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Jordan and Italy expel Iraqi envoys; Vatican demurs
Barry James IHT
Monday, March 24, 2003

PARIS Jordan and Italy expelled Iraqi diplomats Sunday, but most other national governments continued to ignore a U.S. request last week to throw out more than 300 Iraqi officials in more than 60 countries.

Although Italy told four Iraqis to leave with immediate effect, the Vatican said it would not expel envoys accredited to the Holy See, saying that every avenue for dialogue should be kept open, particularly during a time of conflict.

In Jordan, the first Arab country to expel diplomats following the American request, the information minister, Affash Adwan, denied that the move was prompted from Washington but that it was "a sovereign decision and stems from purely security reasons."

Adwan declined to go into detail about these reasons, but political observers in the Jordanian capital suggested that the diplomats may have been involved in organizing anti-war protests. In Amman, about a thousand demonstrators burned the American flag and broke the main gate of the University of Jordan in an attempt to march to the center of the city, but were turned back by the riot police.

Thousands of Jordanians protested on the Islamic campus of the Al Hussein University in Maan, in the south. On Sunday, the Iraqi vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, urged Arabs in the street to rise up against the war, saying there was "no hope" in Arab rulers.

Jordan has sought to maintain neutrality in the conflict both because of the prevailing anti-war sentiment in the country and because the desert nation relies on Iraq for its entire daily supply of 90,000 barrels of oil, although it has allowed hundreds of U.S. troops to operate anti-missile batteries near the border with Iraq to prevent any attack on it or on Israel.

The Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, said that Iraq "was not expecting the Jordanian move," particularly after it had provided "generous assistance" to Jordan - a reference to the fact that the oil is supplied at preferential prices or as a gift from President Saddam Hussein. "This is regrettable," Sabri said, adding that the Jordanian government had "bowed to American orders."

The most important opposition group, the Islamic Action Front Party, called on the government to reverse the expulsion and instead kick out American, British and Israeli diplomats as well as the U.S. troops.

The Iraqi Embassy, with 19 diplomats and several locally hired employees, remained open, and the foreign minister, Marwan Moasher, said there was no question of expelling the ambassador, nor had the United States asked it to do so. "Even if they had made such a request it would not have affected our decision," he said. But local political observers said the government would have a difficult job persuading the people that it had not acted under pressure from Washington.

Other Arab countries have turned down the U.S. request, including America's main Arab ally in the region, Egypt, which also depends on Iraq for oil and has important economic links with the Iraqis. The official Yemeni news agency, Saba, said Yemen had rejected a request from the United States to expel three of 25 Iraqi diplomats, which a diplomatic source cited by the agency said was "interference in the internal affairs" of the country.

The Italian government, which earlier said it was evaluating the request from the U.S. government, "invited" four Iraqi diplomats to leave, without giving any specific reason. Demanding an explanation, Gavino Angius, a senator for the main left opposition party, suggested the expulsion was "another instance of supine acceptance of an American dictat."