July 21, 2003	Monday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 20, 1424

UNITED NATIONS, July 20: The UN Security Council on Tuesday will for the first time take stock, in a long-awaited public session, of the situation in Iraq four months after the US-British invasion.

The session will take place as the United States, which went to war opposed by much of world community, finds itself in a military and financial quagmire and facing the prospect of asking help from the United Nations.

The council session, from which no official statement is expected, will also hear from three members of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), come to New York from Baghdad to offer their personal — not official — assessments of the situation.

That condition, said Spanish UN ambassador Inocensio Arias, rotating security council president, is intended to avoid the thorny question of international recognition of the provisional Baghdad government.

The 25 members of the CPA, set up on July 13, were hand-picked by US civilian administrator Paul Bremer, who retains veto power over any of their decisions, a proviso already the target of demonstrations in Baghdad’s streets and mosques.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will open Tuesday’s session with a report that one UN diplomat described as a “polite but firm warning to the US-British occupiers.”

The 15 security council members on Friday got copies of the report, which was also obtained by the AFP.

Right from the start of his report, Annan recommends a rapid transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people and stresses that, for them, the first priority is “security, or rather, the lack of it.”

For the majority of Iraqis, says the report, daily living conditions “have not improved and might even be worse” than before the US-British invasion.

Annan will urge the occupying coalition to respect international human rights and to shoulder full responsibility for maintaining order and security in Iraq, firmly dismissing the idea of a UN-led international police force for that purpose.

Washington has already vetted the idea of an international force to take the burden off US troops in Iraq.

Annan’s report to the security council will be followed by a presentation by his special envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who will in turn be followed by the three CPA members, Akila al-Hashimi, Ahmed Chalabi and Adnan Pachachi.

Akila Al Hashimi, a protegee of former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tarek Aziz and a member of the Baath Party, was a high official in the former Iraqi foreign affairs ministry.

Ahmed Chalabi is one of the best known Iraqi opposition figures in the West. A Shia Muslim born in 1945 to a wealthy banking family, he left Iraq in 1958 and has lived mainly in the United States and London, returning to Iraq with US forces last April. He is said to have close ties to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Adnan Pachachi, an 81-year-old former Iraqi foreign minister, left Iraq during the Baathist revolution of 1968 and returned two months ago.

He recently gained backing of the White House as a Sunni elder statesman who could play a leading role in post-Saddam Iraq, acceptable to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.—AFP