BBC - London - 10/02/98
Unscom surveillance aircraft - information has been exchanged with Israel
Iraq has accused the United Nations Special Commission for weapons inspection (Unscom) of working with the intelligence services
of its enemies.
In a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz called for an investigation of the
commission's work.
The Iraqi complaint followed remarks by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who on Tuesday told an Israeli newspaper that
UN inspectors had received help from Israeli intelligence.
"These statements show... that Unscom, which works in the name of the UN Security Council and the United Nations... is firmly
connected with the intelligence agencies of states that pursue anti-Iraq policies," the letter said.
The chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler has also confirmed that his teams have been exchanging information with Israel on
Iraq's weapons programme.
"We have had such cooperative relations with 50 member states, that is almost one third of UN membership. Israel is one of them,"
Mr Butler said at a news conference in New York, but he would not go into more detail of that co-operation "to respect
confidentiality."
But Mr Butler also said that Mr Ritter, who resigned from the inspection team in August saying that western leaders did not want to
push the weapons issue, in some cases was telling "not quite the correct story".
In particular, Mr Butler denied Mr Ritter's claim that Iraq has the components to make nuclear weapons.
"Does anyone in this room honestly think that if we had information that Iraq had three partly fabricated nuclear weapons, that we
would not have called that to the attention of the International Atomic Energy Agency or put it on the table of the Security Council?"
Mr Butler asked.
"Have you seen us do that? No."
Baghdad's co-operation in further doubt
A BBC US correspondent, Janes Hughes says that Mr Ritter's revelations have given Iraq new ammunition with which to criticise
what it considers the bias of the weapons inspection teams.
"These facts... confirm our complaint and anxiety that the real objective of this body is not to follow up the implementation of the UN
Security Council resolutions, but to deliberately act to maintain the embargo against Iraq and to spy against it," Mr Aziz wrote in his
letter to the UN.
Dismantling Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction is a pre-condition for the lifting or easing of stringent trade sanctions imposed
in August 1990, when Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait.
Iraq halted regular inspections in August, permitting only the Unscom monitoring system to function and thereby stopping new
inspections.
The UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan has met Mr Aziz earlier this week, and said he believed he was persuading Baghdad to
resume co-operation with the UN, but correspondents say the latest developments are likely to harden Iraq's position.
The cabinet in Baghdad has just ordered the resumption of a large-scale military training exercise, in which more than 1,000,000
civilians are learning to use light weapons.
The training exercise started earlier this year, at the hight of a crisis with the UN over the weapons inspection.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has also instructed that Iraqi airports, out of use since the international embargo was imposed,
should be repaired and their buildings refurbished as soon as possible.
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