Armed with superior equipment and elaborate surveillance plans, UN disarmament experts arrive in Baghdad today, four years after they were forced to leave Iraq, to begin the most extensive and intrusive weapons inspection in modern history.
The chief arms inspector, Hans Blix, said the mission would be ”comprehensive, thorough and objective,” and called on the Iraqi regime to ”seize the opportunity” for peace.
”We are pleased to be on our way to a new chapter of inspections in Iraq,” said the 74-year-old Swede who is leading an advance party of about 30 officials and technicians to install communications and testing equipment.
”The question of war and peace remains, first of all, in the hands of Iraq,” added Dr Blix who heads the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission, Unmovic, which is charged with ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
”But we have a very important role to play and we’re not going to play that down. I hope Iraq seizes this opportunity.”
Dozens of weapons inspectors, equipped with jeeps, helicopters and an aeroplane would, he said, get down to ”real work” in a week’s time.
In the coming days the advance team will establish laboratories with soil, water and air samplers that can detect ”signature” traces of biological, chemical and radioactive materials.
Iraq has denied that it holds any stocks of banned weaponry but is bound by the UN resolution to declare any parts or material that could be used in chemical and biological weapons on December 8.
Blix said events would depend on the content of that declaration: ”We trust, hope, expect that they will report in detail whatever may remain of the [weapons] programmes, and also a great deal of things from the sector which they claim are for peaceful purposes.”
Blix admitted that it would be a ”challenge” to unearth the full range of weapons and chemicals thought to have been amassed by Iraq over the years.
”There have been a lot of allegations about concealment and about putting weapons of mass destruction on mobile targets and it certainly will be a challenge to try to find underground installations,” he conceded.
The task might be daunting but this time round the inspectors had ”a lot of equipment which is very superior”.
Moreover, they were expecting to ”get tips from various UN member states,” said Blix. The fact that the inspectors had the unanimous support of the UN security council was the ”best incentive” for the Iraqis to cooperate, he added.
The Swede, who is accompanied by Mohammed El Baradei, the Egyptian director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he believed the experts would be welcomed by senior Iraqi officials. ”We are determined to be an honest organ, a subsidiary of the security council,” he said in a bid to allay fears, raised by Iraq, that the inspectors may seek to also act as spies.
Broad differences remain between the UN and the Bush administration over how inspectors should behave in Iraq. Blix has not yet agreed to a US request that a senior American official be appointed to manage the flow of US intelligence to the inspectors.
Disputes also remain over whether Iraq would be in ”material breach”, under the resolution, if it continued to fire on US and British warplanes patrolling the no-fly zones. The patrols are not mentioned in any UN resolution, but the New York Times quoted Bush administration officials as saying they had determined that an attack on Friday did constitute a breach. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001