/ 14 December 2002

UN arms inspectors locked out

UN weapons inspections in Iraq hit their first snag yesterday when the inspectors were temporarily locked out of rooms in a contagious diseases clinic in Baghdad.

The doors were opened after a two-hour delay when officials authorised to unlock them were found.

The glitch occurred at a tense moment in the inspections, as US and British officials began to voice dissatisfaction with Baghdad’s declaration and warn against future obstruction.

On this occasion the delay may have been due to the visit to the communicable disease control centre, the first since the inspectors arrived a fortnight ago, being arranged for Friday, the Muslim weekly holiday.

Iraqi officials said that senior staff were off work and had locked several rooms. The inspectors then had to phone the Iraqi officials who were supposed to be helping the inspections and wait for them to resolve the problem.

Lieutenant-General Hossam Mohammad Amin, the Iraqi officer liaising with the inspectors, was called on a hotline and brought to the site. ”It is a newly declared site and there was a need for tagging of some of its equipment,” he said. ”There is no problem.”

In the past 10 years inspectors have tagged important equipment at sites to ensure that it is not moved.

In New York a meeting between the chief UN inspector, Hans Blix, and the five permanent members of the security council to discuss the Iraqi arms declaration was put off until Monday, but US and British officials said in private that the document had glaring omissions.

”Apart from a few gestures, it does nothing to clear up some of the outstanding questions from the Unscom period. Much of it is old stuff,” said a British official.

Unscom was the UN inspection body until 1998. In its final report it said thousands of tonnes of chemical weapons and ingredients, plus a large number of chemical and biological munitions, remained unaccounted for.

Earlier this year Britain claimed that Iraq had been buying uranium in Africa, and officials said there was no attempt in the declaration to explain the purchases.

”What’s remarkable is how little new there is,” an American official with access to the declaration told the New York Times. ”And how little effort there was to try to explain gaps that everyone knew were there since Unscom left.”

In Vienna Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that most of the 2 400-page nuclear section was ”material we already had before”.

”The new part is 300 pages in Arabic that covers activities in 1991 until 2002. Part of it also we know, however, there is additional information we are going through right now,” Baradei said.

So far the declaration has been seen only by permanent security council members, because it contains sensitive information, particularly about the making of nuclear weapons, that could not be made available to non-permanent and non-nuclear members in the interests of non-proliferation.

An edited text is due to be handed out on Tuesday. Blix and Baradei are due to give their assessments on Thursday.

Hawks in the Bush administration are pushing for the US to declare the document a ”material breach” of a UN resolution last month calling for full cooperation. Other permanent members, including Britain, believe evidence of Iraqi obstruction, deceptions and omissions in the declaration is needed before a ”material breach” can be declared, which would then allow military action.

A Washington Post report yesterday quoted an unnamed senior administration official as predicting that the critical showdown with Iraq would occur over UN demands to interview officials and scientists thought to be involved in weapons projects. The official said the interviews should begin soon.

The US official said if the Iraqis ”do not produce those people, I would say that’s a demonstration of non-compliance and non-cooperation.

A British official said London would also view the refusal to make Iraqi government employees available for interview as a potential breach. But Britain would not see as a violation any refusal by an Iraqi interviewee to leave the country for questioning.

”We’re less fixated on this question of interviews outside the country than some people in Washington,” the British official said. – Guardian Unlimited Â