BAGHDAD, (Reuters):
IRAQ'S FOREIGN minister attacked UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, yesterday, saying he had helped the US-led invasion in which he said some 1,250 Iraqi civilians had been killed since March 20.
"We have now more than 1,250 civilians killed and 5,000 injured all over the country since the beginning of the war," Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, told Reuters in an interview in Baghdad's central Palestine hotel.
Sabri said Annan had facilitated the invasion by US and British troops two weeks ago.
"The UN secretary-general has done nothing to stop the war, in fact the UN secretary-general has done something in the opposite direction," he said.
"He has facilitated the invasion. He has withdrawn the UNIKOM people between Kuwait and Iraq so as to open the border for the enemy force to invade Iraq," said Sabri, referring to the withdrawal of UN observers between Iraq and Kuwait.
UNIKOM, the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission, had monitored the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border since the 1991 Gulf War.
Sabri said the United Nations had also interrupted Iraq's oil-for-food accord by pulling out international humanitarian staff on the eve of war. "All these moves are illegal and facilitated the aggression," he said.
He also urged Arab countries to take punitive measures against the United States and Britain to stop the war. "Arab countries can use a lot of their resources such as oil, trade to stop this aggression because the aggression is designed as an aggression against the whole Arab nation."
He said Iraq was treating US and British prisoners of war "very well and in accordance with Geneva Convention", while Washington and London treated Iraqis badly.
"They have been violating this convention by badly treating our civilians who they caught as prisoners of war," Sabri said. The United States says it is abiding by the convention in its treatment of thousands of Iraqi prisoners.
Asked if he could give a number of US and British prisoners of war, Sabri said: "I don't have a figure."
