By Judith Miller
June 25, 1999
United Nations -- The United Nations has agreed to send a team to dismantle a laboratory in Baghdad, but, in a victory for Iraq, the team does not include technical experts from the special commission charged with disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
Prakash Shah, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy to Iraq, said Thursday in Baghdad that Iraq had agreed to allow a team of 10 or 11 "totally independent and neutral" experts to remove small amounts of toxic substances left behind in a lab when inspectors left the country last December. Shah said he expected the team to arrive by the first week in July and spend about a week removing the potentially dangerous substances.
Several diplomats here said they were troubled by the precedent of permitting Iraq to choose UN inspectors, but a spokesman for the secretary- general said that "cleaning up this lab has nothing to do with limiting the special commission's mandate." It was a matter of safety, he asserted.
Meanwhile, Annan appears to have abandoned an earlier effort to find a temporary chief who is not an American to head the embattled special commission, which is known as UNSCOM. Richard Butler, the commission's chairman, is scheduled to resign from his post on June 30th. At that time, Charles Duelfer, his American deputy, is to become acting chairman. Spokesmen for the secretary-general, who is in Russia Thursday on an official visit, would not discuss who Annan had asked to temporarily replace Butler. But UN officials said that several weeks ago, Annan had asked Jayantha Dhanapala, the undersecretary-general for disarmament affairs, to take the post and that Dhanapala had declined.
Members of the Security Council had also objected to other suggested candidates, including members of the commission that oversees UNSCOM, diplomats said. Even Sergey Lavrov, Russia's representative here and UNSCOM's harshest critic, preferred to see an American temporarily in charge rather than someone new who might give the impression that Russia had softened its hostility to UNSCOM or its demand that it be replaced.
The developments come as the Security Council has been attempting to close a deep rift over policy toward Iraq. Russia, China and France have favored an immediate lifting of sanctions, while the United States and Britain staunchly oppose that unless and until Iraq answers outstanding questions about its weapons programs and cooperates fully with inspectors. Support in the Council has been slowly building for a compromise resolution introduced earlier this week by Britain and the Netherlands. The resolution could pave the way for suspending UN economic sanctions against Iraq if Baghdad complies with its disarmament commitments and cooperates with a new inspection agency, a successor to UNSCOM. So far, Iraq has denounced the draft as unacceptable, but Baghdad might be isolated if most Council members embrace the proposal as a respectable compromise.
Iraq had also refused to permit UNSCOM inspectors to return to Baghdad even to remove what it and Russia asserted were the dangerous chemical substances left behind when UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq shortly before American air strikes began in December. UNSCOM officials say that slightly more than two pounds of mustard gas and minute samples of sarin and other agents remain inside the UNSCOM headquarters in Baghdad, and that the substances pose no threat to the health or safety of Iraqis.
Senior diplomats here said that the United States had asked Annan's office to help resolve the problem over the toxic substances in a way that satisfied Iraq and UNSCOM. One senior diplomat said American officials were "taken aback" when they learned that Annan's aides had asked the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an independent organization that monitors chemical-weapons agreements, to choose technical experts for the mission who did not have UNSCOM experience.
"To allow the Iraqis to pick and choose who can enter their facilities and who heads the inspectors does not bode well for the current, or a future, United Nations inspection agency," said one UN official and critic of Iraq. At the same time, several diplomats noted that the new team would include at least one person on the special commission's payroll -- Jaako Ylitalo, a Finnish citizen who worked for the United Nations before joining UNSCOM. But Ylitalo is neither a chemist nor technical expert; he is to accompany the team as an administrator.
