VIENNA: Iraqi minders showing journalists around Tikrit, the birthplace of the country’s president, Saddam Hussein, recently promised them in English that they could go wherever they wanted, even the enormous presidential palace. But, in Arabic, the minders said to one another that there was no way they were taking journalists anywhere within sight of the palace or to any other place that fell into the category of “not allowed”, one of the most commonly used phrases in Iraq.

There are many similar no-go areas in Iraq. But restrictions will not apply to the United Nations weapons inspectors who are scheduled to return to Iraq on Monday after an absence of four years. They have been promised unfettered access to all areas, including the presidential sites such as Tikrit.

The inspectors will fan out across Iraq in a hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear-related weapons and for banned long-range missiles. They will turn up unannounced at military complexes, factories, government offices and private homes, from Mosul, a green, hilly city in the far north, to Basra, the main city in the barren desert of the south, as well as the heavily-industrialized complexes in and around Baghdad.

They will visit the open-cast phosphate mines in the west which can provide President Saddam with low-grade uranium, and the oilfields and petrochemical complexes that could produce biological and chemical weapons.

“We don’t have a finite list of sites,” said Jacques Baute, head of the nuclear inspection team.

Baute will accompany the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, to Baghdad on Monday for two days’ of talks with the Iraqi government about the details of the inspections. They will be accompanied by an advance team which will focus on logistics, establishing living quarters and a functioning office.

The following Monday, the first inspectors will arrive, about 10 or 12 in number, from the New York headquarters of the United Nations monitoring, verification and inspection commission (Unmovic), building up within a few weeks to a full complement of about 80. A further 200 or so will stay at home, ready to take over as the rota requires. As well as setting up shop in Baghdad, the UN sleuths are also intending, for the first time, to open offices in Basra and in Mosul.

The crucial test for Iraq will come either on or before December 8 when it has to hand the inspectors a “full and complete” declaration, listing, as required by last Friday’s UN resolution, all aspects of banned weapons programmes, including components, sub-components, stocks of agents, and related material and equipment. The resolution also called for Iraq to provide in the declaration all equipment “which it claims are for purposes not related to weapon production or material”.

The consensus among the inspectors is that the teams hunting chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles have a tougher job than the detectives searching out any nuclear materials because it is much easier to conceal a small-scale installation manufacturing bio-weapons.

Even British intelligence does not claim that Iraq is close to making a nuclear bomb.

But biological and chemical weapons are another matter. The inspectors will have to return to the 600 to 700 sites monitored by Unmovic’s predecessor, the UN special commission on Iraq (Unscom), between 1991 and 1998.

The same names turn up time and time again: the suspected nuclear sites at Fallujah, Tuwaitha and Furat; the alleged biological and chemical weapons sites at the agricultural research centre at Fudaliyah; the foot and mouth disease plant at al-Dawara; the blood serum institute at Amariyah; and the military complex at al-Qaqa, where the nerve gas, phosgene, is produced, although Iraq claims that it is for commercial use only.

These sites are prominent in British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s dossier — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — published in September and based on Anglo-American intelligence. The new generation of inspectors will establish what changes have taken place at sites since their predecessors left, but they do not expect to find anything in them. It would be too obvious.

The inspectors are also expected to make an early visit to presidential sites. The US claims that these palaces occupy much larger areas than would be needed for a presidential retreat and are suspicious about the hardened bunkers and warehouses that show up on satellite pictures.

But the political thinktanks which observe events in Iraq are much more skeptical. They also consider such sites to be too obvious to store weapons or components, and argue that although the inspectors will go to the presidential palaces, they will do so mainly for symbolic reasons: to show that they have the authority to go anywhere in Iraq.

Sources at the United Nations said the focus of the search would be not on the big military complexes, such as al-Qaqa, outside Baghdad, but on apparently innocent factories and laboratories making goods for domestic use. Much of the equipment in such factories and laboratories is classified as dual-use, meaning it can be used for the purposes suggested on the gate signs but also be used to manufacture the forbidden weapons.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.