The UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, planned to tell Iraq yesterday that the chief UN arms inspector would go to Baghdad for talks if Iraq showed a willingness to allow weapons inspectors back into the country after a nearly four-year hiatus, diplomats said.
Mr Annan was consulting the inspector, Mr Hans Blix, on holiday in his native Sweden, while drafting a reply to the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Mr Naji Sabri, a UN spokesman, Mr Fred Eckhard, said.
The Iraqi minister last week asked Mr Blix to visit Baghdad for technical talks on suspected weapons of mass destruction and hinted that the arms experts would be able to return.
"I don't think it should be dismissed," Mr Annan said of the invitation, "but my concern is with the agenda and how it proceeds," he told CNN television.
At issue is Iraq's insistence on a joint evaluation of what has been achieved in investigating its nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic weapons programmes, what needs to be done and how it will be done.
However a 1999 Security Council resolution says the inspectors cannot determine unresolved tasks until they are back on the ground to see what happened since they left in December 1998, the eve of a US-British bombing raid to punish Iraq for not co-operating with the arms experts.
Movement on the inspectors would probably create new international pressure on the United States to hold back on military action against Iraq, which the Bush administration is exploring in an effort to oust President Saddam Hussein.
After meeting UN Security Council members on Monday, Mr Annan said he would view Iraq's invitation "in a different light" if Baghdad agreed to the 1999 Security Council resolution that outlined a work programme for the arms experts.
The inspections are key to suspending UN sanctions against Iraq, imposed when Baghdad's troops invaded Kuwait in 1990.
The weapons experts, who went into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, spent seven years inspecting and destroying Iraq's dangerous weapons, a process which Baghdad says is complete.
The US ambassador to the UN, Mr John Negroponte, said the US, which is this month's Security Council president, would be "deeply sceptical, to say the least, of any move by the secretariat to accept the Iraqi invitation".
Most council members however opposed outright rejection, with some maintaining such a move would only give a green light to Washington for an invasion.
There was "not too much agreement", said Mr Gennady Gatilov, the deputy UN ambassador from Russia, Iraq's closest ally on the council. - (Reuters)