November 14, 2002	Thursday	Ramazan 8, 1423

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UNITED NATIONS, Nov 13: Iraq said on Wednesday it accepted a new UN security council resolution, which orders Baghdad to disarm, cooperate with UN weapons inspectors or face “serious consequences”.

“I delivered a letter to the secretary-general’s office,” Iraq’s UN ambassador Mohammed Aldouri told reporters. “It was a positive reply.”

Aldouri described the six-page letter as setting out Baghdad’s entire position on the resolution, adopted by a 15-0 vote on Friday. But he said the response was “unconditional, no questions asked”.

“We are waiting for the inspectors to go as scheduled,” Aldouri said. “We are eager to see the inspectors perform their duties in accordance with international law.” Aldouri said Baghdad had accepted the resolution in an effort to avoid war.

“This is a part of our policy that is to protect our country, to protect the nation, to protect our region also from the threat of war which is real,” he said.

The letter was signed by Foreign Minister Naji Sabri.

The Security Council had given Iraq a one-week deadline to Nov 15, to accept the resolution and promise to abide by its terms. Aldouri said his country had agreed to the measure in order to avoid a US-led attack.

Iraq’s acceptance came as a surprise as most council members expected Baghdad to wait until Friday. The letter arrived a day after the Iraqi parliament voted unanimously to reject the resolution and its terms.

Aldouri again said again his country had no weapons of mass destruction and would make that clear. Iraq next month has to give a declaration of any weapons programmes or components of dangerous weapons it still may have under terms of the resolution.

An advance party of UN technicians is expected to go to Baghdad on Monday to prepare for inspections, not expected for another week or two.

China’s deputy UN ambassador, Yishan Zhang, who holds this month’s security council presidency, said the 15-member body welcomed “the correct decision of the Iraqi government”.

“We want to see the resolution implemented fully and very effectively,” he said.

A US official, however, said, “We shouldn’t make more of this than there is. This is their responsibility under the council mandate.”

MOSCOW’S WARNING: Russia warned the United States on Wednesday against taking the law into its own hands over Iraq, saying Washington would be breaking international law if it went ahead with strikes without UN approval.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov stressed that Washington was also obliged to keep to the draft’s wording — which does not include an automatic threat of force.

“I hope that in future they will not violate international law,” Fedotov told reporters, referring to US bombing raids on Iraq in Dec 1998 which he described as “a clear violation of international law”.

Those attacks “began during a UN debate on the Butler weapons inspections report”, Fedotov said in reference to the then chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler.

After a standoff between the weapons inspectors and Iraqi officials in Dec 1998, Butler withdrew his team and the United States and Britain bombed suspected weapons sites and other Iraqi military targets. No weapons inspections have been carried out in Iraq since then.

Russia, which has strong economic interests in Iraq, and France fought furiously to make sure that the UN resolution did not include an automatic threat of the use of force should President Saddam’s government come in conflict with weapons inspectors.—Reuters\AFP