MOSCOW, Dec 20: Russia does not consider Iraq’s declaration on its weapons programme to represent a material breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on Friday in Washington, as quoted by the Interfax news agency.
The comment was Russia’s first official reaction to the weapons declaration, handed to the UN on Dec 7 in line with a UN ultimatum and which Washington and London have already criticized.
“There is nothing that could be described as a violation of the UN resolution,” Ivanov told Russian journalists in the US capital where he is taking part in talks by the diplomatic “quartet” on the Middle East situation.
“We cannot say that that Russia is or is not satisfied with the declaration. We simply acknowledge reception,” he said.
Ivanov noted that international weapons inspectors in Iraq had expressed doubts regarding “that this or that statement in the Iraqi declaration corresponds to reality. But it is for the inspectors to answer these questions.”
Ivanov was speaking after a meeting with US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Interfax said.
Powell said on Thursday that gaps in Iraq’s declaration were “not the result of accidents or editing oversights or technical mistakes, (but) material omissions that, in our view, constitute another material breach.”
Britain on Wednesday said that omissions in the Iraqi declaration could be considered a “material breach” of UN Resolution 1441.
Iraqi has been ordered to establish to the satisfaction of UN weapons inspectors that it has no weapons of mass destruction.
The UNited States and Britain have made it clear that they will initiate military action if Iraq does not comply.
BEIJING: China, which has the power to veto UN resolutions, said on Friday it was too early to tell if Iraq was in “material breach” of a UN resolution and that it had weapons of mass destruction.
In its first official response to Washington’s declaration that Baghdad had violated a new UN resolution, for which it used the legal term that could trigger war, China’s Foreign Ministry said it was still studying Iraq’s lengthy arms dossier.
No other country, including close US ally Britain, has joined Washington in declaring a material breach after the UNited States accused Baghdad of lying when it reported it had no “ongoing weapons of mass destruction programs”.
“Relevant UN Security Council resolutions require the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out inspections and destroy any large scale weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry official told Reuters by telephone.
“We hold that the condition of Iraq’s report should be appraised after the two organizations have carried out on the spot inspections,” the official said.
“The report is very long, the Chinese side is still studying and analyzing it,” the official said, in reference to the 12,000 page arms document submitted by Iraq to the UNited Nations this month.
China, which voted in favour of the new resolution giving Iraq a last chance to disarm or face “serious consequences”, renewed calls for a political solution through the framework of the UNited Nations, the official Xinhua news agency said.
50,000 TROOPS: The United States will send an extra 50,000 troops and more military hardware to the Gulf early next month to be ready for a possible war against Iraq, a US defence official said on Friday.
The deployment will include tens of thousands of reservists and give President George Bush the option to start combat operations against Iraq late next month or early February, the official said.
There are now about 65,000 US soldiers in the Gulf, including 15,000 in Kuwait, on the border with Iraq. The new deployment will take the force above 110,000.
“We want to be ready, but of course, it’s up to the president to decide about a war and he has not made a decision,” the official said.
The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, speaking during an inspection visit to the 4,000 US troops in Qatar, said on Friday the US military buildup in the Gulf was “to reinforce diplomacy” in the standoff with Iraq.
The US deployment is aimed at helping “the diplomatic angle”, making sure the Iraqi government “understands the options we have”, he said.—Reuters/AFP