Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

United Nations -- Iraq said today that it would allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the country next week to check its uranium stockpiles, ending a monthlong standoff between the agency and the government of President Saddam Hussein.

The inspections, however limited, will be the first by any outside agency concerned with clandestine weapons programs to take place in Iraq since December 1998. Inspectors from the atomic agency were withdrawn then in advance of American and British bombing raids, along with United Nations inspectors who monitored biological, chemical and missile programs.

The new inspections are not related, however, to the monitoring systems imposed on Iraq after the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf. Next week's inspections are related solely to the 1968 nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which Iraq signed and which demands annual inspections of materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons. Iraq has 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium and 13 tons of natural uranium. Both could be transformed into bomb-grade material with the right equipment. By refusing visas to the atomic agency's inspectors, Iraq had violated the treaty.

Iraq's decision to admit the inspection team comes at the same time that efforts are being made here to resume other United Nations arms inspections. This week, Secretary General Kofi Annan is expected to name a chief arms inspector for the new monitoring commission that the Security Council created in December to replace the United Nations Special Commission, known as Unscom, which has been unable to return to Iraq after the American-led bombing. Unscom's executive chairman, Richard Butler, resigned last year.

The Security Council, which has been consulting with Mr. Annan as he makes his choice, has yet to agree on a nominee. Several lists of candidates have come and gone, and sometimes come again, as one nation or another rejects them. In recent days, the leading compromise candidate has become Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat and arms control expert who set up Unscom in 1991 and led it until 1996. Mr. Ekeus, now Sweden's ambassador to the United States, has remained in touch with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, with whom he worked when she was the American representative here.

Mr. Annan is likely to name the new chief inspector on Friday, officials and diplomats said. The deadline set by the Security Council is Sunday. As the new inspection system begins to take shape, Iraq is finding little diplomatic support in its threats to defy monitoring. Although Russia, China, France and Malaysia abstained in the voting for the new surveillance and disarmament panel, to be known as the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, neither Russia nor China was prepared to veto the plan, as the Iraqis had hoped. In recent weeks, the Russians have been very active in persuading the Iraqis to end their defiance of the atomic energy agency, a senior European diplomat said. Furthermore, on a visit to China this week, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz of Iraq apparently did not receive much encouragement as a long diplomatic battle to force Iraqi compliance with new inspections begins. Today in Malaysia, a nonpermanent Security Council member with a reputation for voting against the United States, Mr. Aziz was more or less told to get in line with the program, although the government of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said it understood some of Iraq's grievances.