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Members of the United Nations Security Council were holding intense dialogue on the lifting of stringent comprehensive UN economic sanctions on Iraq, Council President Adolfo Aguilar Zinser said on Thursday.
"The Security Council is in intense dialogue among its members to establish conditions under which some of the UN resolutions regarding Iraq ought to be discussed, and possibly be revised," Mexican UN Ambassador Zinser told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York.
Zinser did not elaborate on what resolutions could be modified, but said the dialogue would continue over the weekend.
The council was expected to take up the issue of removing sanctions on Iraq while convening next Tuesday to discuss UN weapons inspections in post-war Iraq and the humanitarian situation in the country, Zinser said.
He confirmed that so far none of the 15 council members had submitted any draft resolution calling for raising the sanctions on Iraq, which have been in place since 1990.
Currently, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbes was also engaged in intense dialogue with his counterparts of the other council members on the removal of the sanctions on Iraq, he noted.
But Zinser did not say whether the private consultations among the council members were a result of US President George W. Bush's appeal Wednesday for lifting the sanctions after the fall of the Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein.
The UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Iraq, including anoil embargo, in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion of its tiny neighbor Kuwait.
Under relevant UN resolutions, only after UN inspectors verify the removal of all Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) could the council adopt a resolution to lift the sanctions.
However, neither UN inspectors, who left Iraq on the eve of the US-led war, nor the US-British coalition forces have so far discovered any solid evidence that Iraq has nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Observers here believe it could take some time for the council to agree on whether to end the sanctions on Iraq with the WMD issue unresolved.
Russia has already expressed its opposition to lifting the sanctions on Iraq just because of a regime change in Iraq as suggested by Bush.
"The decision cannot be automatic. It requires the fulfillment of certain conditions stipulated in relevant UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq," Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said in Moscow on Thursday.
(Xinhua News Agency April 17, 2003)
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