UN Arms Inspectors Arrive in Baghdad as Weapons Debate Widens

06/06/2003| IslamWeb

United Nations' nuclear experts arrived in Baghdad to visit a plundered nuclear plant, as the debate over Saddam Hussein's alleged banned weapons of mass destruction widened further. The seven-man team from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived as chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix publicly questioned the credibility of the coalition experts charged with searching out Iraq's arsenal. Meanwhile in Baghdad, with occupation forces struggling to control growing unrest in the country, Iraq's top US overseer Paul Bremer opened a key round of talks on Iraq's political future. The IAEA team has been entrusted with a two-week mission to determine whether refined uranium ore is missing from Iraq's largest nuclear complex at Tuwaitha near Baghdad. It is the first, and so far only, team of international inspectors allowed back into Iraq since all pulled out of the country on the eve of the war and Washington has made it clear that the nuclear experts will have no role in the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. With the debate over Iraq's elusive weapons raging on in London and Washington, Blix pressed the UN Security Council on Thursday to allow his inspectors back into Iraq to restart searches. **"I do not want to question the integrity or the professionalism of the inspectors of the coalition, but anybody who functions under an army of occupation cannot have the same credibility as an independent inspector,"*** Blix told reporters after addressing the council. On Friday Blix told the BBC that he had been disappointed by the intelligence his team received from the United States and Britain in the weeks leading up to the war. "Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction -- and that shook me a bit, I must say," Blix said. "I thought, 'My God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?'" Controversy has been raging over whether the United States and Britain fudged the data to back up their claims about those weapons, which were cited as the main reason for the war but have not been found inside the country. The United States and Britain have assembled their own team of more than 1,200 experts to continue the search for Saddam's alleged arsenal. France rallied behind Blix on Friday, calling for the return of UN weapons inspectors and nuclear experts to Iraq, where they would cooperate with the US-British coalition to ensure that Iraq is weapons-free. "France wants Iraq's disarmament to be completed and certified, in order to strengthen regional security and stability," a foreign ministry spokesman told reporters. A US defence official confirmed on Friday that the US Defense Intelligence Agency had reported before the war it had "no reliable information" that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. "It is fair to say there was no reliable information to say declaratively, 'yes, there was stuff," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. But the official said that there was reliable information to say "with a degree of confidence that there was a weapons program", the official said. Meanwhile, Bremer gathered with Kurdish, liberal and Shiite Muslim delegates for a three-hour meeting in Baghdad, aimed at thrashing out the details and membership of an Iraqi interim administration. The interim body would be led by a 25- to 30-strong political council that would name ministerial advisors and work in parallel with a separate, much larger, convention that would elaborate a new Iraqi constitution. Although US authorities declined to say who had been invited, traditional leaders and the wide range of new parties which have emerged in the two months since Saddam's overthrow were expected to join the process. The talks come shortly after Bremer scrapped a promised national conference on the issue, effectively sidelining the seven-strong leadership council that had until recently been the US authorities' key interlocutor in Iraq. The former Iraqi exiles on the leadership council agreed to attend the talks, however, despite their anger over Bremer's change of plans. In the hotspot Iraqi city of Fallujah, US soldiers came under fresh attack early Friday morning, although there were no casualties, residents said. A man hiding behind a building fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a US armored vehicle but none of the soldiers were inside at the time. The attack triggered two searches of the kind which have fueled resentment and bitterness over the US occupation, witnesses said. Many residents said soldiers are frisking women and flouting Islamic moral codes. The shooting came on the heels of one US soldier being killed and five others wounded in an attack in Fallujah Thursday. Coalition forces had on Thursday poured more than 1,000 soldiers into the area to clamp down on the spate of guerrilla-style attacks on US troops. And occupation authorities warned the same day they would enforce a ban on incitement to violence, even in mosques, although they insisted the ban was not designed to stifle criticism of the coalition. Meanwhile, in Poland, the defence ministry announced that a Polish-led force responsible for security in a southern sector of Iraq had been formed with troops from more than 15 countries. Poland, a key European supporter of the war, has been given command of a stabilisation force in one sector of Iraq, alongside British and US forces. **PHOTO CAPTION*** U.S. Military Police detain several Iraqi men from the city of Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, Friday, June 6, 2003. Five of the men were taken to an undisclosed destination. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)