December 20, 2002	Friday	Shawwal 15, 1423

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 19: Syria protested on Thursday the excised and edited copy of Iraqi weapons declaration given to the 10 rotating non-permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and said it would not participate in the council talks on Iraq’s arms.

On Tuesday, the UN Weapons Inspector office handed over 3,500 edited pages of some 12,000 pages of Iraqi declaration to the non-permanent members.

Last Monday, the United States took the first unedited copy of the Iraqi declaration to Washington and made copies for the four other permanent members — China, Russia, France and Britain — despite an earlier agreement which precluded any country from getting the first copy without assessment by the UN weapons inspectors.

Syria sent the excised copy of Iraq’s arms declaration — about 3,500 pages — back to UN inspection commission on Wednesday, saying it wanted the same uncensored 12,000-page version the five permanent council members had received.

“The Syrian Arab Republic announces that it will not be a party to the conclusions that will be reached in the Security Council since it has not looked at the full copy of the Iraqi declaration,” Syrian news agency SANA said.

Syria’s deputy UN ambassador, Fayssal Mekdad, had been among the first 10 non-permanent council members to collect the redacted version of the Iraqi document on Tuesday from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency. “This is an unacceptable discrimination,” Mekdad told reporters at the time. “Either we take a full copy or we don’t take anything.”