Iraqi minders showing journalists around Tikrit, the birthplace of the country’s president, Saddam Hussein, recently promised them in English that they could go wherever they wanted, even the enormous presidential palace. But, in Arabic, the minders said to one another that there was no way they were taking journalists anywhere within sight of the palace or to any other place that fell into the category of ”not allowed”, one of the most commonly used phrases in Iraq.
There are many similar no-go areas in Iraq. But restrictions will not apply to the United Nations weapons inspectors who are scheduled to return to Iraq on Monday after an absence of four years. They have been promised unfettered access to all areas, including the presidential sites such as Tikrit.
The inspectors will fan out across Iraq in a hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear-related weapons and for banned long-range missiles. They will turn up unannounced at military complexes, factories, government offices and private homes, from Mosul, a green, hilly city in the far north, to Basra, the main city in the barren desert of the south, as well as the heavily-industrialised complexes in and around Baghdad.
They will visit the open-cast phosphate mines in the west which can provide President Saddam with low-grade uranium, and the oilfields and petrochemical complexes that could produce biological and chemical weapons.
”We don’t have a finite list of sites,” said Jacques Baute, head of the nuclear inspection team. ”I can’t say that there are 100 sites that are very important and 300 more that are quite significant. For us, it doesn’t matter. We have a mandate to monitor the whole country.”
Baute will accompany the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, to Baghdad on Monday for two days of talks with the Iraqi government about the details of the inspections. They will be accompanied by an advance team which will focus on logistics, establishing living quarters and a functioning office.
The following Monday, the first inspectors will arrive, about 10 or 12 in number, from the New York headquarters of the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission (Unmovic), building up within a few weeks to a full complement of about 80. A further 200 or so will stay at home, ready to take over as the rota requires.
As well as setting up shop in Baghdad, the UN sleuths are also intending, for the first time, to open offices in Basra and in Mosul.
The crucial test for Iraq will come either on or before December 8 when it has to hand the inspectors a ”full and complete” declaration, listing, as required by last Friday’s UN resolution, all aspects of banned weapons programmes, including components, sub-components, stocks of agents, and related material and equipment.
The resolution also called for Iraq to provide in the declaration all equipment ”which it claims are for purposes not related to weapon production or material”.
The consensus among the inspectors is that the teams hunting chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles have a tougher job than the detectives searching out any nuclear materials because it is much easier to conceal a small-scale installation manufacturing bio-weapons.
Even British intelligence does not claim that Iraq is close to making a nuclear bomb.
Baute said: ”Until now there is not a single event that is related to an amount of nuclear material that would be of significance for a weapon. We don’t have a single example.”
But biological and chemical weapons are another matter. The inspectors will have to return to the 600 to 700 sites monitored by Unmovic’s predecessor, the UN special commission on Iraq (Unscom), between 1991 and 1998. These sites are well documented by Unscom, which has thousands of papers relating to their search-and-destroy missions.
The same names turn up time and time again: the suspected nuclear sites at Fallujah, Tuwaitha and Furat; the alleged biological and chemical weapons sites at the agricultural research centre at Fudaliyah; the foot and mouth disease plant at al-Dawara; the blood serum institute at Amariyah; and the military complex at al-Qaqa, where the nerve gas, phosgene, is produced, although Iraq claims that it is for commercial use only.
These sites are prominent in Tony Blair’s dossier — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — published in September and based on Anglo-American intelligence.
The new generation of inspectors will establish what changes have taken place at sites since their predecessors left, but they do not expect to find anything in them. It would be too obvious.
The inspectors are also expected to make an early visit to presidential sites. The US claims that these palaces occupy much larger areas than would be needed for a presidential retreat and are suspicious about the hardened bunkers and warehouses that show up on satellite pictures.
But the political thinktanks which observe events in Iraq are much more sceptical. They also consider such sites to be too obvious to store weapons or components, and argue that although the inspectors will go to the presidential palaces, they will do so mainly for symbolic reasons: to show that they have the authority to go anywhere in Iraq.
Sources at the United Nations said the focus of the search would be not on the big military complexes, such as al-Qaqa, outside Baghdad, but on apparently innocent factories and laboratories making goods for domestic use. Much of the equipment in such factories and laboratories is classified as dual-use, meaning it can be used for the purposes suggested on the gate signs but also be used to manufacture the forbidden weapons.
For example, if a large volume of aluminium tubing was found, it would raise suspicions that it was being used as part of a centrifuge to enrich uranium for weapons purposes. A machine manufacturing pans, for instance, could also be used to make weapon components.
In a move that was little noticed at the time, the Iraqi government handed over four CDs to the inspectors in Vienna almost two months ago. The contents have not been publicly disclosed but they contain much information detailing dual-use equipment. This will form the basis of the Iraqi declaration.
The inspectors have a considerable body of documentation on imports into Iraq and will spend much of their time checking that this equipment is being used for the purposes for which the documentation claims it was intended.
It remains a highly difficult task. The US claims that President Saddam established a 1 000-strong team to hide weapons, and that sensitive documentation has been spread all over Iraq, hidden in people’s homes. Weapons have also, allegedly, been dismantled and scattered.
There is documentary evidence of links between Iraq and the Serbian government, which had experience during the Kosovo war of such deception, successfully hiding tanks and other material from Nato spyplanes and warplanes.
In the face of such odds, the inspectors stress that the human factor can be just as crucial to the mission as site inspections. The inspectors have a list of about 1 000 Iraqi scientists, engineers and technicians that they want to interview to gauge what kind of work they have been performing since 1998.
In theory, they can whisk out of the country any Iraqi witness willing to spill key information. Such informants will be allowed to take their families with them so they cannot be used as hostages by the Iraqi government. But Blix is reluctant to use the power, seeing it as impractical.
If the Iraqis obstruct the inspectors as they did between 1991 and 1998 or lie about what weapons they possess, as they did in the same period, there will be war.
But the Iraqi response this time may not be so clear. Iraq can say in its declaration that the components it has are for innocent, domestic uses only, despite Anglo-US claims to the contrary. And when the inspectors produce their report to the security council in four months, they may be unable to provide anything conclusive.
Ewen Buchanan, Blix’s representative, said it was impossible to pronounce ”a clean bill of health”. It just meant that the inspectors had not found anything. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001