Global Policy Forum

By Nicholas Kulish

The search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction appears close to an official conclusion, several years after their absence became a foregone one. The United States and Britain have circulated a new proposal to the members of the UN Security Council to "terminate immediately the mandates" of the weapons inspectors. Staff meetings on the latest proposal have already taken place, and officials say that the permanent council members, each of whom has veto power, seem ready to let the inspection group - the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission - meet its end.

In the heat of the debate leading to the Iraq invasion, the commission's acronym, Unmovic, rang out almost nonstop through the halls of the United Nations. Its inspection teams, at the very center of the worldwide debate over the war, supervised the destruction of rocket engines and fuel tanks. But the inspectors left Iraq in March 2003, shortly before the invasion, and have not been allowed to return. October will be the third anniversary of the U.S.-led Iraq Survey Group's finding that Saddam's government had destroyed its stockpiles of illicit weapons just months after the Gulf War in 1991. "Suddenly they got in a hurry," the acting executive chairman of the group, Demetrius Perricos, said of the push to disband. His contract is up at the end of the month, and he says he plans to move back to Vienna, Austria. The other staff members' contracts run until July 10. Of course, nothing is certain. Kofi Annan, then the secretary general, asked Perricos to take the job for six months in June 2003. Perricos has outlasted Annan at the United Nations.

Any decision about the commission's future will have to deal with the disposition of its significant and unusual archive. While the offices for the most part look like standard drab, gray-carpeted cubicle farms, closer inspection reveals electronic combination locks and padlocks on the file cabinets, not to mention a guard at the door. "If you want the formula for VX, we have it here," said Ewen Buchanan, an Unmovic spokesman, referring to a deadly nerve agent. "We have, quite literally, the cookbooks for all the biological weapons, chemical weapons, the missile blueprints and designs, supplier information." The archive even includes an engine from a Scud missile - which shares space with a desk in a spare office - as well as a smaller one from an SA-2 missile. "The archives must be handled prudently for risk of being utilized by proliferators," Hans Blix, the former chief weapons inspector, said. Dealing with those archives will be no small task. In addition to the rocket engines, Unmovic has about 1,500 feet, or 460 meters, of paper files and a terabyte of electronic records (that is one million megabytes). The archive runs the gamut from floppy disks and VHS cassettes to digital video files and satellite images, reflecting the history of a body that stretches back through its predecessor inspection group, known as the UN Special Commission, all the way to 1991.

That Unmovic still exists says as much about the decision-making procedures at the United Nations as it does about the hunt for VX and anthrax. The uncertainty now, diplomats here say, is Russia. The Russian delegation has said that it is the United Nations' responsibility, not the U.S.-led coalition's, to certify that Iraq is in compliance with UN resolutions prohibiting the country from possessing unconventional weapons. A Russian official said that the delegation was not against ending Unmovic's mandate, but that procedures needed to be followed.

The Belgian ambassador, who holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council, has scheduled more debate for the end of the month. At the same time the commission has said it will release a 1,200-page compendium on Iraq's illicit weapons program that could be the group's final word. Perricos said that, at a minimum, the new Iraqi government should have to sign on to the latest international agreements on arms control and weapons proliferation before Unmovic's mandate was terminated. For the time being, Unmovic remains on a form of life support, not searching on the ground for weapons in Iraq but not going away either. A skeleton crew still analyzes satellite photographs and issues regular quarterly reports to the Security Council. The entire presence in Iraq consists of just two local staff members who, according to the most recent report, released at the end of May, "continued to perform routine maintenance on the office support equipment" left behind there. If it is not ended, Unmovic will continue to spend $10 million a year of Iraqi oil money to keep a reduced version of its weapons monitoring team in place and in limbo.