Financial Times

Intellectuals seek focus on human rights

By Gareth Smyth in Beirut

Published: January 24 2003 19:47 | Last Updated:

January 24 2003 19:47

A group of Arab intellectuals will on Monday publish

an appeal to their governments to press for the

removal of Saddam Hussein to avoid a war that

"threatens with catastrophe the peoples of the

region".

But the petition also seeks to shift international

emphasis from Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of

mass destruction to its human rights record.

It calls for "the rule of democracy in Baghdad, and

for the stationing across Iraq of human rights

monitors from the United Nations and the Arab League".

The call has been endorsed by 30 leading signatories,

including Edward Said, the Palestinian author, Yusri

Nasrallah, the Egyptian film-maker, Sadik al Azm,

philosophy professor in Damascus, and Abdallah Yusuf

Sahar-Muhammad, professor of international relations

at Kuwait University.

Arab public opinion, more or less reflected by Arab

governments, is against US strikes on Iraq. At the

same time the Arabs - including the Iraqi opposition

to Mr Hussein - are concerned that the US has not

clarified what kind of regime it wants to install in

Baghdad.

"Despite all the assurances [from the US] about

involving the opposition and wanting representative

government in Iraq, the tangible results are not

there," said Hamid Bayati, a senior official in the

Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,

the main Shia Muslim opposition group.

Chibli Mallat, the Lebanese lawyer who drafted the

Arab intellectuals' petition, said he hoped it would

attract more signatures next week and then be

presented by dissident Iraqis to the UN Security

Council.

"If Saddam isn't forced to flee, there will surely be

a war. But it must be a war for Iraq and not a war on

Iraq," he said. "It must be to secure the rights of

the Iraqi individual."

The call is likely to receive a mixed reaction from

the Iraqi opposition. Hoshyar Zebari, a leading

official in the Kurdistan Democratic party, expressed

scepticism that Mr Hussein would ever resign, despite

apparent recent pressure from Saudi Arabia.

"The talk of asylum originated in Baghdad," he said.

"The idea is to buy time, a tactic to postpone the

conflict. Saddam will never leave Iraq."

But Mr Zebari said the Kurdish parties controlling

northern Iraq would welcome human rights monitors and

would support their introduction across the rest of

the country. "For 10 years we have wanted the struggle

to be about human rights as well as weapons of mass destruction."