IRAQ: RUSSIAN DELEGATION LANDING AT SADDAM AIRPORT

Описание: (23 Sep 2000) Natural Sound
XFA
Russia has joined France in challenging a United Nations ban on flights to Iraq.

On Saturday a Russian airliner carrying a soccer team, musicians, business people and medical supplies touched down in Baghdad.

Senior Iraqi officials, most from the Oil Ministry, were on hand to greet the plane.

The flight comes a day after a French charter flight carrying athletes, artists and doctors ignored U-S and British objections and sent a plane from Paris to Baghdad.

The French flight was the first to arrive in Iraq without U-N permission in a decade.

Sanctions were imposed on Iraq after Saddam Hussein's army invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Russia says it informed the U-N sanctions committee of the flight, but did not seek permission from the committee to send the plane.

Both Russia and France want to see sanctions eased.

Russia is eager to resume lucrative oil contracts with Baghdad and wants Iraq to pay back some $8 billion in Soviet-era debt.

France has often spoken out against the impact of sanctions on civilians.

U-N resolutions require the sanctions to remain in place until Baghdad complies with demands to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.

SOUNDBITE: (Russian-Arabic)
"The main object of our flight is to ease and council, the so called sanctions."
SUPERCAPTION: Jurij Schafranik, Head of the Russian delegation

SOUNDBITE: (English)
"When the plane landed in Baghdad airport that is an indication that was whatever United States is saying, whatever United States is trying to prevent, such trips to Iraq they are not succeeding. "
SUPERCAPTION: Abdul Razak Al-Hashimi, Head of the friendship and solidarity council of Iraq

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