SADDAM HUSSEIN has offered a qualified apology for invading Kuwait 12 years ago. However, the Iraqi President urged Kuwaitis to expel their Government for colluding with American “infidels” who were preparing to attack Iraq.

In a televised statement, read out by Mohamed Said Sahaf, Iraq’s Information Minister, on Saturday, Saddam said: “We apologise to God for any deed that angered him in the past, which we might not have known of and is blamed on us, and on this basis we also apologise to you.”

Saddam’s statement, which is likely to alienate the Kuwaiti leadership after months of diplomacy, suggests that he believes that an American assault is inevitable. His message appeared to be a last desperate appeal to Kuwaitis and Gulf Arabs to stay out of the conflict.

He referred to more than 10,000 American troops training in Kuwait, saying that the emirate was under “direct foreign military occupation” and called on Kuwaitis to join efforts to drive them out.

“Why will not the faithful, the devoted and the holy warriors in Kuwait meet with their counterparts in Iraq under the blanket of their creator, instead of under the blanket of London or Washington and the Zionist entity, to discuss their matters on top of which is the jihad against the occupation of infidel armies?” he asked.

Saddam avoided using the word “invasion” in describing what he did to Kuwait in 1990 and attempted to lay the blame elsewhere. He said that Baghdad’s actions 12 years ago were prompted by joint US-Kuwaiti military manoeuvres and Kuwait’s lowering of crude oil prices.

Kuwait condemned Saddam’s statement as an attempt to drive a wedge between its people and their leaders and of inciting terrorist attacks. Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahd al-Sabah, the Information Minister, said: “This speech is a repetition of the claims which he (Saddam) used to commit his horrendous act of invading Kuwait in 1990.”

Saad Qassem Hammudi, head of the government- sponsored Congress of Popular Arab Forces and a member of Iraq’s ruling Baath Party, said the statement sounded “alarm bells for all those involved in the region, primarily Kuwaiti leaders, so that they understand the dangers of foreign collaboration against the Arab nation and Iraq”.

He said that the leaders of Kuwait were continuing to plot against Iraq as they did after the Iraq-Iran War and on the eve of the incidents of August 1990 when Iraq invaded the emirate. He criticised the Kuwaiti Government for allowing thousands of US troops to deploy for manoeuvres in the emirate, for opening airbases to US and British warplanes and for collaborating with the exiled Iraqi opposition.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said that he had rarely seen anything as cynical as Saddam’s speech, which made no mention of nearly 600 people, most of them Kuwaitis, missing since Iraq’s seven-month occupation of Kuwait.

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