoners walked through the Al-Muntheriya desert crossing-point ending their long years in captivity.
Before being set free, every Iraqi prisoner was given a copy of the Qur'an, a small Persian rug and a pair of shoes as a gift from their former captors. The Iraqi government said that it would give each former prisoner 30,000 Iraqi dinars, equivalent to $150 dollars, as a gift from President Saddam Hussein.
The POWs release was the latest gesture made by Iran to mend fences with its Arab neighbour. In January, Teheran unilaterally freed some 276 Iraqi POWs to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ayatollah Khomeini, its late revolutionary leader.
Nearly 100,000 POWs taken during the 1980-1989 Iran-Iraq war were repatriated through prisoner exchanges beginning in 1989.
POWs are a major obstacle in the efforts to normalise relations between the two countries. Each has accused the other of giving false accounts about the number of prisoners still held. Iraq claims that there are still some 13,000 POWs in Iran, while Tehran accuses Baghdad of holding 2,806 Iranian prisoners. Iraq claims that it has released all Iranian prisoners.
The latest Iranian move comes amid an exchange of accusations between the two regimes in which each claimed that the other was encouraging their neighbour's opposition groups to launch attacks from their territory.
On Monday, Baghdad accused what it called "Iranian agents" of launching a mortar and rocket attack against targets in southern Iraq. It said the shells fell close to a residential area but caused no casualties.
Last month Iraq claimed that it shot down two pilotless Iranian reconnaissance planes which apparently were trying to spy on the camps of the Iranian opposition group, the Mujahideen Khalq.
A few days before that incident, Iraq blamed Iran for a mortar attack that hit a residential apartment building in Baghdad, killing four civilians. The onslaught came after the Mujahideen Khalq claimed that its militants in Iran were responsible for several attacks in Tehran and other Iranian cities.
The recent ups and downs in Iraqi-Iranian relations coincided with attempts by the United States to re-establish ties with Iran, a policy that it began following the 1997 election of reformist President Mohamed Khatami.
In March, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made the most significant gesture by the American government to Iran in more than 20 years by announcing the lifting of some sanctions and saying America wanted to start a new relationship with Tehran. Albright also admitted that Washington had made mistakes in its dealings with Iran and conceded some responsibility for the deterioration of bilateral relations.
In a move seen as an attempt by Iran to demonstrate its desire to cooperate with the United States, Iran has begun to detain ships that are carrying Iraqi oil outside of the framework of the UN food-for-oil programme.
In the second such incident within a week, Iranian naval forces on Monday detained a tanker flying the Panamanian flag, allegedly smuggling Iraqi oil, when it entered Iranian waters to circumvent US ships enforcing the embargo elsewhere in the Persian Gulf.
Such actions are vital to the US efforts to curtail Iraq's exportation of oil in violation of sanctions, an activity that Washington says brings some $500 million to $1 billion annually to Hussein's government.
By re-establishing ties with Iran, Iraq believes Washington is trying to increase its pressure to further isolate Hussein's government. Indeed, Iraq's official media have warned Iran against "playing with fire" by allying itself with Washington.
