U.N. Inspectors Return to Iraq Nuke Site

09/12/2002| IslamWeb

U.N. arms inspectors paid a return visit Monday to Iraq's huge al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex, where scientists in the 1980s worked to produce the fissionable material for nuclear bombs .On Sunday, a top science adviser to President Saddam Hussein  said Iraq's arms report to the United Nations  documents Baghdad's drive to develop a nuclear bomb until 1991. Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi said Iraq no longer has such ambitions.

"It's for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to judge how close we were" to a nuclear bomb, al-Saadi said.

In Vienna, Austria, U.N. nuclear experts said Iraq's report on its nuclear program appears to echo that claim.

"At first glance, it appears the declaration is consistent with Iraq's statement that it has no nuclear weapons and that it has no nuclear weapons material or associated programs," Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The Associated Press.

Inspectors will seek to verify Iraq's claims by on-the-ground inspections.

The U.N. teams want to ensure that Iraqi specialists, in the four years since U.N. monitors were last in Iraq, have not returned to research in areas that would contribute to nuclear weapons-building. Recent satellite photos show new construction at al-Tuwaitha, buildings whose purposes the U.N. investigators would want to check.

Last Wednesday, in their first visit to al-Tuwaitha in the two-week-old new round of U.N. inspections, specialists of the International Atomic Energy Agency spent five hours going "room to room," team leader Jacques Baute reported afterward.

But they needed more time to complete their inspection of the complex of more than 100 buildings, he said.

Many buildings at al-Tuwaitha, 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, were destroyed in heavy U.S. bombing in the 1991 Gulf War . Through the 1990s, it was scrutinized by U.N. nuclear agency inspectors under a postwar U.N. monitoring regime to ensure Iraq did not develop weapons of mass destruction.

Those inspections stopped in 1998 amid U.N.-Iraqi disputes. The current round began Nov. 27 under a new, tougher U.N. Security Council resolution.

From Baghdad Monday, a second U.N. team went to an undisclosed destination. They headed west, in the direction of an area of chemical plants and other facilities with past connections to Iraq's old chemical and biological weapons programs.

The U.N. operation received reinforcements on Sunday, 25 new inspectors who doubled the staff, allowing a rapid
expansion of field missions. Over the weekend, the U.N. teams also got the first of an expected eight helicopters that will enable them to range farther afield on their unannounced inspections.

The daily inspections continue as the monitors' headquarters offices in New York and Vienna begin their review of the massive arms declaration, more than 12,000 pages, submitted by Iraq to the United Nations on Saturday.

Analysis of the declaration, whose submission was required by last month's U.N. resolution, is expected to suggest new sites for inspections, especially facilities that can alternate between civilian and military use.

If Iraq is eventually found to have cooperated fully with the inspectors, U.N. resolutions call for the Security Council to consider lifting economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. If Iraq is found in noncompliance, on the other hand, the council may consider military action to forcibly the Baghdad government.

In Baghdad Monday, peace activists from the Chicago-based Iraq advocacy group Voices in the Wilderness gathered before U.N. offices in for a demonstration urging the United States and Iraq not to interfere in the U.N. weapons inspectors' work.

The inspections process "is the main source of help right now to avoid war," said Kathy Kelly, leader of the 17-member delegation from the United States and several other countries.

In his comments to reporters Sunday, presidential adviser al-Saadi said the Iraqi declaration was "accurate" and "truthful" and that it reiterated Iraq's contention that it has no weapon of mass destruction.

Washington says it has "solid evidence" Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction, but U.N. inspectors indicate they have seen no conclusive evidence thus far from U.S. or other sources.

Al-Saadi challenged the United States to present its evidence.

He criticized Washington's rush to judge that Iraq has illegal weapons, saying U.S. officials should first read the arms dossier Baghdad submitted to the United Nations.

"A superpower should study and take its time in judging, especially since everyone is looking on as it prepares for a huge military campaign for an aggression against Iraq," he said.

PHOTO CAPTION

United Nations  weapons inspectors, wearing blue caps, flanked by Iraqi officials, check pipes as they go through a chemical plant near Fallujah, some 80 kms (50 miles) northwest of Baghdad Monday, Dec. 9, 2002. (AP Photo/Jerome Dela