UN/IRAQ: UN experts vowed on their arrival in Baghdad yesterday to operate "like detectives" in inspecting suspected Iraqi arms sites after a four-year hiatus.
"We operate like detectives and when we have clues, we have to be flexible and change our plans," Ms Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said.
"We are here just to test co-operation on the ground. We do not believe any words of any government ... We believe actions. We believe what we can see with our own eyes," Ms Fleming said.
Iraq, which has offered "full co-operation", has strongly denied having any weapons of mass destruction and says the inspectors will find nothing incriminating.
But if it does not co-operate, it will face "severe consequences", in accordance with the tough new UN Security Council Resolution 1441, including possible military strikes led by the US.
The 11 inspectors from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and six from the IAEA who arrived with Ms Fleming are due to start work tomorrow.
They landed from Cyprus, without any official reception, at Saddam International Airport aboard a white C-130 Hercules aircraft bearing the letters UN in black, and were driven to their hotel in a convoy with no escort.
Arriving after a four-year break since their predecessors fled the country on the eve of four days of massive US-British airstrikes in December 1998, they will meet Iraqi officials in the next 24 hours before starting inspections early tomorrow, Ms Fleming said.
"One of the most important points of our strategy is the ability to conduct unannounced inspections. We will never reveal where we are going.
"We do not give any details about schedules or where we are going. We will never disclose at any point or any time the sites that we are going to visit," said Ms Fleming, who is a US citizen.
Frenchman Mr Jacques Baute will be leading the IAEA inspection team, and Greek Mr Demetrios Perricos will head the UNMOVIC group. Members of the teams come from Australia, Britain, Egypt, Finland, Russia and the US. Among them are people who took part in the last inspections in Iraq.
"In a sense we are starting from scratch, in the other sense we are operating on the basis of the tremendous amount of experience that we have gathered," Ms Fleming said.
"We have gathered a lot of information over the last four years in our absence and have a systematic operational plan of where we want to go, but this plan is flexible."
She insisted that the inspectors had "no expectations. We come in here with hope that things will go well this time, that we will get what is required of Iraq", in line with terms of the resolution.
"We have had a lot of promises of co-operation. We believe that this is a good start, but we have suspicious minds, we are here to test co-operation among other things."
The inspectors are equipped with a strong mandate under the resolution to find the biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that Saddam's regime is suspected of developing. Inspection teams have unprecedented powers to search Iraqi sites and question Iraqi scientists, even if this involves taking them abroad.
Ms Fleming said that 35 more inspectors would be arriving in Baghdad on December 8th, when Iraq was due to hand in a report of its weapons programmes in line with the resolution.
"After that, every few days, there will be a new wave until they are up to about 80 or 100 by Christmas time," she said. - (AFP)
The US haggled yesterday over what goods Iraq could import, thereby delaying a UN Security Council vote on renewing for six months the Iraqi humanitarian programme until later in the day.
The programme covers food, medicine and a host of other civilian supplies to ease the impact of UN sanctions.