U.N. Approves Plan to Return Arms Inspectors to Iraq

After a year of diplomacy and deadlock, the U.N. Security Council approved a complicated resolution Friday intended to bring weapons inspectors back to Iraq and suspend trade sanctions if Saddam Hussein cooperates.

The resolution passed, 11-0, despite abstentions by Russia, France and China that frustrated U.S. efforts to get all five permanent members on board. Malaysia, a nonpermanent member, also abstained.

Still, the resolution opened a new chapter in the United Nations’ efforts to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the Persian Gulf War.

U.N. inspectors have not been in Baghdad for a year, and experts fear that President Hussein’s government may have embarked on a covert program to resupply its stocks of chemical and biological arms and to seek out key components needed to build atomic weapons.

The resolution creates an arms control agency, the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, directed to ferret out Iraq’s remaining weapons of mass destruction. It offers the prospect that sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War could be suspended.

Iraq, which is seeking a complete lifting of sanctions, immediately rejected the resolution. The negative reaction was not a surprise to Security Council members, who expected stiff opposition but expressed hope for a change in Iraq’s attitude in the long run.

All members of the council stressed the need for renewed arms scrutiny inside Iraq.

“The vote today was not unanimous, but no member asserts that Iraq has met its obligations under the council’s resolutions,” said U.S. representative Peter Burleigh. “No council member argues that Iraq has disarmed as required.”

“Today’s resolution does not raise the bar on what is required of Iraq in the area of disarmament, but it also does not lower it,” he added.

“We believe Iraq must resume cooperation with the United Nations,” said Russia’s ambassador, Sergei V. Lavrov. “Now the ball is in the court of the Security Council, which must act in an unbiased and unprejudiced way.”

Iraq has defied all attempts to reinstate monitors. Before the vote, the ruling party’s newspaper, Al Thawra, called the U.N. resolution “a cover for a new aggression and conspiracy against Iraq.” Hours after the balloting, officials in Baghdad announced that Iraq “categorically” rejected the resolution.

Canadian Ambassador Robert Fowler said the United Nations could not declare what Iraq must do to have the sanctions lifted until the new agency has a chance to visit Baghdad.

“This resolution is a framework,” he said. “It doesn’t dot the i’s and cross the t’s; it requires a bit of faith.”

Diplomats said the resolution leaves many tasks to be fulfilled by the council in the months ahead. It is uncertain whether the divisions and diplomatic paralysis that delayed the vote will again become apparent.

Iraq had warned France that it would break diplomatic relations and cancel oil contracts if the French voted for the resolution. Britain and the United States exerted counter-pressure, and hours before a vote that had been scheduled for Tuesday, France asked for more time.

In Paris, the Foreign Ministry criticized the resolution for not spelling out precisely the disarmament measures that Baghdad had to meet before sanctions could be suspended.

“The text risks causing distorted interpretations . . . which could have as an objective an infinite delay on any decision over the sanctions,” the Foreign Ministry said. “Such a position could only lead to new crises.”

In Washington, Clinton administration officials conceded that they were defeated in their months-long campaign to get all five permanent members of the Security Council to vote for the resolution.

A senior State Department official said French President Jacques Chirac apparently ordered his delegation to abstain, even though most of France’s original objections had been satisfied.

“It’s frustrating for us and, in the end, a disappointment,” the official said of the negotiations with France over the resolution. He said the French and Russian claims that Iraq would be more reasonable if the Security Council agreed to ease sanctions appeared to be groundless.

“It has proved more difficult for Moscow and Paris to deliver Baghdad than for Baghdad to deliver Paris and Moscow,” he added.

At the same time, the official noted that Russia, France and China could have killed the resolution by vetoing it but didn’t.

The new arms control body created by the council will build upon the experience of the U.N. Special Commission, whose outspoken and controversial chairman, Richard Butler, resigned this spring at the end of his term.

The commission’s credibility was seriously compromised after charges that some of its inspectors provided information to U.S. intelligence agencies.

During Butler’s tenure, the commission faced almost continuing deception by Baghdad, but the team succeeded in destroying large quantities of Iraqi armaments. Searchers warned that additional work needed to be done, particularly in the chemical and biological weapons sectors.

As part of the package, the International Atomic Energy Agency will concentrate on nuclear inspections in Iraq. Baghdad this week refused to grant visas to that agency.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will appoint the chairman of the new commission within 30 days.

In remarks widely interpreted as criticizing Butler, Annan said that, in addition to having knowledge of disarmament, the chairman needed to be someone “who has people skills, who can be firm but correct.”

The resolution called for UNMOVIC to formulate its work schedule within 60 days of starting operations and to submit a list of key disarmament tasks to the Security Council for approval.

Sanctions against Iraq could be suspended by a vote of the Security Council if and when the new commission reports that progress has been made on key disarmament tasks and that the Baghdad government has “cooperated fully” with inspectors during a test period.

To assure continued compliance, the sanctions suspension would have to be renewed every 120 days.

Some weapons inspectors feared that the new resolution, which gives a divided Security Council a role in drawing up the new commission’s agenda, could weaken the monitors’ independence.

In a potentially large incentive for Hussein, the resolution would completely lift the cap on how much oil Iraq could sell. Under previous resolutions, the cap was $5.26 billion every six months. A key part of the resolution also streamlined the procedures for sending food, pharmaceuticals, agricultural supplies and other badly needed humanitarian goods to Iraq.

In lobbying before the vote, the Defense Department offered satellite photos showing how Baghdad was skirting U.N. sanctions by smuggling oil and gasoline to other Mideast states for badly needed income. In November alone, according to the State Department, Iraq’s illicit exports averaged 70,000 barrels a day.

“Saddam Hussein has no compunction about preventing the international community from helping the people of Iraq while at the same time ensuring he has enough money to line his family’s pockets,” charged State Department spokesman James B. Foley.

Experts said satellite photos and spy planes can’t provide evidence of the full scope of Iraq’s weapons programs or of its compliance.

“Iraq has the equipment, has the know-how and clearly has a lot of materials,” said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the inspection team that left Baghdad last December. “Biological weapons are not too complicated--you can almost make them in your kitchen.”

When inspectors were in Iraq, he said, they found that a vaccine plant for foot-and-mouth disease was being used to make biological weapons and that a single-cell protein plant for manufacturing animal feed was being converted to produce anthrax.

A State Department official said the Security Council’s action did not make it either more or less likely that the U.S. will use military force against Iraq if it appears to be developing weapons of mass destruction or preparing to threaten its neighbors.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.