UNITED NATIONS, 23 May 2003 — The UN Security Council’s expected move yesterday to lift sanctions on Iraq would leave UN weapons inspectors in legal limbo, with enough funds to keep going for 10 years but an uncertain mandate, diplomats said.
The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, set up three and a half years ago, was able to carry out only seven weeks of inspections in Iraq before its people were evacuated March 17, three days before the US-led invasion.
The United States, which expressed mounting frustration with the commission and its chairman, Hans Blix, has made clear it will not let the inspectors back to continue the search for banned chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles.
The resolution tacitly accepts that US and British forces are now responsible for arms inspections and encourages them to keep the council informed.
It also says the council will take another look at the mandate of the commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was tasked with unearthing any nuclear weapons in Iraq.
British UN Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock, has said UNMOVIC might have a role monitoring Iraqi disarmament after a new government is set up and the occupying forces withdraw.
But he declined to go into details on the eve of the vote, saying “there are all sorts of things that have not been dealt with in this resolution. We will be talking about them in due course, and that will be one of them.”
Unlike the UN inspectors who monitored Iraq’s oil exports and its humanitarian imports under sanctions, the arms inspectorate will not be disbanded by the resolution.
Surplus funds in accounts used to pay for the border controls will be transferred to the new development fund for Iraq but the inspectors’ account will be untouched.
Under previous resolutions, three percent of Iraq’s oil revenues was set aside for UN administrative costs, including 0.8 percent for UNMOVIC.
Those deductions disappear under the new resolution, which also cuts from 25 to five percent the amount put into a fund to meet claims dating from the August 1990 invasion and subsequent invasion of Kuwait.
Since arms inspectors were barred from Iraq for three years, assets available to them mounted and are now estimated at $200 million, a diplomat said.
That is more than three times the budget for a full year of inspections, he said.
Without active inspections, the commission’s costs, including the salaries of 75 staff at UN headquarters in New York and training courses for outside experts, are estimated at between $15 and $20 million a year.
Briefing the Security Council on April 22, Blix said he had a roster of 315 experts available to work for UNMOVIC, of whom 85 were on contract until the middle of June.
Another 33 local staff are under contract until the end of June in Iraq.
“About 30 staff members would form the core of the first inspection teams if we were to resume work in Iraq,” Blix said. “They would later be replaced by staff from the roster.” Blix himself is due to retire June 30, and diplomats said it was unlikely that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan would rush to replace him.
Much of the inspectors’ office materials, such as computers, and all but 16 of their 90 vehicles were looted after Baghdad fell to US forces April 9. But laboratory equipment used for chemical analysis seemed to have survived in a protective container, Blix said.
