December 1989, Page 26, 56

Personality

Ambassador Amir Al-Anbari

By Andrew I. Killgore

Iraq's new ambassador to the United Nations, Amir al-Anbari, didn't have to travel far to take up his duties in New York. At the time of his appointment he already was serving in Washington, DC as Iraqi Ambassador to the United States. A lawyer with degrees from the Universities of Baghdad (B.A.) and Harvard (M.A. and S.J.D), he served as Iraq's Ambassador in London before transferring to Washington in 1987.

Ambassador Anbari spent much of his first year in the US familiarizing himself with Washington. Then, when the August 1988 cease-fire halted eight years of warfare between Iraq and Iran, he was assigned to Iraq's delegation at the peace negotiations, and began shuttling between Washington and Geneva. When it became clear that formal negotiations might drag on for months or even years, the Iraqi diplomat was assigned to UN headquarters.

Ambassador Anbari was born in Babylon 54 years ago, into a family of prosperous merchants and traders. His inclination toward the law may have developed from observing his father, who was constantly called upon to arbitrate disputes. Anbari says admiringly that his father, "made up his mind quickly and no one ever questioned his decisions."

Obviously Anbari has earned some of the same kind of esteem from his own colleagues. Nothing is more important for his country than the negotiations with Iran, with which he will continue to be involved.

The war may have cost Iraq as many as 350,000 deaths, and Iran at least twice as many. The dispute over the Shatt al-Arab river boundary, the basic cause of the war between the two nations, remains unsettled.

Since it is Iraq's only route to the sea, Iraq claims the entire waterway, right up to the Iranian shoreline. Iran insists that the boundary must be at the "Thalweg," the deepest part of the channel. While the dispute remains unsettled, tens of thousands of war prisoners await exchange.

A crucial decision for Iraq is whether to dredge an alternate ship canal from Basra, the country's major port, to Umm Qasr on an estuary of the Persian Gulf, so as to bypass entirely the portion of the Shatt al-Arab that borders Iran. The fact that Iraq has already spent billions of dollars to reconstruct the city of Basra indicates that, one way or another, the city will resume its all-important role as Iraq's only real port.

Before his assignment as Ambassador to London, Anbari had helped found the Institute of International Development Law in Rome. He is still a judge on the Tribunal of Arab Oil Exporting Countries (OAPEC).

Amir al-Anbari's wife, Sanna (Saadi) Al-Anbari was born in Baghdad. She trained as a pharmacist at the University of Baghdad and became one of thousands of fully qualified Iraqi women professionals in such fields as medicine, law, engineering and the arts.

Her life in New York and Washington, however, has been divided between the duties of a diplomatic spouse and in raising their three children: daughters Alia's (13) and Asmaa (8) and son Harith (6).

Ambassador Anbari is caught up in the excitement of representing an Iraq with, having narrowly prevailed militarily against a much more populous, and belligerent, opponent, now seems poised to join the industrially developed world.

Too modest to boast about his considerable personal accomplishments, Al-Anbari takes visible pride in Iraq's varied potentialities. His country's extraordinary oil reserves, totalling more than 100 billion barrels and rivaling those of Saudi Arabia, will furnish the capital for accelerated economic development. Its large copper and sulphur reserves will provide not only additional foreign exchange, but also skilled jobs for his country's talented and industrious people. He notes that rain-fed agriculture in Iraq's northern areas, and the immense irrigated agricultural potential of the fertile Tigris and Euphrates River valleys, can feed many times Iraq's present population of 17 million.

A quiet intellectual who knows Middle Eastern and Iraqi history well, Ambassador Anbari observes that political stability has been the key in the succession of great world civilizations that have arisen in Mesopotamia, the traditional name for Iraq. This was true more than 5,000 years ago when the Sumerians created the world's first cities in Southern Iraq, and for all the Mesopotamian civilizations that followed.

The present juncture in Iraq gives every promise of stability, Ambassador Anbari observes, and thus still another blossoming of economic and intellectual development in his country.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.v