Arab News Staff Writer

JEDDAH, 25 January 2004 — Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said yesterday he “hoped beyond hope” a sovereign Iraq would emerge quickly and warned any breakup of the country would spark civil war and wider conflict.

In an interview with Reuters in Riyadh, Prince Saud said security was a precondition to the handover of power by Washington to a sovereign Iraqi government.

“The impact of a fragmented Iraq will not be just on Saudi Arabia, but on the whole region. I think there would be conflict between the Iraqi independent (ethnic and religious) entities that would arise. This would spread to neighboring countries,” he said.

Prince Saud said any US plan for a political map based on ethnic and religious divisions would be dangerous.

“If you give a federation to one ethnic entity there will be a wish from another... It is in the interest of all ethnic or religious groups to have a united Iraq rather than an Iraq divided along ethnic and religious lines that could cause strife in the future,” he said.

Leaders of Iraq’s neighbors met in Turkey last year ahead of the US-led war to make commitments not to interfere in Iraq, Prince Saud said.

“On paper, they all agreed that this was what needed to be done. But should Iraq fragment, then who knew what would happen?” he said, adding that Turkey had already made its position clear.

Turkey fears Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq could stir up similar aspirations among its own Kurdish minority and has warned it would intervene if Iraqi Kurds declared independence. Its powerful military has said an ethnic-based federation in Iraq would be “difficult and bloody”.

“You follow the logic to its ultimate conclusion — that there will be a conflict that the neighbors of Iraq will interfere in. Then where is it going to end?” Prince Saud said.

He said he could not see a successful political handover of power to a legitimate Iraqi government in June without “a minimum requirement of security and stability”.

“We hope beyond hope that this will succeed because security is interlinked with the return of Iraqi authority in Iraq.

“Our position is the speediest return possible to an independent, a united Iraq, an Iraq with full authority to determine its future the way it sees... but the actions to achieve that depend completely on the Iraqi people,” he added.

Responding to Iran’s announcement on Friday that it would put a dozen jailed Al-Qaeda suspects on trial, Prince Saud said Tehran had not revealed if any of them were Saudis.

“We have been having discussions with Iran and we have a security agreement with Iran and they had promised if there were any Saudis they would hand them over. We still hope that they will do that,” he said.

The United States has suggested some of them may have been behind suicide bombings in Riyadh last year. “This is why we want both countries to exchange whatever information and people they have — so that we can come to terms with who is and who isn’t responsible,” Prince Saud said.

The foreign minister said Saudi Arabia’s cooperation with other countries, including the United States, had helped foil further attacks, both on US soil and elsewhere.

Prince Saud said his country had shown itself to be “the front-line of the countries that are fighting terrorism”.

“There are those (in the United States) who do not want to have a relationship with Saudi Arabia and therefore do not want to accept the reality that we are two countries cooperating with each other,” he said.

Those people want to turn a relationship of “friendship and trust” into one of “confrontation and enmity”, he said. “(But) the people I know in the (US) administration are saying the contrary, that Saudi Arabia is friendly.”