World

U.N. Will Send Team To Iraq

January 30, 2004 / 10:51 AM EST / CBS/AP

Is Iraq - scene of attacks Monday on both U.S. and Polish targets - ready to hold elections? And if so, when and how?

In Paris Tuesday, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that a U.N. team will be sent to Iraq to study the answers to those questions.

Meanwhile, a large explosion was reported Tuesday in central Iraq, causing U.S. and Iraqi civilian casualties, the U.S. military said.

The explosion occurred between Ramadi and Fallujah, a central command spokeswoman said. She gave no other details except to say it was a "large explosion" that caused casualties among U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

Apparently acknowledging the existence of Iraq's different ethnic groups as one component of the problem, Annan said the U.N. team "will ascertain the views of a broad spectrum of Iraqi society in the search for alternatives that might be developed to move forward to the formation of a provisional government."

"I strongly hold to the idea that the most sustainable way forward would be one that came from the Iraqis themselves," Annan continued. "Consensus amongst Iraqi constituencies would be the best guarantee of a legitimate and credible transitional governance arrangement for Iraq."

"Consensus in Iraq is what the U.N. Secretary General is seeking," Annan's spokesman Fred Eckhard told CBS News in a phone call from Paris, "but it is important to note the requirement that the U.N. will send a team only once the Secretary General is assured of the security of the team. Then, that team will report to him, not the U.S. led-Coalition Provisional Authority."

Annan had been asked by the U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqi Governing Council to consider sending a team to examine the possibility of holding elections before the return of Iraqi sovereignty on June 30.

"In agreeing to tackle this very thorny issue of elections in Iraq, the U.N. Secretary General has placed the world body back at center stage by accepting the role of mediator in the stalemate between the Muslim Shiites, led by the Ayatollah al-Sistani, who wants direct elections, and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which has proposed an indirect caucus system for legislative elections leading to the transfer of authority on June 30 ," said CBS News Foreign Affairs Analyst Pamela Falk.

In Other Recent Developments:

Iraqi interim Interior Minister Nouri Badran says the security situation in the nation is not good enough to allow direct elections. Badran also said a lot of the suicide attacks in Iraq in the past few weeks "have the fingerprints of the crimes committed by al Qaeda."

So far there's been no comment from U.S. military officials, who've been wary of drawing a clear connection between al Qaeda and attacks in Iraq - even though a handful of non-Iraqi Arab and foreign fighters have been detained or killed in Iraq.

A bomb exploded outside a liquor store early Tuesday in a south Baghdad neighborhood. According to witnesses, windows were shattered but there were no casualties.

Late Monday, gunmen fired at a hotel housing Polish troops in the holy city of Karbala, but were repulsed by Iraqi police. A police spokesman says the police and the attackers fought a battle in which an Iraqi policeman was killed. Police arrested two of the gunmen and there were no Polish casualties.

Doubts about the war in Iraq will be back in sharp focus in England Wednesday, with the publication of Lord Hutton's report on the apparent suicide of David Kelly, the weapons scientist who was identified as the source of a report questioning Prime Minister Tony Blair's argument for the need to go to war in Iraq.

In the north, military divers are still searching the muddy waters of the Tigris River for three missing U.S. soldiers, including two pilots of an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter that crashed Sunday in Mosul during rescue operations after a patrol boat capsized, a military spokesman said.

The United Nations said Friday that a two-person team had arrived in Baghdad for talks with the coalition on various security matters. It was the first time foreign U.N. staff had returned to Baghdad since Annan withdrew personnel in October.

Attacks in August on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed 22 people, including top U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. The United Nations has employed Iraqi staff since then.

Annan is in Paris for the opening of the Global Compact conference and was to meet later in the day with French President Jacques Chirac.

Annan launched the Global Compact initiative in 1999 to encourage better corporate practices in human rights, labor and the environment.