Baghdad says Blix, ElBaradei returning for crucial talks

The chief UN weapons inspectors will return to Baghdad on February 8 for last-minute talks before their next Security Council report on the hunt for banned weapons in Iraq, Iraqi and UN officials said today.

Arms monitors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei are seeking concessions to speed their investigators’ day-to-day work – in particular removing obstacles to UN reconnaissance flights and to private interviews with Iraqi scientists.

They prefer to see such issues resolved even before their visit next Saturday, Dr ElBaradei’s spokeswoman in Vienna, Austria, Melissa Fleming, said.

Iraq’s UN ambassador, Mohamed al-Douri, said in New York the two sides would be “discussing all the outstanding issues, including interviews with Iraqi scientists”.

But neither al-Douri nor Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz in Baghdad, who also reported the planned talks, said anything about new proposals to end those deadlocks.

A pivotal report by Dr Blix to the Security Council last Monday criticised the Iraqis for not having cooperated fully – by volunteering more information – in the first two months of arms inspections.

The inspectors’ next report, on February 14, could swing the diplomatic balance toward or away from military action against Iraq, the “last resort” threatened by the United States and Britain.

The Iraqis on Thursday invited Dr Blix and Dr ElBaradei back to Baghdad, just 10 days after they completed discussions here over practical problems in the inspections.

The chief inspectors responded with a letter to the Iraqi government proposing talks on February 8-9, but also asking for what Fleming called “signals of progress” before the talks.

Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the inspectors in New York, said UN officials assume the Iraqis accept the purpose of the meeting as laid out in the letter. “If they do not, we would expect to hear from them soon,” he said.

Dr ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, had indicated on Friday that the chief inspectors should meet Iraqi President Saddam Hussein if they returned. But Aziz seemed to rule that out.

Blix’s mission “could be dealt with the experts, who will talk to him about technical matters”, the deputy prime minister told reporters. “And when he was on his last visit, he met the vice-president and the foreign minister, and in my opinion that is enough.”

The disagreement over surveillance flights involves a UN plan to use American U-2 spy planes to fly over Iraq in support of inspections.

The Iraqis say they would allow such flights as long as the US and Britain halted air patrols over southern and northern Iraq while the spy planes were in the air. This way, they say, Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries would not mistake the reconnaissance aircraft for US and British warplanes and fire on them.

On the second issue, Iraqi scientists have uniformly rejected UN requests that they submit to private interviews about possible weapons programmes, insisting that witnesses be present during the questioning, often Iraqi government officials.