You can still avoid war, Blix to tell Iraq
Chief United Nations inspector Hans Blix says he will tell Iraq the situation is “very dangerous”, but it can still prevent war by providing new evidence about its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes.
Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will deliver the message during their visit to Iraq on Sunday and Monday.
The visit comes before their January 27 report to the UN Security Council on Iraq’s co-operation with UN inspections, which resumed in late November after four years.
“The message is that they are in a tense situation and we would want them to co-operate more on the substance and provide more evidence in particular,” Blix said as he left UN headquarters for Brussels, Paris and London, en route to Baghdad.
“They have provided prompt access, been very co-operative in terms of logistics,” Blix said. “But they need to do a good deal more to provide evidence if we are to avoid any worse development.”
Asked whether the Baghdad trip was a last chance for the Iraqis, Blix said: “There’s still time, I think, for Iraqis to get themselves out of a very dangerous situation.”
US president George Bush expressed impatience with Saddam Hussein on Tuesday and said “time is running out for him” to disarm. But White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday that Bush “has made no decisions about whether or not we will go to war”.
“Indeed, much of it still depends on Saddam Hussein and whether Saddam Hussein will get the message that time is running out and he needs to actively comply with the inspections and the inspectors,” Fleischer said.
ElBaradei’s spokesman, Mark Gwozdecky, said on Sunday that UN teams would need about a year to carry out ”credible” inspections of Iraq’s nuclear programme. Blix has said his teams need months.
“If we get the evidence from the Iraqis, then you don’t need much time at all,” Blix said yesterday. “But if it takes a lot of time to do that, then it’s worse.”
Blix and ElBaradei told the security council last week that inspectors had found no “smoking guns”, but they said Iraq’s 12,000-page declaration was very short on new evidence to verify Baghdad’s claims that its nuclear, chemical, biological and long-range missile programmes had been destroyed.
Blix said that during a meeting with US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday, Rice focused on the importance of the January 27 report to the security council and the issue of Iraqi co-operation.
“She wants us to examine the declaration again,” Blix said. “We have given some examples of things that we don’t think it covered and I think she would like us to give an assessment of the co-operation both from the ground in terms of inspection, and in terms of how we see the report now that we have analysed it even further.”
In Resolution 1441, which was adopted unanimously on November 8, the security council gave Iraq a final opportunity to disarm and threatened serious consequences if it did not.
It says false statements or omissions in Iraq’s declaration and a failure to co-operate in implementing the resolution would constitute a new “material breach” that would be reported to the council for discussion and possible action.
