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Iraq says end of

sanctions close

BAGHDAD: A defiant Iraq said on Saturday U.N. sanctions against Baghdad would soon wither away and the anti-Iraq camp abroad would vanish like bubbles.

Iraq's optimistic note was sounded by the newspaper al-Jumhouriya, a government mouthpiece, which ridiculed foreign reports of an imminent change of government in Baghdad and attacked the United States as an "empire of evil".

However the US ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, said on Friday Iraq's latest revelations of its nuclear and biological weapons programmes made the lifting of sanctions a remote possibility in the near future.

"Despite all attempts by America, the sanctions...are wearing out," Jumhouriya told readers hit hard by sanctions imposed after US-led forces swept Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991.

"Current events are nothing more than bubbles...bound to blow up by themselves outside Iraq," it said.

Jumhouriya said Iraq would not back away from its decision to cooperate fully with the United Nations in getting rid of weapons prohibited under terms of the ceasefire at the end of the Gulf War.

It praised a statement by U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus saying that Iraqi disclosures could advance the lifting of an embargo on sales of Iraq's huge reserves of oil.

It said high-level defections of Iraqis, including two daughters of President Saddam Hussein, did not mean that US dreams of a change in government in Baghdad were about to be realised.

Jumhouriya described Lieutenant-General Hussein Kamel Hassan, Saddam's son-in-law and the most senior of the fugitives who fled to Jordan on August 8, as "a dummy" in the hands of the United States.

It said that what was being circulated by foreign media on Iraq was nothing more than "the buzzing of flies", and soon the United States would realise that Iraqis wanted nothing but to live in a country ruled by Saddam.

Since the defection of Hussein Kamel, the United States has sought to further isolate Baghdad. It sent a senior official to the region to muster support for its tough anti-Iraq policy.

King Hussein of Jordan, a long-time backer of the Baghdad government, has had a change of heart following the defections, publicly calling for major political changes in Iraq.

Iraqi newspapers pubished a picture of Saddam chairing a meeting of officials, including Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz.

They also front-paged a statement by the Minister of Culture and Information, Hamed Youssef Hummadi, praising Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for saying that no one had the right to talk about the falling of the government in Iraq other than the Iraqi people.

Babel newspaper, owned by President Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday, accused the United States of adopting an "unjustified, immoral and non-objective attitude" towards Iraq.

Arms inspector Ekeus, a Swedish diplomat, said on Friday Iraq went on a crash programme to produce its first nuclear bomb and deploy lethal biological agents on bases around the country only months before the 1991 Gulf War.-Reuter