September 4, 2002	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Saani25,1423

RIYADH, Sept 3: Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller has urged the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states to endorse the European Union peace plan for the Middle East.

During a meeting with the GCC foreign ministers, on the sidelines of the two-day foreign ministers’ conference of the GCC in Jeddah, he urged the Gulf states to try and push the Palestinians to support the EU peace plan so as to “create a momentum for peace in the region”.

“I introduced (to the GCC ministers) the peace road map which we have made in the European Union,” he told newsmen after the meeting.

“Of course, the GCC want it to be quicker than three years” Moeller said.

“I can’t say I got the support. They now have to study it. I have left the plan with them. They supported the main lines of the initiative, but of course not all the steps because they need time to analyse,” he added.

Moeller who also met the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah added, “Prince Abdullah said he would not work against it. He wished me good luck with it”.

Although the details of the EU peace plan have not been made public yet, indications are that it combines the features of the Arab Peace plan proposed by the Crown Prince Abdullah and later adopted by the Beirut Arab League summit earlier in March this year, and President George Bush’s call for elections.

The proposed EU Middle East peace plan is to be implemented in three stages, apparently over a period of three years.

Meanwhile, the GCC foreign ministers’ during their two-day meeting warned the United States against a military attack on Iraq.

The Omani minister of state for foreign affairs, Yussef bin Alawi, warned the United States of the risk of plunging the world into chaos by attacking Iraq.

“If the United States invades Iraq, it will cause deep anti- American feeling (throughout the region) and will provoke revenge and violence in the Arab and Islamic countries,” Alawi said during the inaugural session of the GGC foreign ministers’ moot in Jeddah.

Kuwait’s Prime Minister Shaikh Khalifa ibn Salman Al-Khalifa urged the Arabs to voice a clear stance against any new war in the region.

Agencies add: Iraq on Monday opened to reporters a facility it says the West suspects of being an arms site. The tour for the media, part of a campaign by Baghdad to repudiate US allegations that it is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, was the latest in a series conducted over the past weeks.

It came as Iraq stepped up a diplomatic drive to avert threatened US military action, saying it would discuss a conditional return of United Nations weapons inspectors with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

The White House dismissed the meeting as pointless. “Iraq changes positions on whether it will let the inspectors in more often than (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein changes bunkers,” President George Bush’s spokesman, Ari Fleischer, told reporters.

Reporters were flown by helicopter to a site at Al Qaim, in Anbar province, 420kms west of Baghdad, accompanied by Hussam Mohammed Amin, head of the Iraqi national monitoring directorate, the office used for liaison with UN inspectors.

They were shown a uranium extraction plant destroyed during the 1991 invasion. The floor was littered with empty and damaged barrels and heaps of twisted iron bars and concrete slabs.

Debris was removed from the plant, built in the 1980s, under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision, Baghdad says.