UN inspectors prepare to assemble team

The United Nations’ top two weapons inspectors arrived in Cyprus on today to assemble their team for the historic journey back to Iraq for a fresh assessment of Saddam Hussein’s suspected clandestine arms programme.

Chief UN inspector Hans Blix, who will lead the overall mission, and Mohamed ElBaradei, overseeing the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency’s search for nuclear arms, flew by commercial jet from Vienna, Austria, where other team members have been arriving and where the inspection operation will be based.

Blix, ElBaradei and a 25-member advance team plan to head to Baghdad aboard a charter flight on Monday.

Blix has said that preliminary inspections – the first in nearly four years - likely will resume on November 27, with full-scale checks to begin after Iraq files a declaration of its banned weapons programmes by a deadline of December 8.

Blix then has 60 days to report back to the UN Security Council with his findings.

His New York-based team, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, will head the hunt for biological and chemical weapons and the long-range missiles capable of delivering them to distant targets. Inspectors with ElBaradei’s IAEA will determine if Saddam still has a secret nuclear arms programme.

Iraq will face the full might of the Security Council if it fails to cooperate completely with inspectors looking for suspected weapons of mass destruction, Blix said Saturday in Paris.

Before departing Vienna, Blix told The Associated Press that war is not inevitable if Iraq cooperates with the inspectors.

“It’s a chance for Iraq, and that’s what the Security Council has said,” he said, adding: “It’s an important mission, but we’ve prepared ourselves for it. We know what we’ve got to do.”

Saddam agreed on Wednesday to allow UN weapons inspectors to return to search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons after the Security Council approved a toughly worded resolution.

Baghdad, however, insisted in a nine-page letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that it does not have any such weapons.

The UN resolution gives Iraq “a final opportunity” to eliminate its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them. It gives inspectors the right to go anywhere at anytime and warns Iraq it will face “serious consequences” if it fails to cooperate.

“If Iraq cooperates fully, if we are allowed to do our work in a comprehensive manner, I think we can avoid a war,” ElBaradei said. “I think that’s the hope of everybody and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

After Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the Security Council imposed economic sanctions that cannot be lifted until UN weapons inspectors verify that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction and the missiles that could deliver them.

The advance team is charged with reopening the office used by the previous inspections regime and setting up new secure phone lines and transportation.

The United States believes Iraq has been illegally rearming for several years. Inspectors, who have been out of Iraq for nearly four years, have not been able to verify that claim.

The inspectors left Baghdad in December 1998, on the eve of US-British airstrikes, amid allegations that Iraq was not cooperating with the teams and Iraqi accusations that some of the inspectors actually were spies.

Blix said in an interview published Friday in the French newspaper Le Monde that inspectors have identified some 700 sites to check in Iraq.

Weapons inspectors will try to keep the location of the sites secret and provide no notice to Baghdad, said Blix, who warned last week that the United Nations would tolerate no Iraqi “cat and mouse” games.

He also said an Iraqi delay of even 30 minutes in granting inspectors access to a site would be considered a serious violation.

“We have a lot of information on where to go. We have a very good game plan,” ElBaradei said.

On his arrival in Vienna late Saturday, Blix said Saddam agreed to comply with the latest UN resolution because he didn’t have any choice. “He was in a very critical situation,” he said.

Saddam said Saturday he was forced to act because the United States and Israel had shown their “claws and teeth” and declared unilateral war on the Iraqi people.