Stymied U.N. Weapons Inspection Team to Depart Iraq

U.N. weapons inspectors ended their five-day vigil outside an Iraqi military base Saturday, and U.N. officials said the team will leave the country today.

The 53-member team, working in around-the-clock shifts, had been guarding a site suspected of containing illegal weapons material to prevent Iraq from removing documents or other evidence of its weapons program.

It is one of five sites U.N. inspectors had been denied access to since Tuesday. They were trying to determine whether Iraq had complied with U.N. orders to destroy all its long-range missiles and halt its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.

Iraq must comply with these demands, pay war reparations and account for 609 missing people before economic sanctions imposed for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait can be lifted. The invasion led to the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The inspectors and their vehicles--which they’d been using to barricade entrances--were no longer outside the military complex in suburban Baghdad on Saturday.

In New York, Charles Duelfer, deputy head of the U.N. commission responsible for Iraqi disarmament, said the team will leave today for Bahrain, the commission’s regional headquarters, because “Iraq has given no indication it would change its position” despite two strong demands from the U.N. Security Council.

“Too much of a bad thing is not good,” he said, adding that the value of keeping the team in place was rapidly diminishing.

U.N. officials had said earlier that the group was searching mainly for documents and that these had probably been removed last week.

U.S. officials said that they did not know if the team would be replaced and that the next move depended on a scheduled trip to Baghdad on Wednesday by Rolf Ekeus, head of the U.N. commission.

The Security Council on Friday rejected an Iraqi proposal to permit inspections of the targeted sites under certain conditions. The council insisted on unconditional access to all suspect sites in Iraq but stopped short of threatening military force to ensure compliance.

Iraq has not officially commented on the resolution, which was not mentioned Saturday in the country’s government-run newspapers. The newspapers did, however, deliver scathing attacks on the inspections team.

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz had offered to allow inspections if the United Nations first showed why it suspects that certain sites contain illegal weapons or documents.

Friday’s resolution firmly rejected the conditions.