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by Kamal Taha BAGHDAD (AFP) - The first Paris-to-Baghdad flight in a decade landed at Saddam international airport on Friday, challenging a U.N. air embargo and to acclaim from Iraq that its isolation is ending.
"There is no air embargo on Iraq and nothing in the [U.N.] Security Council bans air links with Iraq," insisted Transport Minister Ahmed Murtada, welcoming a French delegation of doctors and sporting youngsters. "We praise any measure taken by our friends to resume flights and we expect to receive more planes in the coming days," the minister said. The chartered Boeing-737 brought a 75-member delegation including some 30 medical staff and around 40 young French sports figures that were to take part in the Babylon cultural festival. They left Paris after France ignored a United Nations sanctions committee request to delay the departure of what organizers insisted was a humanitarian flight. "There is no need for U.N. permission," delegation spokesman Jihad Figali told reporters at the airport, where health and foreign ministry officials as well as Iraq's Olympic committee were also part of a welcoming party. Organizers of the three-day private mission, dubbed "Zephyr", said their aim was to show French solidarity with the Iraqi people. French foreign ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau said the flight was a private initiative and not a commercial venture and was carrying no merchandise, so merely required notification to the U.N. and not its permission. In a letter to the U.N. sanctions committee chairman, the French ambassador to the United Nations, Jean-David Levitte, said France had fulfilled its sole obligation, which was to notify the committee in advance of the flight. France, backed by Russia and China, insists that no U.N. resolution bans non-commercial passenger flights to Iraq, but Washington and London say every flight to Iraq needs authorization. Francois Girard-Hautbout, an official for the organization behind the flight, the French Office for the Development of Industry and Culture (OFDIC), said French doctors were going to work alongside Iraqi counterparts. "They are going to do a night shift with emergency staff and they are also scheduled to take part in surgical operations, mainly to do with dental surgery," he said. Founded in April, OFDIC is an obscure group that claims to be faithful to the principles of late French leader Charles de Gaulle and his Arab policy. On the political front, an Iraqi official said a resumption of normal air services out of Saddam airport would soon be on the cards. "Soon, we will have planes taking off and landing at Saddam international airport at a normal rate," the official, who asked not to be named, told AFP. At the United Nations, Levitte told reporters that a Russian plane would fly to Iraq Saturday. A Russian aircraft flew oil executives and humanitarian aid to Baghdad on September 17, but with enough notice for a clearance from the sanctions committee. It was the second Russian plane to land at Baghdad's Saddam International Airport since it reopened on August 17. Iraqi officials are due to travel to Moscow in a week's time to discuss a resumption of flights with Aeroflot, Russia's biggest airline, while Belarus has said it also plans to resume a service to Baghdad. Russian carrier Vnukovo Airlines, meanwhile, plans to fly a 120-strong delegation of European lawmakers and business people to Iraq from Paris on September 29. And Jordan has submitted a request to the United Nations to re-establish its air link with Iraq. On August 29, however, an Amman court handed Italian pilot Nicolas Trifani a three-year prison sentence in absentia for violating Jordanian airspace on a sanctions-busting flight from Baghdad. Iraq's own fleet of civilian aircraft have been stranded abroad for the past decade. |
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