Iraq Cites No Weapons of Mass Destruction

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By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The Iraqi government presented to the rest of the world Saturday a mass of documents detailing its nuclear, chemical and biological activities and formally declaring to the United Nations (news - web sites) that it has no weapons of mass destruction.

Iraqi officials displayed the giant declaration, totaling more than 12,000 pages, to the international media at mid-afternoon. It was expected to be handed over to U.N. officials in Baghdad by late Saturday and flown out Sunday on a U.N. plane, to reach U.N. headquarters in New York and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna by late Sunday.

The U.N. Security Council had set Sunday as the deadline.

On a table in a government office, reporters were shown bound copies of volumes devoted separately to nuclear, chemical, biological and missile activities titled in English, "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declarations." The mass of paper, in volumes spread across the table, was accompanied by computer disks, presumably with additional information.

A dozen Iraqi officials who worked on the declaration stood by, but refused to comment.

Later Saturday, according to an Iraqi state television announcement, a message to the Kuwaiti people from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was to be broadcast. No other details were immediately available.

The thousands of pages of technical detail will shift the Iraq crisis into a new stage, as Washington and Baghdad move step by step toward a crossroads between war and peace.

Under the same Security Council resolution calling for the report, teams from the New York-based U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, and the U.N. nuclear watchdog resumed inspections Nov. 27 after a four-year interruption.

After a two-day break for a Muslim holiday, they resumed their inspections on Saturday morning, visiting uranium storage sites and an Iraqi factory that once made munitions for chemical or biological weapons.

At the munitions factory, the U.N. team presumably was checking to ensure banned activities have not resumed in the last four years.

The inspectors at what Iraqi Information Ministry officials said were "uranium storage sites" near the major Iraqi nuclear research center at al-Tuwaitha southeast of Baghdad may have been interested in large amounts of low-grade uranium that have been sealed and under monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency since the 1990s. Although not bomb-grade material, such fuel could be enriched to that level if major technological hurdles were overcome.

As usual, the U.N. inspection agency issued no immediate information about the visits.

Iraq's report on past weapons programs and industrial activity will take U.N. experts weeks to analyze and U.N. inspectors months to verify inside Iraq. And U.N. officials said weeding out data that might help others produce chemical, biological or nuclear weapons will further delay handover of material to the Security Council's 15 member nations.

In sum, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix told reporters in New York Friday, "no member will get it on Monday."

For all the expectation, the document will be an anticlimax, since it's known that Baghdad will declare it has no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

"We have absolutely no weapons of mass destruction," Lt. Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, the Iraqi official who oversaw production of the declaration, told reporters.

Bush administration officials say they're sure Iraq still harbors such arms. If it doesn't disarm, they say, they will seek Security Council sanction for military action against Iraq. Failing that, they say, Washington would initiate such an attack on its own.

U.S. officials have not presented conclusive evidence Iraq has banned weapons. The White House spokesman said Thursday, however, that "solid evidence" would be turned over to U.N. inspectors, without elaborating.

"We would like to have as much information from any member state as evidence that (Iraq) may have weapons of mass destruction," Blix said.

The United States on Friday offered to protect Iraqi scientists who cooperate with international weapons inspectors searching for hidden arms.

The Security Council resolution under which weapons inspectors are working allows them to solicit information from Iraqi scientists without Iraqi officials being present.

The Security Council resolution adopted Nov. 8 required Iraq to file by Sunday an "accurate, full, and complete declaration" of all weapons programs. Iraq also was required to report on "all other chemical, biological, and nuclear programs," even if not weapon-related.

"It will be really a huge declaration," said Amin, chief Iraqi liaison to Blix's U.N. inspectors. He said the material, possibly including computer disks, covered the 1991-98 history of U.N. weapons and equipment destruction, as well as "new elements."

In the 1990s, after Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf War (news - web sites), U.N. inspectors destroyed many tons of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and dismantled its program to try to build nuclear bombs. But the monitoring regime collapsed amid U.N.-Iraqi disputes, and the inspectors suspect they may have missed some chemical and biological weapons.

The weapons inspectors hope the Iraqis at least will help them answer open questions by, for example, supplying convincing documentation on the fate of 550 artillery shells filled with poisonous mustard gas. Iraqi and U.N. accounts contain many such discrepancies from the 1990s.

The U.N. resolution provides that "false statements or omissions" in Iraq's declaration would constitute a "material breach," that is, a potential cause for military action, but only if coupled with Iraqi noncooperation. That would seem to exempt inaccuracies shown to be inadvertent.

If Iraq eventually is 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.

-- Anonymous, December 07, 2002


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