Iraq Again Vows U.N. Access to Nuclear Sites

Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar accused Iraq of evading a series of nuclear inspections but told the U.N. Security Council on Friday that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has now promised full compliance with the U.N. teams empowered to find and destroy all materials that could be used to make a nuclear bomb.

The promise came in a letter from Hussein that Perez de Cuellar relayed to the Security Council alongside a report from a special U.N. commission criticizing Iraq for failing to live up to past promises of full compliance.

Iraq’s defiance of the inspectors--especially a dramatic incident when Iraqi soldiers fired over the heads of inspectors trying to stop a convoy a week ago--led to worldwide alarm and condemnation and raised the possibility that the United States might launch air strikes against possible nuclear hiding places in Iraq.

The latest Iraqi promise evidently failed to impress Alexander F. Watson, Washington’s deputy U.N. ambassador. “We’ve heard that many times before,” Watson told reporters as he received his official copy of the report and letter. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

After listening to Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who headed the special U.N. commission formed to look into the problem, Watson said that he and other members of the council had “great concern that clearly the Iraqis are still not complying with their obligations to cooperate with the inspection team.”

Although U.S. sources have not been inclined to put much faith in Hussein’s promises, his letter to Perez de Cuellar was so specific that it could not serve as a deception for long. U.N. officials will know by early next week whether Iraq is serious about complying.

The Iraqi president promised that U.N. inspectors would receive a list either Sunday night or Monday morning of the controversial uninspected items on the convoy spotted last week. Under the terms of the Security Council cease-fire resolution that ended the Persian Gulf War last February, the inspection team should then be allowed to see the items and, if they are forbidden, to order their destruction.

In the letter, Hussein pledged that “prompt and unimpeded access will be ensured to the locations and items designated for inspection” in accordance with the cease-fire resolution.

But Deputy U.S. Ambassador Watson derided Hussein’s promise of what Watson called “a mysterious list” of items when Iraq had failed to produce the items themselves to inspectors.

Iraqi Ambassador Abdul Amir Anbari, talking with journalists, described the Hussein letter as “a positive, sympathetic and cooperative answer” to a letter from Perez de Cuellar on Thursday that had denounced the Iraqi attitude and actions toward the inspections as “not satisfactory.”

“Now these difficulties are behind us,” Anbari said.

It was far from clear that this was so. But it was clear that Iraq had embroiled itself in one of the most emotionally charged conflicts with the United Nations since the end of the war. The Security Council, in its war-ending resolution, voted to strip Iraq of all its capability in nuclear, chemical and biological warfare.

U.N. officials have had the most difficulty trying to destroy Iraq’s nuclear capability. Although all analysts agree that Iraq is far from possessing a nuclear bomb and has only pieces of old-fashioned equipment, the defeated country has failed to turn everything over to the inspectors and evidently moved some material from one site to another in the convoy that was shielded from the inspectors a week ago.

For a week now, President Bush has issued a series of warnings to Iraq that amounted to a barely veiled threat to take military action if nothing else would persuade Hussein to back down.

The determined mood of the White House was underscored Friday by Deputy Press Secretary Roman Popadiuk, who said: “Iraq has accepted those resolutions, so they’re legally bound to fulfill every letter of those resolutions. . . . And we will hold them to that, simple as that. We have the right and the international groundwork for enforcing those resolutions, period. I don’t think I could get any stronger than that.”

The Security Council took no action after receiving the report by the Ekeus commission. Among the document’s conclusions were that despite assurances from the Iraqi prime minister, deputy prime minister, minister of foreign affairs and minister of defense, the actions of Iraq fell short of what was required by the Security Council.

U.N. officials, the report said, were allowed to inspect materials at the town of Fallujah, but these were not the objects that the inspectors had tried to check in the convoy.

The situation became so confused, according to the commission, that the inspectors were shown destroyed equipment that need not have been destroyed under the Security Council resolution.

“The large pieces of equipment which were thus inspected were related to nuclear research and could not have had relevance for the production of weapons-usable material,” the report said. “No meaningful explanation was given why they had been destroyed.”

Trying to explain the convoy, the report said, the Iraqis insisted that they were moving nuclear equipment and material from the Atomic Energy Commission of Iraq to the Ministry of Defense. Iraqi officials said that the Ministry of Defense was then supposed to destroy the equipment and material involved in military programs and redistribute the rest for the use of civilian reconstruction in Iraq.

The report emphasized that the inspectors had no way of verifying the Iraqi version of what had happened.

Aside from the renewed attempt at nuclear inspections early next week, Iraq will also be the object of a second controversial inspection by Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the special U.N. envoy for humanitarian affairs in the Gulf. He will be investigating reports that thousands of Iraqi Shiite Muslims are trapped in deplorable conditions in the marshlands of southern Iraq under siege by the Iraqi army in the wake of a failed Shiite uprising.

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang in Washington contributed to this report.