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If the U.S. & U.K. have any proof Iraq has WMD, "let them forthwith come forward," Saadi said
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BAGHDAD,
December 9 (News Agencies) – U.N. weapons inspections moved up a gear
Monday, December 9, with the arrival of 25 more experts who went
straight to work as the new disarmament mission entered its third week
in Iraq.
"They
are already participating in the inspections," U.N. spokesmen Hiro
Ueki told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on a tenth day of inspections in
Iraq.
Teams
of experts from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection
Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
drove out of their Baghdad headquarters at 8:30 am (0530 GMT) heading
for suspect sites.
The
reinforcements arrived Sunday, December 8, to bolster the 17 inspectors
who reached Baghdad November 25 and began work two days later.
Ueki,
who did reveal exactly how many of the new arrivals set off on
inspection duty early Monday, said the number of sites checked, usually
two per day, would "probably" now increase.
Among
the new batch are 21 IAEA staff and four from UNMOVIC on top of the 11
UNMOVIC and six IAEA employees already in Baghdad.
Ueki
also said that no copies of Iraq's declaration of its military programs
had been kept by the U.N. inspectors in Iraq so there could be no
details provided, said AFP.
"Don't
hope for leaks from here," he added.
Iraq
late Sunday handed over its long-awaited declaration saying it has no
weapons of mass destruction.
"Tomorrow,
copies will be made and we will start to work," chief U.N. weapons
inspector Hans Blix said. "We will discuss with the president of
the Security Council exactly how we'll handle it physically."
"Here
are the documents," he added, waving an arm as staffers passed
carrying two black briefcases.
One
copy of the 12,000-page arms declaration, required under a tough new
inspection regime approved by the U.N. Security Council last month,
arrived at the U.N. headquarters in New York after a flight from Baghdad
via Nicosia.
Another
copy arrived earlier in Vienna and was being scrutinized by members of
the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency.
In
Baghdad, a government official said the United States and Britain must
come forward with any evidence showing that Iraq has forbidden chemical,
biological or nuclear weapons, as they have been stating for weeks.
Washington
has been claiming that regardless of what is in the written statement,
it has what it describes as proof that Iraq allegedly has weapons of
mass destruction, despite insistent Iraqi denials.
"If
they [the United States and Britain] have anything to the contrary, let
them forthwith come forward," government scientific adviser Amer
al-Saadi told reporters. "The sooner they do it the better for all
concerned."
Asked
whether he expected Iraq's weapons declaration to satisfy the two
Western allies, Saadi said: "I hope that it will satisfy because it
is currently accurate, complete, truthful, all the things that they
asked for."
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The documents in two black briefcases
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He
said the declaration listed eight main nuclear sites and 20 supporting
ones, although he declined to reveal how close Iraq was to building a
nuclear bomb.
Saadi
also said the text contained no new evidence about Iraq's germ warfare
program – a point of controversy with past U.N. inspection missions.
The
problem was Iraq had destroyed all evidence of its bacteriological
research before the first U.N. inspectors arrived in 1991, he said,
something he conceded was, with hindsight, a mistake.
Its
main section covering 11,807 pages, the Iraqi declaration also included
two annexes composed of 529 megabytes of CD-ROMs containing back reports
for the four years U.N. weapons inspectors were out of the country, and
a 325-page dossier on the fate of long-term monitoring of suspect sites.
In
Vienna, nuclear experts were comparing the document's contents with
information gathered when Iraq first began disarming in 1991. They plan
to give the Security Council a preliminary analysis within two weeks,
officials said.
However
the Security Council has said it will not release the document until
late next week at the earliest, even to council members, and diplomats
said the full version would not be published.
U.S.
arms experts will be doing their own analysis of the declaration, as
soon as it is released to council members, sources said.
The
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed
El-Baradei, on Monday asked for patience while his agency digests Iraq's
declaration on its weapons programs.
The
agency said it received the 12,000-page document Sunday night in Vienna,
of which 2,100 pages concern Iraq's nuclear weapons capability.
The
IAEA said it would take 10 days to make a preliminary report to the U.N.
Security Council before making a final report on the document by January
27.
El-Baradei
said, however, it could take over a year to conclude whether or not Iraq
possessed the ability to produce nuclear arms, and asked the world to
wait.
"We
know that our conclusion is very crucial to decisions which come between
war and peace, so we feel conscious that before we come to any
conclusion that it is based on absolutely as much information, as much
fact as possible," he told a news conference in Tokyo.
"If
we succeed in providing a thorough analysis of the report, if we succeed
in making sure that Iraq is disarmed through the inspection, then I
think that could lead to the avoidance of the use of force, could lead
also to spare innocent lives which could be lost," he said.
"I
think spending a few weeks doing that analysis and making progress also
with the inspections is time well spent."
Most
of the seven-volume document concerns previously known information, but
300 pages regarding developments from 1991 to the present are written in
Arabic and require close scrutiny and translation, El-Baradei said.
The
agency chief was in Tokyo for the first day of a two-day agency meeting
into how to increase the number of countries that have joined a pact
with the IAEA to report and allow inspection of their nuclear
activities.
