April 16, 2003
The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has met with silence after calling on the United States to let U.N. nuclear inspectors return to Iraq after the war to resume their hunt for Baghdad's alleged atomic arms programme. "We have not been contacted and we have not been informed," a nuclear expert close to the IAEA told Reuters on Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei said on March 31 and again on April 8 that only his agency had a mandate to search out and destroy any nuclear weapons or parts of a nuclear weapons programme found in Iraq. Washington has made it clear it would hunt for Iraq's weapons itself and that the IAEA and UNMOVIC monitoring and inspection agency, charged with finding chemical, biological or ballistic arms, could have only limited inspection authority in post-war Iraq. However, ElBaradei said he plans to return to Iraq with the full authority granted the IAEA by the U.N. Security Council and on the basis of the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) banning the spread of nuclear weapons, which Iraq has signed.
The IAEA has said legal experts support ElBaradei's view that only the IAEA has the right to verify NPT compliance. On Monday, the New York Times quoted Thomas Graham Jr., general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administrations, as saying there was no question that the United States had to let in IAEA inspectors in after the war. "If we didn't, we'd be accessory to a violation," he said.
The U.S. has reportedly assembled its own inspection teams, despite calls from the U.N. and countries opposed to the U.S.-led war on Iraq to let the U.N. handle arms inspections. IAEA inspectors returned to Baghdad late last year after a four-year hiatus to look for signs President Saddam Hussein had revived his nuclear weapons programme. The IAEA found no signs Iraq had revived the programme in three months of inspections.
Although UNMOVIC inspectors found some banned missiles, they were never able to verify Iraq's guilt or innocence regarding the possession of chemical or biological weapons. The U.S. army has yet to find proof Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, though Washington insists the weapons are there.
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