Iraq Ends Siege of U.N. Nuclear Arms Inspectors

The siege of 44 U.N. inspectors ended shortly before 1 a.m. today, Baghdad time, as armed Iraqi soldiers withdrew into the night and the inspectors kept control of their cache of files, videotapes and film documenting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s elaborate plans for building nuclear bombs.

Talking with the Cable News Network on his mobile telephone, David A. Kay, the Texas-born political scientist who heads the inspection team, said, “I am happy to say that . . . the siege is officially over as of seven minutes ago.”

But Kay said that his team, many of whom were already asleep in cars and buses in the parking lot of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, would not break camp until dawn.

His supervisor at the United Nations, Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish diplomat who heads the commission charged with eliminating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, also pointed out that “the team preferred not to move back in the dark with all the documents and their equipment.”

But Kay said, “as of 6 a.m., we will be moving back into the hotel. As of 8 a.m., we will be meeting with the Iraqis to provide copies. . . . Then we will resume our inspections.”

Ekeus said the team, once back in its headquarters at the nearby Palestine Hotel, would photocopy the documents and make duplicates of the videocassettes for Iraqi officials. The film would be sent to Bahrain for developing, but the inspectors would supply the Iraqis with a list of everything on each roll of film.

The Swedish diplomat estimated that it would take the inspection team about five hours to make this inventory.

Iraqi soldiers, who had kept the inspectors in the parking lot for four days, withdrew after Kay and Iraqi officials signed an agreement on how to prepare the inventory on the seized material. Iraq, which had refused at first to allow the inspectors to leave with the documents, finally relented under U.N. pressure but demanded an inventory of what had been taken.

In New York, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, echoing a theme of the Bush Administration, described the end of the siege as another example of what he called the Iraqi “cheat-and-retreat policy.”

There has been a good deal of speculation that the documents expose the countries and companies that supplied the equipment, materials and know-how to Hussein for his nuclear weapons program.

Asked about this, Ekeus replied: “We shouldn’t answer that question until we have studied the documents.”

Ekeus said that, while his commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency will supply a comprehensive report on their work to the Security Council, they do not intend to make the documents public. At present, he said, his commission’s policy is to supply the names of nuclear-program suppliers only to those governments that asked for them.

But, acknowledging that this system could conceal from public view the governments and companies that supplied Iraq, Ekeus said his commission might consider changing this policy.

In Washington, a number of federal agencies were eagerly awaiting a chance to look at the documents. Experts on technology controls said the files obtained by the United Nations could well prove to be valuable as evidence in prosecuting foreign companies that may have broken their own governments’ laws by exporting sensitive material to Iraq.

At the United Nations, Ekeus also addressed another knotty issue involving Baghdad and whether it will allow unrestricted U.N. helicopter inspection flights across Iraq.

Ekeus said that he had just read the translation of an Arabic letter from the Iraqi government listing technical requirements for such flights. “I haven’t been able to assess it fully,” he said. “But I am prepared to characterize it as a clearly positive step.”

He said the Iraqi government, which had once objected strenuously to the flights, had not raised any political objections in its letter but had only listed safety measures and other requirements, such as the use of Iraqi navigators, that were acceptable to the U.N. But Ekeus also said the U.N. decided to postpone the start of the flights, originally scheduled for Sunday. He said he expects to reschedule them soon.

The inspectors’ siege and the helicopter controversy, although both evidently heading toward a peaceful solution, had earlier raised the specter of renewed military action against Iraq. President Bush and other U.S. officials had made it clear that the Administration was losing patience with Iraq and its harassment of the inspection process--a key element in the Security Council resolution accepted by Iraq that had ended the Persian Gulf War.

But Ekeus said the Iraqis evidently had been upset in the last week by the surprise inspections of Kay’s team. They simply had never anticipated that the inspectors would go somewhere without informing them.

“We hope that Iraq will now understand how to work with us,” Ekeus said, “and that we will not have these incidents in the future.” But his words sounded more like a wish than a cold assessment.

Asked if he thinks that the Iraqi nuclear weapons program has come to a halt--as required by the cease-fire resolution--Ekeus said, “My hunch is that the Iraqi (uranium) enrichment program has stopped. But there still are a large number of people employed” in nuclear research.

Earlier in the day, the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the Security Council issued a strong communique condemning Iraq for its obstruction of U.N. resolutions.

After meeting with Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, the foreign ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Britain and China “reaffirmed their determination to secure Iraq’s full and scrupulous compliance with . . . all . . . relevant resolutions in order to bring about the council’s objective of restoring international peace and security in the area and to ensure that the humanitarian needs of all segments of the Iraqi population are met.”

The ministers said the “pattern of persistent Iraqi noncompliance” with Security Council resolutions and its “obstruction of U.N. inspection teams” were unacceptable.

Although the Iraqi government seemed to capitulate on its two confrontations with the Security Council, Iraqi Foreign Minister Ahmed Hussein Khudayer showed the usual Iraqi defiance with an angry attack on President Bush in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

Accusing Bush of attacking President Hussein at the General Assembly earlier in the week “in a manner incompatible with diplomatic practice,” Hussein said that, “if we were to call the American President names . . . we would wonder what to call one who killed women, children and the elderly with his planes and missiles, who bombarded the Amirya shelter killing more women and children, what we could call one who gave the orders to bury Iraqi soldiers alive. . . .”