January 20, 2003	Monday	Ziqa'ad 16, 1423

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BAGHDAD, Jan 19: The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog reported progress on Sunday after flying to Baghdad to demand that Iraq actively volunteer information on its weapons programmes to avert the threat of war.

Mohamed ElBaradei flew in from Cyprus with chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in what Blix had said was a last-ditch bid to get Iraq’s full cooperation before they report back to the UN Security Council on Jan 27.

The ensuing debate may be crucial to deciding whether the United States launches a war on Iraq that it has threatened in order to enforce its demand that Baghdad come clean on alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in Washington that the United States would know “in a matter of weeks” whether Iraq was cooperating fully with the inspectors.

Blix and ElBaradei spent two-and-a-half hours at the Foreign Ministry with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s scientific adviser Amir al-Saadi and Gen Hussam Mohammad Amin, head of Iraq’s National Monitoring Directorate.

“We are having good, constructive meetings,” ElBaradei told reporters. “We are still going to meet tomorrow. We are making progress,” he added, without elaborating. The two men are due to leave Baghdad on Monday.

Demands that the inspection process be given a chance picked up steam on Saturday when a wave of anti-war protests rolled around the world from Tokyo to London and the United States — where tens of thousands attended celebrity-led rallies.

Blix said on arrival on Baghdad that it was in Iraq’s power to avert war.

“We don’t think war is inevitable. We think the inspection process we are conducting is the peaceful alternative, and it requires very active Iraqi cooperation,” he said.

“WE NEED PROOF”: ElBaradei’s spokeswoman Melissa Fleming underlined the inspectors’ message of the last few days:

“What we are looking for is proof that they have destroyed weapons, proof that they haven’t produced (weapons). We are saying Iraq has to make the effort itself to prove it, not just open doors.”

The inspections have yet to uncover compelling evidence of banned weapons programmes, but the United States has said they are designed as a test of cooperation with a UN disarmament resolution rather than an effort to find hidden arms.

“The test is: ‘Is Saddam Hussein cooperating?’...he’s not doing that,” Rumsfeld said on the “Fox News Sunday” television programme. “If the test is, are the Iraqis going to cooperate — that’s something you’re going to know in a matter of weeks, not in months or years.”

He said Washington had “a lot of intelligence” to establish that Iraq had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes, and that there was significant information about Iraqi “efforts to deceive” by hiding and dispersing weapons.

UN teams, who returned to Iraq in November after four years away, headed for at least seven sites in search of traces of the weapons programmes that Iraq says it has eradicated.

Blix had said before leaving Cyprus that Saturday’s discovery of documents at the home of an Iraqi scientist was a worrying indication that Iraq was choosing to hide relevant papers that it should be actively delivering to the inspectors.

UN inspectors had raided the scientist’s house and found 3,000 pages of material apparently related to enrichment of uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons.

“Iraq has an obligation to give a full declaration, so they (documents) should have been given. Why are they still there? Are there more?” he said.

“These are not weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Documents are not WMD. Shells are not. But they are a sign that not everything has been declared and that is worrying.”—Reuters