Iraq co-operates

IRAQ has promised the Arab League it will co-operate at an 8 January meeting in Amman on the missing from the 1991 Gulf War, the Cairo- based organisation said on Tuesday. The Iraqi delegation to the League delivered a message to the organisation's deputy secretary general, Ahmed Ben Helli, vowing to be "very co-operative" at the meeting, a League official said.

The Amman meeting, the first of its kind in four years, will group representatives from the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi foreign ministries and officials from the International Commission for the Red Cross (ICRC) as part of a process launched by the Red Cross in 1991. On 19 December, representatives of Kuwait and Iraq met in Geneva, in their first face-to-face encounter since 1998. Kuwait has repeatedly charged that Iraq is holding 605 people, most of them Kuwaitis. Baghdad has rejected the accusations and said it wants clarification about more than 1,000 of its nationals who are still missing or allegedly detained in Kuwait.

ICRC officials said the organisation has no "accurate" figures on the number of Iraqi and Kuwaiti nationals missing since the Gulf war. "The ICRC has no accurate information about the number of missing Kuwaitis and Iraqis," the ICRC head of delegation in Amman, Guy Mellet said.

Denouncing arrest

THE NEW-YORK-based Committee to Protect Journalists protested on Tuesday at the arrest of the Damascus correspondent of the pan- Arab daily Al-Hayat and called on Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad for his release. The Syrian news agency SANA officially reported on Friday that police had detained Ibrahim Hmaydi for publishing "false information".

According to Al-Hayat's Damascus bureau, he had written an article published on 20 December about Syrian preparations to host up to one million Iraqi refugees in the event of a US- led strike on neighbouring Iraq. The CPJ quoted a source at Al-Hayat as saying that he had been denied access to a lawyer.

The CPJ urged Assad to do everything within his power to ensure that Hmaydi was released at once and that any pending criminal prosecution against him is dismissed.

Hmaydi, a Syrian who has worked for the Saudi-owned London-based paper in Damascus since 1994, faces one to three years in prison and a fine of up to one million Syrian pounds ($20,000).

In Cairo the Arab Human Rights Organisation also called in a statement for Hmaydi's release, calling his arrest " a blow to the freedom of the press and the freedom of expression". Another Cairo-based organisation, the Arab Programme of Human Rights Activists, said Hmaydi should be freed immediately, failing which, it said, Syrian authorities should allow human rights groups to attend his interrogation and trial.

The Paris-based organisation Reporters sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders) has also called for Hmaydi's release, as has the Human Rights Association in Syria, which noted that "press freedom is guaranteed by the Syrian constitution".

Protesting Amnesty

SOME 300 people demonstrated in the Bahraini capital, Manama, on Friday demanding the trial of Adel Jassem Flifel, a former colonel in the security services, accused of torture and also calling for a recent general amnesty to be revoked. The demonstration was organised by the Committee for the Victims of Torture, which was formed at the beginning of December in Bahrain. It was calling for the trial of Flifel, accused by the opposition of human rights violations during anti-government disturbances in the 1990s.

Flifel, who had been under an injunction to remain in the country after being charged with abuse of power and embezzlement, fled secretly in May and went to Australia. He returned to Bahrain in November. The previous month, King Hamad issued a decree stipulating that courts can no longer hear cases brought against individuals accused of crimes committed before a general amnesty declared in February 2001 as part of national reconciliation and political reform. That effectively left Flifel free from answering the torture charges against him.

Appeal rejected

A LEBANESE court has rejected the final appeal of a banned television station associated with the opposition to Syria's political dominance of Lebanon. Lebanon's publications court on Friday ruled that a previous court order closing MTV television and its sister radio station should stand, and court sources on Saturday said there could be no further appeal of the initial ruling.

Security forces loyal to Lebanon's Syrian-backed president stormed and closed MTV in September after a court ruled it had run afoul of broadcast laws with its coverage of a parliamentary election seen as a referendum on the Syrian presence. That election was won by MTV owner Gabriel Murr, who beat a candidate from a rival, broadly pro- Syrian wing of his family. MTV often voiced the sentiments of the Christian-based opposition to Syrian power in Lebanon, where Damascus has about 20,000 troops and wide influence in the presidency, courts, military and security services.