UN/BLIX REPORT: Drs Blix and ElBaradei showed their independence yesterday by challenging assertions by Colin Powell. Conor O'Clery at the UN examines their latest report to the Security Council.
When US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the case against Iraq at the UN last week, he showed two satellite photographs of a weapons facility at a place called Taji which had housed chemical munitions.
They were taken some weeks apart. In the first were several signs of continuing banned activity, including a truck he called a "signature item" for a chemicals dump - a decontamination vehicle in case something went wrong.
The other picture showed the same site on December 22nd as a UN inspection team arrived. The signature vehicle had gone. The site had been cleaned up. The bunkers were clean. The inspectors found nothing. It raised the possibility, Mr Powell said, that the Iraqis had been tipped off.
This argument was calmly countered by Dr Hans Blix at yesterday's Security Council meeting. The inspectors had checked out the American claim.
In general, he said, they had found no evidence that the movements of inspectors had been detected in advance by Iraqi surveillance. The site in the satellite pictures was a "declared site", one that Iraq would have expected them to inspect.
"The reported movement of munitions at the site could just as easily have been a routine activity as a movement of proscribed munitions in anticipation of imminent inspection," the Swedish diplomat said - adding dryly: "Our reservation on this point does not detract from our appreciation for the briefing."
Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, also showed he was not prepared to let Mr Powell away with anything.
The US Secretary of State pointed out on February 5th that a search of the home of an Iraqi scientist on January 16th had yielded 2,000 documents, some classified and relating to Iraq's nuclear programme. He argued that this pointed to a scheme of hiding documents in scientists' houses to deceive the inspectors.
Dr ElBaradei said his team had reviewed the documents, which related predominantly to lasers, including the use of laser technology to enrich uranium. Some, indeed, had been classified. But they mostly referred to the pre-1991 period and to activities or sites already known to the IAEA.
They also, he said, "appear to be the personal files of the scientist in whose home they were found" - in other words, that there was nothing sinister about their presence in his home. Nothing contained in them, he said, altered the conclusion previously drawn by the IAEA that Iraq had no ongoing nuclear programme.
In his review yesterday, Dr Blix did, however, agree with a strong thrust of Mr Powell's basic case against Baghdad: that Iraq had not accounted, in its declaration of December 7th, for suspected stocks of anthrax and the nerve agent VX. It was "a matter of great significance that many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for", Dr Blix said.
One document supplied by Iraq suggested that some 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were unaccounted for. "One must not jump to the conclusion that they existed," he warned (as many US officials have done).
"However, that possibility was also not excluded. If they exist, they should be presented for destruction. If they do not exist, credible evidence to that effect should be presented."
The result of inspections of more than 200 chemical and more than 100 biological samples collected at different sites were "consistent with Iraq's declarations" that it did not have the banned weapons.
Nevertheless, issues concerning proof of the disposal or destruction of possible stocks of anthrax and the nerve agent VX had not been dealt with, and "Iraq itself must squarely tackle this task and avoid belittling the questions."
This was "perhaps the most important problem we are facing". He could understand that it may not be easy for Iraq in all cases to provide the evidence needed, but "it is not the task of the inspectors to find it", Dr Blix pointed out.
"At the meeting in Baghdad on February 8th and 9th, the Iraqi side addressed some of the important outstanding disarmament issues and gave us a number of papers, for example regarding anthrax and growth material, the nerve agent VX and missile production.
"Although no new evidence was provided in the papers and no open issues were closed through them or the expert discussions, the presentation of the papers could be indicative of a more active attitude focusing on important open issues.
"The Iraqi side suggested that the problem of verifying the quantities of anthrax and two VX-precursors, which had been declared unilaterally destroyed, might be tackled through certain technical and analytical methods.
"Although our experts are still assessing the suggestions, they are not very hopeful that it could prove possible to assess the quantities of material poured into the ground years ago. Documentary evidence or testimony by staff that dealt with the items still appears to be needed."
Dr Blix concluded that, three months after the adoption of resolution 1441, the period of disarmament through inspection could still be short, if "immediate, active and unconditional co-operation" were forthcoming.