A group of South African arms experts who worked on the country’s disarmament in the 1990s left for Iraq on Saturday to help Baghdad cooperate with UN inspectors, the government said.
The mission includes nuclear experts and a chemical-biological weapons specialist who served under the former apartheid regime, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad, who visited Baghdad earlier this month to urge Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to cooperate fully with UN inspections.
South Africa became the only country in the world to voluntarily dismantle its weapons of mass destruction a decade ago, when it first admitted it had possessed such weapons but said they had been dismantled, throwing open the door for inspections in 1993-4.
”I think we were in a similar situation to Iraq. Lots of documentation were destroyed when we dismantled our programme,” said Deon Smit, who directed South Africas nuclear missile programme.
Smit, now acquisitions manager at South African arms company Armscor, told the SAPA news agency that documentation was not always available to prove that disarmament had taken place.
”To put a picture or a puzzle together to show that you have, in fact, totally dismantled your capability is a very, very complex matter,” he said the day before setting off for Baghdad.
”Our experience in helping the inspectors to put that picture together could be the key. That experience we can go out and share with the Iraqis.”
The South African experts are due to arrive in Iraq on Sunday evening. President Thabo Mbeki announced Friday that Baghdad had accepted an offer of assistance from South Africa. The proposal had also been discussed with UN weapons inspectors in Iraq and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
South Africa, chair of the African Union and the Non-Aligned Movement, has been driving protests against a US-led war on Iraq, arguing that the conflict would have a devastating impact on Africa.
The chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, recently praised South Africa’s own disarmament history as a model of cooperation, urging Iraq to adopt a similar approach. – Sapa-AFP