Iraqi Officials Pledge to Meet U.N. Demands

Iraqi officials promised Tuesday to declare any weapons of mass destruction by a Dec. 8 deadline and reaffirmed that U.N. arms inspectors would have full access to all sites across their country.

After a meeting between chief weapons inspectors and senior Iraqi officials, Gen. Amir Saadi said Iraq would cooperate with Resolution 1441, which was passed unanimously by the Security Council on Nov. 8 and gives Baghdad a “final chance” to disarm.

“Within 30 days, as the resolution says, a report from Iraq will be submitted on all the files -- nuclear, chemical, biological and missile files,” Saadi said. He added that in two meetings that included chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and Mohammed Baradei from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the participants discussed the forthcoming inspections “in order to avoid problems or misunderstandings.”

“We are hopeful,” Saadi said. “We are in fact quite sure that things will work much better than before.”

Iraq maintains that it has no weapons of mass destruction, so the potential contents of the Dec. 8 declaration are a matter of great curiosity to Security Council members, especially the U.S. and Britain, whose intelligence services have compiled their own lists of what they believe Iraq possesses.

When U.N. inspectors left Iraq four years ago after facing continued resistance and obstacles, they had a long list of items that were unaccounted for, including deadly VX nerve gas, 7,100 liters of anthrax and a number of Scud missiles.

If Iraq’s accounting of its arsenal does not match the inspectors’ or if a member state believes there are intentional omissions, the Security Council will consider subsequent steps. The options range from seeking clarification to authorizing an attack on Iraq.

“We told them that this declaration should be comprehensive, concise and clear, as the Security Council mentions,” said Baradei, “and it should include all factors that the Security Council demanded.”

On the inspectors’ second day in the country, they began technical preparations for formal inspections to begin next Wednesday. At the former Canal Hotel in Baghdad, they reopened their old command center -- which has been occupied by only pigeons and insects -- sweeping out the dust and installing new computers.

They will also set up secure phone lines, arrange for jeeps and helicopters and install a laboratory for testing. The resolution calls for surprise inspections, anywhere, any time, and there are hundreds of sites on the inspectors’ lists.

The preparations began amid a row over clashes in the “no-fly” zones in northern and southern Iraq. U.S. officials declared over the weekend that targeting U.S.-British coalition aircraft patrolling those areas would be a “material breach” of the resolution but that the U.S. would not push the issue in the Security Council just yet.

However, none of the other 14 members of the council agree with the U.S., and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan weighed in Tuesday.

“Let me say that I don’t think that the council will say this is in contravention of the resolution of the Security Council,” he said while traveling in Yugoslavia.

Coalition aircraft carried out two strikes Monday, in the north and south, after being fired on by Iraqi forces. The U.S. and Britain declared the zones after the 1991 Persian Gulf War to protect ethnic Kurds in Iraq’s north and Shiite Muslims in the south from President Saddam Hussein’s forces, but they are not explicitly mandated by any Security Council resolutions. Iraq regards them as an infringement of its sovereignty and has routinely fired at the planes for a decade. Baghdad said four people were injured in the Monday strikes.

Meanwhile, at U.N. headquarters, attention turned to the humanitarian situation in Iraq. The chief of the U.N. “oil for food” program, Benon Sevan, reported that newly instituted “smart sanctions” appear to be working and that nearly all the contracts that were put on hold by Security Council members have been cleared. But a prolonged drop in Iraqi oil sales means that there is not enough money in Iraq’s U.N. escrow account to pay for $3 billion of approved contracts.

“While understandably the current discussions are focused on the resumption of the weapons inspections regime, all concerned [should] also focus attention on the humanitarian dimension and spare no effort in meeting the dire humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people,” Sevan told the council.

In an effort to provide humanitarian relief from sanctions implemented after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the U.N. has administered Iraq’s trade since 1995, to allow Iraq to sell oil to buy basic goods and to prevent imports that could be used for military purposes.

The sanctions were to be dropped when Iraq disarmed. No one expected the program to last as long as it has.

The U.N. revamped the program this summer after years of complaints that it was run inefficiently and was delaying the delivery of basic humanitarian goods. A new procedure implemented in July -- nicknamed “smart sanctions” -- created a “goods review list” of banned items and allowed everything else to go through. The result, said Sevan, has been noticeable improvements in health, nutrition, education and other standard of living measures. But the shortfall in oil sales puts such gains in peril, Sevan said, and he called for donations.