”The latest rumour is that it’s going to weigh 60 kilograms,” one security council diplomat said yesterday, a little apprehensively, as UN officials waited in New York for the arrival of the Iraq’s written declaration on weapons of mass destruction.
With some reports from Baghdad putting the document’s size at 12 000 pages, White House translators and analysts were preparing for weekend duty.
The UN was also gearing up for the challenge of interpreting and checking the text against a compendium of past inspections records that is itself a million pages long.
Iraq was expected to deliver it to UN representatives in Baghdad today, a UN representative said.
Copies would be dispatched to the Unmovic inspections headquarters in Cyprus, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and the UN in New York. They may not arrive until early Monday.
The security council was meeting with chief Unmovic inspector, Hans Blix, yesterday the spokesman said, to discuss whether the UN would translate the text and distribute it to the 15 members, or whether they would receive the Arabic version first.
They must also decide how much of the document to make public.
One potential source of rancour among council members became apparent yesterday when a source close to the talks told the Guardian that the United States and Britain would demand that parts of the declaration dealing with nuclear programmes be made available to the council’s 10 non-permanent members on a read-only basis. They would not be allowed to take it back to their capitals for scrutiny.
Some council members had suggested that the declaration be scrutinised by the weapons inspectors before being distributed to individual states, the diplomat said.
That idea was ”quite sensible”, the diplomat added, ”except that the chances of the Iraqis playing along and not releasing the whole thing to CNN are zero”.
Making the document public could serve as an important gesture by Saddam Hussein that he has nothing to hide.
It was also unclear if Iraq would provide its own English translation, as it has done in the past, or include an introductory summary in English.
Baghdad has said it will submit some information on CD-Rom, but the document is likely to be too big to be emailed or faxed to New York and elsewhere.
In Washington, the national security council said teams of translators were on standby and chemical and biological weapons experts at military laboratories were on call.
UN officials, however, stressed that the council would not reconvene over the weekend, and that any response — other than an acknowledgment of receipt — could take days or even weeks.
Ewen Buchanan, Blix’s representative, said: ”The length of time it will take us to analyse the declaration will depend on how long it is and how much information is new.” – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001