Posted on 10/19/2002 11:46:53 AM PDT by HAL9000
ABDALI, Kuwait-Iraq border, Oct 19 (AFP) - The handover of Kuwait's national archives looted by Iraq during its 1990-1991 occupation of the emirate will begin on Sunday, a Kuwaiti official said Saturday."Today they (UN officials) will finalize details with the other parties to be ready to start receiving" the archives on Sunday, foreign ministry undersecretary Khaled al-Jarallah told AFP, adding that the documents would be returned through UN officials.
The handover is due to take place at the Abdali border point on the Kuwaiti side of a demilitarized zone along the Iraq-Kuwait frontier. The zone is monitored by the UN Iraq-Kuwait Observers Mission (UNIKOM).
A convoy of Iraqi trucks carrying the archives that set out from Baghdad Friday had reached Safwan near the border with Kuwait and was waiting for a UN green light to cross to the Kuwaiti side of the frontier, a UN source told AFP.
An Iraqi foreign ministry statement later said the handover would get under way at 10 a.m. (0700 GMT) Sunday, but did not specify how long the operation would last.
It quoted the head of the Iraqi delegation handling the return of the archives, Ghassan Mohsen Hussein, as saying Iraqi officials gave Kuwaiti counterparts a detailed list of the archives to be restored.
The list was handed over during a meeting attended by Richard Foran, the UN official in charge of the archives issue, and an Arab League delegation headed by Mohammad Fuad Sirri, Hussein said.
The first batch to be restored on Sunday would include the archives of the Kuwaiti national security department, he said.
Iraq has said it was returning the documents in line with an agreement reached under UN auspices and with the participation of the Arab League, and also in keeping with pledges Baghdad made at last March's Arab summit in Beirut.
Iraq occupied Kuwait for seven months before being evicted by a US-led coalition in February 1991.
Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, while describing the restoration of the archives as "important," said on Saturday that a more important issue was that of some 600 Kuwaitis missing since the 1991 Gulf war.
"Even though it (return of archives) is important, there is something more important to us, which is the issue of the POWs. Everyone in Kuwait is waiting for the POWs," Sheikh Sabah told reporters outside parliament, which reconvened for a new term on Saturday.
The decision to restore the archives was taken during the Beirut summit, the Kuwaiti foreign minister noted.
Kuwait maintains that 605 of its and other countries' nationals disappeared during the Iraqi occupation of the emirate, and claims they are still being held in Iraq.
Iraq has admitted taking prisoners but said it lost track of them during a Shiite Muslim uprising in southern Iraq following its retreat from Kuwait.
Baghdad claims 1,142 of its own nationals have been missing since the Gulf conflict.
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