960416

Anbari vows to

Stay till oil

deal reached

UNITED NATIONS:Iraq's chief negotiator in oil-for-food talks with the United Nations said he was puzzled by constant changes in a draft agreement but that he would stay in New York as long as necessary.

Ambassador Abdul Amir al-Anbari has accused the United Nations of backing down on key parts of the agreement he said both sides had settled last week. He blamed the changes on pressures from two Security Council members, presumably the United States and Britain.

Anbari said he was not sure whether the United Nations would continue to come up with new proposals on how to implement a 1995 Security Council resolution allowing Iraq to sell $2 billion worth of oil over six months to buy food, medicine and other necessities for its people.

"It's a vicious circle," he said in a telephone interview late on Monday. "There is no way of knowing whether negotiations are open-ended or whether one day we are going to say, 'that's it, let's sign.'"

The resolution was meant to ease the impact on hard-pressed Iraqis of stringent U.N. sanctions, imposed shortly after Baghdad's troops invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

Anbari said he had planned to leave New York first on Sunday, then on Tuesday but cancelled his plans. "I will be here as long as it takes to finalise an agreement," he said. Reuter