LONDON: India and five other Asian nations have called for an urgent meeting of the Security Council to consider the flight of stranded Asians in the Gulf and urged the council to take immediate action to provide food and medicine to thousands of their nationals trapped in Kuwait, Iraq and Jordan.

In a common initiative, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines have approached the five permanent members of the Security Council for convening the meeting.

An urgent message from external affairs minister I.K. Gujral, voicing India’s serious concern over the situation, was handed over to the British foreign secretary, Mr Douglas Hurd, by high commissioner Kuldip Nayar, at the foreign office here Friday.

The shortages of food, drinking water and medicine being experienced by the Asians are so acute that the situation calls for an immediate relief supplies, it said. ‘The governments in these countries are under mounting public opinion for an urgent action to save their nationals from starvation deaths.

India, Iran and China have expressed readiness to send to Iraq and Kuwait food and medicines.

Turkey today said it would sell medicine to Iraq if asked. Diplomatic sources at the United Nations said after a council meeting Sept 6 that the sanctions committee has asked the secretary general, Mr Javier Perez de Cuellar, to prepare a report on the food situation in Iraq and Kuwait.

The Security Council resolution 661, adopted on August 6, put into force the embargo on shipments to and from Iraq and Kuwait. This embargo can be lifted for humanitarian considerations.

In Amman, relief agencies appealed for planes and money to airlift home thousands of Asians stranded in Jordan’s desert after leaving Kuwait and Iraq.

In Belgrade, a Yugoslav foreign ministry spokesman said that foreign ministers of Algeria, India and Yugoslavia would discuss the gulf crisis on Tuesday.

The spokesman said plans to hold a broader meeting of the nonaligned foreign ministers in Belgrade next week had been scrapped.

Gujral said in Delhi that contact had been established with PLO chief Yasser Arafat and other Arab states friendly to Baghdad to persuade Iraq to allow evacuation by air of Indians from its territory.

Gujral said that America was telling India not to send food as it would reach the Iraqis. But the food situation was very bad, he said.

WASHINGTON: The U.S, ambassador to India William Clark indicated here the United States does not favour India sending food to Kuwait for its nationals there. Holding that food is an embargoed item. “The U.S. position is that food per se comes under the sanctions of the U.N. and, therefore, that would be breaking the sanctions,” Clark told a news conference at the foreign press center of the U.S. information agency (USIA).

He confirmed that when India approached the U.S., the U.S. suggested that it should take up the matter with the sanctions committee of the United Nations.

I don’t think there is difficulty with food now,” added Clark.

“The problem is: how do you deliver food to the Indians? It is a difficult problem, I am not sure there is any agreement on that. There is no problem delivering food to Jordan. We do not have a blockade of Jordan. The problem is in delivering it to Iraq and occupied Kuwait.

Article extracted from this publication >> September 14, 1990