December 10, 2003
UN Security Council members complained on Monday that the US and Britain have refused to give UN weapons inspectors the results of their search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
UN inspectors withdrew from Iraq in March, just before the US-led invasion, which overthrew Saddam Hussein's government. After the war, the US deployed its own experts and refused to allow the UN inspectors to return.
At a closed council meeting on a recent quarterly report from the UN inspection commission, about a dozen countries said the expertise of the unit - which had dealt with Iraq's WMD since 1991 - was being wasted, participants reported. But no conclusion was reached, and the council did not deal with a future mandate for the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). US officials have said that the US did not want to take up the issue until its own searches, led by David Kaye, a former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspector in 1991, had been completed, probably in June.
German diplomats asked US and British officials what had happened to the Al-Samoud 2 missiles UNMOVIC did not have enough time to destroy before the war and to hundreds of engines for SA2 surface-to-air missiles. UNMOVIC declared Al-Samoud 2 missiles illegal this year because they have a range of more than the 150-kilometer limit allowed by UN resolutions.
According to diplomats, US representative Josiah Rosenblatt replied that the Kaye report contained sensitive operational details, but the US was willing to share classified information "at an appropriate time". And British Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry asked the inspectors why they could not draw more precise conclusions.
The UNMOVIC report said there was circumstantial evidence that Iraq was working on a two-stage rocket that would have had an illegal range, but closer investigation was needed. Demetris Perricos, current head of UNMOVIC, has said that he doubts that Saddam Hussein had large stocks of WMDs. But his report also pointed to unanswered questions regarding materials like anthrax, which Iraq said it had destroyed without giving proof. In the report, Perricos said that most of Kaye's findings reported in the media had related to "complex subjects familiar to UNMOVIC, both through declarations and semi-annual reports provided by Iraq and from correspondence, meetings, and the inspection reports of UN teams".
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