This undated audio file handles one of the Revolutionary Command Council meetings, attended by Saddam Hussein and some high-ranking commanders. The meeting addressed the UN and the Security Council resolutions against Iraq. Also discussed were the negotiations with Russia and France, British messages to the Russians to help release an unidentified British prisoner, frozen Iraqi assets, and biological/chemical weapons.

This audio file contains a meeting between Saddam Hussein and Iraqi high-ranking officials in which they discuss different issues. Tarqi Aziz discusses the technical negotiations in New York, and the Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991. He asks whether the sanctions will be lifted after the end of the special commission. He recommends hurrying with the commission to shorten the period of inspection and to let them use the cameras they requested in order to claim Iraq had not imposed any obstacles during the inspection process. Saddam states the special target group is concerned with future observation rather than what they have already done so far. He adds that the attempts of overthrowing the regime have failed, thus they insist on using cameras to guarantee future observation. One of the speakers advises to let the team work in a technical and a professional mechanism away from means of media which always exaggerate things and make matters worse. Saddam shifts to another subject, saying that Iraq has unmasked western democracy. They discuss European political affairs, ruling parties, socialism, and what Arabs and Asians face from offering those hard jobs and low positions requiring only physical effort. Finally, they agree to send a message to the commission saying that when you believe in an appropriate way towards Iraq, you will have positive results. 

This audio file contains a meeting between Saddam and his cabinet regarding the Iran-Iraq War. Saddam discusses the resolutions of the Security Council, the position of various Arab states, the role of chemical weapons and other subjects. The attack on the USS Stark is also discussed.

This audio file contains a record of a meeting in which Iraqi officials discussed Security Council resolutions and POW issues pertaining to the Iran-Iraq War. They discussed the Geneva Convention and its implications, translating the text of the resolutions into various languages, and the diplomatic positions of the various members of the Security Council. They also discuss the number of Iraqi POWs held by Iran, and vice-versa.

As other documents in this collection on Moroccan nationalists in 1947 and 1950 have exemplified, the United Nations was an important arena in decolonization struggles for Arabs, as it was for Asians and Africans as e.g. Alanna O’Malley’s The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo crisis, 1960-1964 (2018) has shown. In this regard, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964 and taken over by the Fatah movement in 1969, was no exception.

To be sure, Palestinian organizations including Fatah and the PLO decried key UN actions. One was the UN Palestine partition plan of 1947; another was UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967. Calling upon Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied” during the Six-Day War in June and calling for the “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace,” it did not mention Palestine or the Palestinians. Even so, the PLO sought to get access to the UN and UN recognition. A crucial landmark on this road was the address to the UN in New York in November 1974 by Yassir Arafat (1929-2004), a Fatah co-founder in 1959 and from 1969 PLO chairman.

Arafat did not speak at the Security Council, which was and is dominated by its five veto-carrying permanent members Britain, China, France, the United States, and the USSR/Russia. Rather, he addressed the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where from the 1960s Third World states were in the majority; his speech was the first time that the UNGA allowed a non-state representative to attend its plenary session. The UNGA invited the PLO after having decided, in September, to begin separate hearings on Palestine (rather than making Palestine part of general Middle Eastern hearings), and after the PLO was internationally recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, a landmark accomplishment for the organization. The UNGA president who introduced Arafat, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1937-2021), was the Foreign Minister of Algeria, which since its independence in 1962 had supported the Palestinian cause organizationally, militarily, and politically. Arafat spoke in Arabic; the below text is the official UN English translation. Arafat did not write the text all by himself; several PLO officials and Palestinians close to the PLO, including Edward Said, assisted, as Timothy Brennan has noted in Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021). Later in November 1974, the UNGA inter alia decided to give the PLO observer status and affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Communist parties liquidate several leaders in Syria and Lebanon, students from Lebanon contact the Security Council to call for intervention, and Lebanese and Syrian leaders follow suit.

Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, reports that he may have reduced UN suspicion through compliance with sanctions that had been placed on Iraq regarding WMD's, along with his report to the Council that "gaps" in weapons files will be closed sooner than anticipated.

Saddam and his Security Council discuss Iraqi biological and nuclear weapons program. Focusing primarily on the biological file, they consider possible interpretations by Ekeus, director of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, as well as potential UN reactions.

Transcript of a meeting between Saddam Hussein and high ranking Iraqi officials regarding the Iran-Iraq war. They discuss the cease-fire negotiations, the UN Security Council, military and diplomatic issues, and Soviet and US Policy in the region.