 |
|
“Obviously
the (Iraqi) cooperation seems to be good,” says Annan
|
BAGHDAD,
December 4 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – U.N. arms inspectors
left Baghdad Wednesday, December 4, to inspect two Iraqi sites, as a
visit Tuesday, December 3, to one of President Saddam Hussein’s
palaces earned them their first criticism from Baghdad since arriving in
the country last week.
One
of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC)
and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams
headed south to the Al-Tuwaitha compound run by Iraq’s nuclear power
authority, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
A
second team went north to the Al-Muthanna site which has been associated
in the past with the production of mustard gas, sarin and other agents
before it was demolished by earlier inspectors.
On
Tuesday, U.N. arms experts inspected a sensitive presidential palace
site in Baghdad for the first time since they resumed work last week in
key exercise of their sweeping new powers.
They
were able to visit “every corner” of the Al-Sejud palace compound,
U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki said after the two-hour inspection.
“The
question is: Is it a start of misbehavior which would recreate the
climate that marked relations between previous arms inspection teams and
Iraq?” asked a foreign ministry spokesman in a statement quoted by the
official INA news agency commenting on the palace visit.
He
was referring to Iraq’s crisis-ridden relationship with inspectors of
the former U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), who pulled out of the
country ahead of a December 1998 U.S.-British bombing blitz.
The
spokesman wondered if the inspectors were starting to behave in the
“bad” way which “the United States, Britain and the Zionist entity
(Israel) are seeking to impose on the United Nations.”
“UNMOVIC
and the IAEA face a real test of their credibility and of their (ability
to live up to) their promises of professionalism, objectivity and
respect of the U.N. Charter and international law,” he said.
The
coming days will show if the inspectors are determined to act in
conformity with their “impartial international identity or whether
they will bow to U.S.-British pressures and blackmail” and be used to
“spy on targets that are not mentioned in U.N. Security Council
resolutions”.
The
Iraqi foreign ministry spokesman noted that arms inspectors entered the
palace “without protective clothing or masks to protect them against
the alleged biological, chemical and nuclear agents” they were
supposed to be looking for.
This
raises the question of whether the visit was aimed at “searching for
prohibited weapons or pursuing other objectives,” he said in a
reference to the spying activities which UNSCOM was accused of engaging
in.
The
criticism came after U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan stressed Iraq was
cooperating with the inspectors and Baghdad said it would beat by one
day a UN-imposed deadline by declaring its weapons arsenal on Saturday,
December 7.
Annan
said on Tuesday inspectors have been effectively using the new powers
granted them last month and Iraq seemed to be cooperating with them.
“It
has only been a week. Obviously the cooperation seems to be good, but
this is not a one-week wonder,” Annan said.
“They
have to sustain the cooperation and the effort and perform. We will have
to wait for the report from the inspectors,” he said.
But
U.S. President George W. Bush downplayed Iraq’s cooperation, as top
U.S. officials fanned out across the globe to bolster support for a
possible attack on Baghdad.
“The
issue is not the inspectors. The issue is whether or not Mr Saddam
Hussein will disarm like he said he would,” Bush told several thousand
cheering fellow Republicans in the southern U.S. state of Louisiana on
Tuesday.
“Inspectors
are there not to play hide and seek with Mr Saddam Hussein. Inspectors
are there to verify the will of the world, and the will of the world
says clearly: Disarm.
“If
he refuses to disarm, if he tries to deceive his way out of disarmament,
this nation, along with other willing nations, will disarm Saddam
Hussein.”
In
a related development, Pentagon number two Paul Wolfowitz said in Ankara
Wednesday that Turkey backed the United States in the crisis with Iraq
and was ready to cooperate in case of a military operation against
Baghdad.
“We
got very strong affirmations of Turkish support for the United States in
this crisis with Iraq,” he told reporters.
He
said Washington had not yet requested any specific military assistance
from Turkey, adding: “We’re still talking very theoretically”.
“Let
me make it clear there isn’t a firm American request. We’re going to
go now, immediately, into very concrete discussions about what
facilities might be used, what forces might be employed on them, how
much money is going to have to be invested to bring them up to the
level,” he said ahead of his talks Wednesday with the Turkish general
staff.
“We
have agreement to move forward with concrete measures of military
planning and preparations that have been in a bit of a holding pattern
while the government was getting established” following the November 3
general elections here, Wolfowitz said.
“The
immediate focus of our planning efforts needs to be to identify how much
investment we’ve got to make in various places if we're going to use
them. We're talking potentially about several hundred million dollars of
investment in various facilities we might use,” he said.
“I’m
quite confident that we will in fact have a significant level of Turkish
participation,” he added.
Turkish
Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis said Tuesday Ankara was ready to offer use
of its air bases to the United States, but only in the event of a war
against Iraq approved by the U.N.
He
appeared to rule out a U.S.-led ground offensive across the border into
Turkey’s southeastern neighbor.
Iraq
on Wednesday branded a British government report accusing Baghdad of
systematic torture, arbitrary killings and ethnic persecution as being
“full of lies”.
“The
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has delivered another of his
statements full of erroneous information, accusations, injustice and
lies against Iraq, its people and its leadership,” a foreign ministry
spokesman said in a statement.
Blair
had given “false witness (and) ignored the U.N. mechanisms with which
Iraq cooperates,” he added.
The
ministry, which did not respond to specific points in the British
report, stressed that Baghdad “reserves the right to reply in detail
to the communiqué full of lies from Blair.”
It
recalled another Blair report two months ago on Iraq’s alleged
development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons calling it also
“full of lies and false information.”
The
statement said that inspections by U.N. experts of some of the sites
highlighted in the British arms dossier had “revealed the lies that
public opinion has become used to hearing from Blair.”
Amnesty
International secretary general Irene Khan criticized the content of the
new British dossier as “a cold and calculated manipulation of the work
of human rights activists.”
