IRAQ: No Hope for Quick Sanctions Lifting, Say U.S. Diplomats

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 13 1995 (IPS) - The United Nations likely will not lift the five-year-old embargo against Iraq for at least another year, U.S. diplomats here say.

Following the latest revelations that Iraq has hidden data about its weapons of mass destruction from a U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), the U.N. Security Council now wants tighter monitoring over the country, the diplomats say.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright said Friday that after a “stunning report” from UNSCOM this week, U.S. qualms over monitoring the Iraqis’ compliance with demands they scrap their weapons have won broad Council support.

The UNSCOM report “shows that Iraq has cheated and lied,” Albright said. “I think it is incumbent on them to provide their bona fides even more.”

The latest UNSCOM report was perhaps the most severe in years, accusing Baghdad of repeatedly providing false information while seeking to maintain aspects of its long-range missile, chemical and biological weapons programme.

“Iraq has been concealing proscribed activity, and…consequently, some of the assessments in the Commission’s earlier reports have to be revised,” the report said. UNSCOM noted several instances in which, despite years of work by the U.N. monitoring body, Iraq managed to conceal weapons programmes and even to acquire new weapons, including long-range missiles.

“Iraq’s efforts to conceal its biological weapons programme, its chemical missile warhead flight tests and work on the development of a missile for the delivery of a nuclear device led it to provide incorrect information concerning certain of its missile activities,” the report added.

“The combination of facts has surprised even me,” Albright said. As a result, she added, Baghdad now is “a long way from satisfying (U.N. resolutions).”

UNSCOM Chairman Rolf Ekeus said the main difficulty now is verifying whether Iraq has kept its stated commitments that it has destroyed its Gulf War-era weapons programmes.

In particular, UNSCOM has concerns that Iraq may still possess some long-range missiles, as well as components — including chemical precursors — for ‘VX’ nerve gas. Iraq needs to provide more information before UNSCOM can be certain that it cannot deploy chemical or biological weapons anymore, Ekeus said.

The UNSCOM report paid special attention to Iraq’s biological weapons programme, which only came to light in August after former Iraqi Interior Minister Hussein Kamel al-Majid defected to Jordan.

Following Kamel’s departure, Iraqi officials revealed data about the biological weapons, which they claim Kamel had concealed while he supervised the programme.

UNSCOM is still worried over many aspects of that programme, under which Baghdad had briefly deployed anthrax- and botulism- filled warheads before the 1991 Gulf War.

“Iraq has declared that it unilaterally destroyed in 1991 all biological agents and all weapons filled with biological agents,” he said. “We have not been able to ascertain that.”

He added that the Security Council and Iraq’s neighbours openly disbelieve Baghdad’s own account that no written record of the destruction of its biological weapons exists because the government ordered that destruction orally.

Several Council diplomats, including Albright, doubted that such a major act could be accomplished just through phone calls.

Ekeus said UNSCOM would now have to examine as many as one million pages of print and electronic data provided by the Iraqis to garner more information.

That task, he noted, could be a long one considering that hundreds of thousands of pages of data will require translation from Arabic. But Ekeus added that UNSCOM is trying to put in place a system to scan the data quickly to speed up the long process of monitoring Iraq’s weapons.

Washington, added a U.S. diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity, would help confirm data by providing its own intelligence, but the task may still be a lengthy one. The United States has given UNSCOM data from its U-2 spy planes, various sources acknowledge.

“The hardest part now would be to try to prove that the biological weapons they have admitted to have actually been destroyed,” the U.S. official added. Without specific proof of destruction, the United States will not tolerate any easing of sanctions, he said.

They may not end the embargo in any case. The United States and Britain, both of which wield veto power in the 15-member Council, have both indicated they do not trust President Saddam Hussein’s government, and may keep the sanctions in place as long as that distrust remains.

One of the immediate results of the UNSCOM report has been that both Britain and the United States now are calling for stronger weapons monitoring from UNSCOM. British Ambassador John Weston said Friday that a tightening of the weapons regime would be needed to avoid any further concealment of Iraqi weaponry.

The U.S. official argued that only Kamel’s defection, rather than the ongoing UNSCOM monitoring programme, allowed the United Nations to find out about the concealed programmes.

“The defections provided the impetus for all this information,” he said. “Iraq concluded it was in their best interest to provide all the information (it) had.”

Ekeus disagreed, asserting the monitors had done their job.

“The monitoring system has demonstrated its strength,” he said, noting UNSCOM suspected Iraq was concealing biological data before Kamel left Iraq and threatened to reveal its secrets. “If there were a Nobel Prize for arms control, our scientists deserved it.”

As a result, he said, although the Council was concerned at how long Iraq could hide data about its weapons, “I don’t see any need for any major re-tooling” of the monitoring system.

Instead, the UNSCOM director said, what was needed was for Baghdad to provide all the weapons information it still has. For now, the countries seeking continued sanctions have the upper hand at the United Nations until such data comes to light.