The Iraqi minister, Naji Sabri, held talks on Saturday with his Iranian counterpart Kamal Kharazi on the issue of the PoWs, who continue to languish in prisons 13 years after the two sides ended their 1980-1988 war.
Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported after the meeting that the ministers had promised to resolve all the humanitarian issues in their troubled relations, but offered few concrete details about the talks.
However, there have already been signs of an important thaw in ties, notably when Tehran earlier last week released 682 Iraqi prisoners.
Iran and Iraq never signed a formal peace treaty to mark the finish to their bloody and ultimately inconclusive war, which left a million dead on both sides.
Sabri’s visit, scheduled to end Monday, also comes in a politically-charged context, because of rumours of a potential US attack against Iraq as part of its “war against terrorism,” a prospect Teheran has already come out against.
“We have to close the file of humanitarian problems, and it will have very positive repercussions on the relations between the two countries,” Kharazi said after his meeting with Sabri.
One hurdle to getting the PoWs home will be getting the sides to agree on how many there are.
Iraq says it has 29,000 prisoners in Iran, and accuses Tehran of not registering some 20,000 of them with the International Committee of the Red Cross. It also says some 60,000 Iraqis have disappeared.
Tehran says 3,206 of its PoWs are still being held in Iraq, and has said it is willing to listen to Baghdad’s evidence over the disputed figures.
Other prickly issues between the countries, whose conflict was sparked over rights to the shared Tigris river, as well as ideological differences, include Iraqi refugees in Iran and the fact they host the other’s opposition groups.
Iran’s vice minister for the interior charged with immigration, Hodjatoleslam Hassan Ali Ebrahimi, said Saturday that were 220,000 officially registered Iraqi refugees in Iran, but that the actual total was “near 300,000.” However, other generally accepted estimates place the figure at between 400,000 and 450,000 refugees.
“Officially, there are 220,00 Iraqi refugees in Iran, and many of them live in some 20 camps in the west and southwest of the country,” explained Mohammad Nouri, an official of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Iran, to AFP.
He said that there were four types of these refugees: members of Iraq’s opposition Shiite Muslims who fled repression after the 1991 Gulf War, opposition Sunni Muslims, Kurds whose numbers are decreasing, and Iraqis of Iranian origin whose situation is “unclear.”
The countries are now trying to assemble a “mixed commission” to verify the status of the official and unofficial refugees.
The Iraqi ambassador to Tehran recently said there was a large number of returnees who wanted to take advantage of an amnesty offered by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in July 1999.
The Iranian vice minister Ebrahimi has also said that there are 20,000 Iranian refugees in Iraq, and that “1,600 had asked to be repatriated.”
The issue is further complicated, according to humanitarian groups, by the fact that the higher estimates include thousands of opposition members of both countries, who are often still active and whose status is murky at best.
These people — especially Iran’s main armed opposition, the Iraqi-based People’s Mujahedin, and militants of the Tehran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq — are considered another major problem.
Iran accuses the People’s Mujahedin, which has carried out numerous violent operations, of being “terrorists.”—AFP