BAGHDAD, 8 December 2002 — The Iraqi government presented to the rest of the world yesterday a mass of documents detailing its nuclear, chemical and biological activities, and formally declaring to the United Nations that it has no weapons of mass destruction.
Baghdad delivered to the United Nations the documents. A vehicle with the Iraqi document arrived at the UN office at the edge of the capital shortly after 8 p.m. (1700 GMT).
The United Nations confirmed later that Iraq had submitted a weapons declaration.
The filing of the more than 12,000 pages of technical detail, meeting a UN deadline, now shifts the Iraq crisis into a new stage, as Washington and Baghdad move step by step toward a crossroads between war and peace.
“It will answer all the questions which have been addressed during the last months and years,” said Lt. Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, the official who oversaw the declaration’s preparation.
Amin also said it would name companies and countries that helped Iraq develop weapons of mass destruction in the past, information that could help in prosecutions under other nations’ export-control laws.
As for today, “I reiterate here Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction,” he told reporters. “I think if the United States has the minimum level of fairness and braveness, it should accept the report and say this is the truth.”
Iraqi officials displayed the declaration, totaling more than 12,000 pages, to the international media in the afternoon. It will be flown out of Baghdad today on a UN plane, to reach UN headquarters in New York and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna late in the day.
Reporters viewed the documents spread out on a table in a government office, including bound copies of volumes devoted separately to nuclear, chemical, biological and missile activities, titled “Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declarations.”
The mass of paper, in red and blue covers, was accompanied by computer disks, presumably with added information.
In another development, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein apologized for the first time yesterday to the people of Kuwait for invading the emirate in 1990 and urged them to struggle against foreign armies.
“We apologize to God for any deed which might have angered Him and ... we apologize to you as well on this basis,” he said in a speech read out on his behalf on state television by Information Minister Mohammad Said Al-Sahhaf.
“We regret all that happened to you as a result of the position you took” in the run-up to the invasion, Saddam told the Kuwaiti people, slamming their leaders for pushing down the price of oil from 21 to seven dollars a barrel by “drowning the oil market” at the time.
Referring to the presence of US troops, Saddam said Kuwait was under “direct foreign military occupation” and went on to hail “devout youth who carry arms against the occupier” — an apparent reference to Kuwaiti militants who recently attacked US forces in Kuwait. He urged the Kuwaiti people to join Iraq in resisting the occupation of foreign forces. Kuwaiti lawmakers and observers ridiculed Saddam’s speech to the Kuwaiti people saying it was provocative and threatened the emirate’s leaders.
Meanwhile, after a two-day break for Eid holidays, UN inspectors resumed their work visiting two sites south of Baghdad.
The inspectors visited uranium storage sites and an Iraqi complex that once made munitions for chemical or biological weapons yesterday, a day before reinforcements arrive to bolster their mission.
One UN team yesterday visited the Al-Quds General Company for Mechanical Industries at Al-Iskandariya, 40 km south of Baghdad, an industrial complex that in the 1980s was associated with Iraq’s production of medium-range missiles now prohibited under UN resolutions.
The complex also made “special munitions,” aerial bombs designed to hold chemical or biological weapons.
As usual, the UN inspection agency offered no immediate information about the visits.
The inspectors visited the two-building site, including laboratories and administration offices, and “asked some questions that were all answered,” Al-Azawi told reporters shortly after the 15 inspectors left the site after spending 3 1/2 hours inside. “We dealt with them with total transparency and they were happy with our answers.”
The weapons inspectors hope the Iraqis at least will help them answer open questions by, for example, supplying convincing documentation on the fate of 550 artillery shells filled with poisonous mustard gas. Iraqi and UN accounts contain many such discrepancies from the 1990s.
The UN resolution provides that “false statements or omissions” in Iraq’s declaration would constitute a “material breach,” that is, a potential cause for military action, but only if coupled with Iraqi noncooperation. That would seem to exempt inaccuracies shown to be inadvertent.
Diplomats said it could take a week before the 15 Security Council members including the United States get a copy. Others said it might take 10 days to analyze.
Both UNMOVIC and the IAEA will scan the material to see which parts should be held from public view and then reproduce it for transmission to council members.
If Baghdad is found to be in “material breach” of UN resolution 1441, it could set the stage for a military attack on Iraq by the United States and its allies.
“We would advise the council that these should not be circulated to anybody,” chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said of the sensitive sections. In sum, he told reporters in New York on Friday, “no member will get it on Monday.”
In Washington, US President George W. Bush warned in a radio address that the declaration must hold up to US scrutiny if Baghdad is to avoid military attack.
“We will judge the declaration’s honesty and completeness only after we have thoroughly examined it, and that will take some time,” the US president said in his weekly radio address yesterday.
Bush warned that Iraq’s attempts to appear to be cooperating with weapons inspectors — as with its early submission of its weapons declarations — might not be enough to avoid war.
“The declaration must be credible and accurate and complete, or the Iraqi dictator will have demonstrated to the world once again that he has chosen not to change his behavior. “Disarming that regime is a central commitment of the war on terror,” Bush said in the radio speech. (The Independent)
