Iraq Insists Some Sites Are Off Limits to Arms Inspectors

Despite two days of talks, chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler said Monday that Iraq told him his team will never enter presidential sites as part of its mission to dismantle Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

“I have to tell you that the Iraqi side insisted that we would never be able to inspect presidential sites,” Butler told a news conference at the end of his talks with Iraqi officials in Baghdad.

The envoy is head of the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, charged with disarming Iraq’s biological, chemical and ballistic missile arsenals under the cease-fire terms of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Iraq needs a clean bill of health from UNSCOM before crippling sanctions imposed for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait can be lifted.

Butler, who is scheduled to address the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, said the council can decide whether access to the palaces can remain an “unresolved issue.”

He said Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz told him that Iraq will defend its decision to the Security Council, but the envoy said he “gravely doubted” that the council will accept Baghdad’s justifications.

Butler said that Iraq refused to give him a list of the off-limits “presidential sites,” but he reported progress in other areas, including access to less critical “sensitive sites” in Iraq and an agreement to subject technical disputes to a group of experts “from a variety of countries who are known to be experts and objective.”

He said that Iraq provided no new information about biological weapons that UNSCOM believes it may still be working on.