Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

REVUE DE PRESSE-PRESS REVIEW-BERHEVOKA ÇAPÊ-~NISTA STAMPA-DENTRO DE LA PRENSA-BASIN ÖZETi
Simon Kreitem/Reuters
•Lady Thatcher leaving the inquiry after her testimony Wednesday.
She parried polite but pointed questions from Lord Justice Scott.
,~hatcher Tells Inquiry
She Wasn't Informed of
.S'ensitive Sales to Iraq
By Richard W. Stevenson blanket immunity from prosecu-
New'York Times Sen'ic'e tion.
LONDON - Former Prime Occasionally turning combative,
Minister Margaret Thatcher said the former prime minister repeat-
Wednesday she had been unaware edly turned aside suggestions that
thatjunior ministers relaxed a pro- . the policy shift outlined in governhibition
on sales of militarily sensi- ment documents and previous testive
goods to Iraq in 1988,allowing timony to the inquiry amounted to
President Saddam Hussein's re- a major change in the way Britain
gime to buy British weapons-mak- dealt with requests by its manufacing
equipment in the years before turers to export "dual use" equip:
the Gulf War.
ment to Iraq.
Testifying for the first time in an Such equipment, including maofficiiil
inquiry into the sales, Lady chine tools, has civilian uses but
Thatcher said she wished she had can also be employed in the probeen
kept informed of the change. duction of weaponry.
She said, however, that she viewed Under the 1984 guidelines, Britthe
shift even now as technical, ain effectively prohibited sales of
limited in effect and not a funda- weaponry and dual-use machinery
mental policy change that required to both Iran and Iraq, which were
her approval or public disclosure. .at war at the time.
Lady Thatcher, who led the Con- After the cease-fire between
servative government until Novem- those two countries in 1988, Britain
ber. 1990, four months after the began responding to requests from
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, said in its exporters by allowing the sale of
response to questions at the inquiry dual-use equipment to Iraq, althat
she had not knowingly misled though the Thatcher government
Parliament when she told the did not publicly disclose the
House of Commons in 1989 that change.
guidelines on weapons sales to Iraq "It seems to me abundantly clear
formulated in late 1984 had not thlil when they proposed these
been changed.
changes they viewed it as a change
"This partiéular answer given of circumstances rather than a
was what I believed to be correct," change of policy," Lady Thatcher
she said. . . said.
Asked whether ,Parliament The inquiry was set up by Prime
should have been informed of the Minister John Major last year following
the collapse of a criminal
change, Lady Thatcher, who fre- case against the top executives of
quently referred to her tenure in Matrix Churchill, an Iraqi-owned,
office in the present tense, replied: British-based company that was
"I would not like to answer that selling machine tools to Iraq in the
question without considering it late 1980s,
with my ministers,"
The executives had been charged
Lady Thatcher spent most of the with violating export laws, but the
day parrying polite but pointed charges were dropped after governquestions
from Lord Justice Scott, ment officials acknowledged they
the High Court judge who is lead- had known that the equipment
ing the inquiry, and his chief assis- might be used for military purtant,
Presiley Baxendale.
poses.
The inquiry is to issue 11public Lady Thatcher said that she had
report next year, but has no power not been consulted about the grantto
bring criminal charges, and wit- ing of export licenses to Matrix
nesses have been granted a near- Churchill.
Iran: Normal Relations Should Mean No More Murders Abroad
By Mansour Farhaitg
ENNINGTON, Vermont -
B President Bill Clinton's meeting
with Salman Rushdie last month inspires
me to tell of my own experience
with Iranian terrorism. .
On June 10, an FBI agent carne to
my house to inform me that I was on
a hit list of the Islamic Republic of
Iran. He revealed that the list had
been passed on by "a friendly country"
and that U.S. authoritiesjudged
it serious enough to warrant his visit.
He added that only three of the 200
people on the list lived in America.
56
After regaining my balance, I
asked him to elaborate on the source
and credibility of his information. He
replied that he did not know anything
else. He expressed sympathy but
could not offer any advice or protee- .
tion. He gave me his telephone num-
. ber and encouraged 'me to call him if
I had anything to report.
Since then, I have been able to live
without excessive concern for safety.
I may be in danger, but I believe I still
feel more secure in my environment
than the paranoid guardians of the
Islamic Republic do in theirs.
That Tehran's theocrats have the
.audacity to arrange the assassination
of Iranian dissidents abroad is not
. news, but the existence of a list of
targets that includes someone like me
was a cOmplete surprise. The idea .
that I could be perceived as a threat
to Iran was beyond my imagination, .
for I arn a naturalized American citizen
and have no affiliation with any
exile or expatriate group.
I work with a nuIilber of human
rights organizations, but my 3D-year
involvement in that cause has never
been limited to Iran.
I abhor political violence, even
against a violent state like Iran., and
• whenI ànälyze the character arid policies
of the Islamic regime, I try to do
so in a nonbelligerent fashion.
Government officials in Tehran
must be aware of these facts, because
I periodically appear as a commentator
on the Persian-language programs
of the BBC and the Voice of America.
But clearly, the hit list has little to
do with the political weight of its targets.
Iran's campaign of terror abroad
is intended to demonstrate that the
ruling clerics are not afraid of Western
governments and can eliminate
their critics wherever they live.
Since the founding of the Islamic