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Talabani appeals to UK not to abandon Iraq

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Oct 10, IRNA
UK Troops-Iraq Talabani
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani appealed to Prime Minister Tony Blair Monday not to leave his country in chaos by withdrawing troops.

"To abandon us now would be murderously irresponsible and cynical," Talabani said in an article written for the Times newspaper.

"The resulting devastation would outstrip that of the spring of 1991, when the Kurdish and Shia Arab uprisings were encouraged and then betrayed," he warned.

The president's appeal come after his first official meeting with Blair in London last Thursday, when he thanked the British prime minister for "liberating us" from Saddam Hussein's regime.

Talabani said that the events of recent weeks have reaffirmed the "need for the alliance between the new Iraq and Britain," referring to the rioting in the British-controlled Basra region.

"Britain owes no apology for delivering the enslaved people of Iraq from the hands of a callous tyranny. The challenge is to show fortitude in the face of horror so that we can finish the job that began in 2003," he said.

The Iraqi president supported the British argument that foreign troops are in Iraq on the basis of a Security Council resolution as well as Iraq being "liberated through the enforcement of 17 such resolutions that Saddam chose to flout."
He described those who "spuriously claimed" that the war was fought to discover stocks of weapons of mass destruction as "those who preferred the stability of the mass grave to liberation, and who raised their voices to save Saddam, but not his victims."
In his appeal against those calling for UK troops to withdraw, Talabani said that "many in Britain are unaware of the advance of Iraqi democracy and of the desire of its first democratically elected government to have British and other foreign troops remain." He also dismissed the "occasional immoral voices that call for a new dictatorship to be installed in Iraq as, they claim, a less laborious means of imposing order."
"Order is certainly important, but so is freedom. A restored dictatorship in Iraq will be neither friendly nor benign. Animated by vengeance and fed by oil, a new dictatorship will again seek to make Iraq into the Arab Prussia," the president warned.

HC/1412