Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

Mr. President, allow me at the outset to express to you our congratulations on your assumption to the presidency of the Security Council for this month. We are confident that African wisdom will certainly help crown the deliberations of the Council with success under your leadership.

We would also like to express our thanks and gratitude to the friendly State of South Africa for its initiative on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement on requesting the convening of this meeting to give a chance to the Members States of the United Nations to express their views on this matter, which is not only about relations between Iraq and the Security Council, but also about international relations in general. It is also a matter that relates to the capacity of the international community to face up to the American tendency to practice hegemony and aggression, and to stand steadfastly by the principles of the United Nations Charter. We hope that the Security Council will take the views that we will hear today and tomorrow into account.

The deterioration in international relations has reached a point where the American Administration unabashedly declares its plans to invade and occupy Iraq, using military force and even appointing an American governor, therein changing the map of the region by force and putting their hands on the sources of energy there. The United States also wants the Security Council to give it a blank check to colonize Iraq, not just Iraq but the entire Arab Mashrq, which it plans to violate as part of its plan to subject the entire world to American hegemony. The United States of America has taken advantage of illegal means of pressure and a tremendous propaganda mechanism to disseminate lies concerning Iraq, one lie after the other, the latest being the pretence that Iraq owns weapons of mass destruction and the alleged threat of such weapons to world security.

I believe that everyone knows that there are no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Iraq implemented many years ago the disarmament requirements set out in paragraphs 8 to 13 of resolution 687 (1991). This has been recognized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has declared that there are no pending issues concerning disarmament in Iraq. The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) also recognized that fact. Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, the former Executive Chairman of UNSCOM, declared on 13 January 1993 that Iraq had implemented 95 per cent of its obligations, an assertion that he repeated in an interview for the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation on 7 September 2002.

I should like to beg the Security Council's indulgence in describing in depth Iraq's implementation of resolution 687 (1991) over the past seven years and seven months. Suffice it to say that 276 inspection teams, made up of a total of 3,845 inspectors, in addition to 80 delegations in the form of special missions, undertook 3,392 visits to Iraqi sites. Among these teams were 94 teams specializing in meetings and interviews, which met for a total of 2,359 hours with 1,378 people connected directly or indirectly with Iraq's previous programmes. There were 192 monitoring teams involving 1,332 inspectors who undertook 10,256 inspection visits to sites subject to the monitoring system, as well as other sites. Although 595 sites were subject to monitoring pursuant to the mechanism for monitoring Iraqi exports and imports under resolution 1051 (1996), 74 sites were added, including in border and customs areas, harbors, hospitals and health centers.

UNSCOM and IAEA used 140 surveillance cameras at 29 sites and 30 sensors at 23 sites, as well as 1,929 labels on 1,832 facilities and pieces of equipment in monitoring 161 sites. UNSCOM placed 9,026 labels on 99 types of missile with a range of less than seven kilometers. UNSCOM and IAEA also undertook 2,967 helicopter sorties in their work, for a total of 4,480 flight hours. The United States undertook 434 U-2 surveillance sorties for a total of 1,800 flight hours. Iraq submitted 1,744,000 pages of documents to UNSCOM and IAEA, along with a number of videotapes and nine kilometers of microfilm, containing 600,000 pictures and 50,000 microfilm slides.

All of this demonstrates to the Security Council that Iraq has honored all its requirements, despite the many harmful and insulting practices of the inspection units, including the espionage carried out by the American and British inspectors, in particular, in implementation of the well-known plots and plans devised by the United States to maintain the embargo and to jeopardize Iraqi national security. This was recognized by many inspectors, UNSCOM Executive Chairman Ekeus and the chief United States inspector Scott Ritter among them.

Iraq has consented to all these sacrifices in the hope that its cooperation would lead the Security Council to honor its obligations under resolution 687 (1991). Foremost among those obligations are lifting the comprehensive embargo imposed on Iraq, ensuring respect for Iraq's national security, and addressing the regional security imbalance embodied in Israel's possession of a vast arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, long-range missiles and their delivery systems. However, when the United States sensed that the pretext of inspections had become an inadequate excuse for maintaining the comprehensive embargo and for repeated American and British aggressions, it asked the inspection team led by Mr. Butler to leave Iraq on 15 December 1998. In other words, the inspectors did not leave because Iraq asked them to, but because Mr. Butler asked them to do so, as instructed by the United States.

One day after the inspectors left Iraq, there was a vast military attack against Iraq, which claimed the lives of hundreds of Iraqi citizens and destroyed several economic and service institutions, including sites that had been under the surveillance and monitoring of UNSCOM and the IAEA.

Following that, the United States dragged the Security Council along a very long and complex path of discussions in order to redraft Council resolutions, impose new conditions on Iraq and set up new inspection committees, believing that the continued absence of inspectors justified continuing the embargo, which would mean that one day the Iraqi people would kneel to the will of the United States.

Thus, the inspectors left Iraq and the overall embargo continued from 6 August 1990, claiming the lives of Iraqi citizens, so much so that the number of embargo victims has reached 1,750,000 Iraqi citizens, as of the end of September of this year.

The embargo continues to represent a moral problem for the United Nations, as described by the Secretary-General. It also is a blatant violation of several provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, such as Article 24, which calls for the Security Council to work in keeping with the purposes and principles of the Charter. It is also a violation of Article 1, paragraph 1, which states that sanctions and other measures adopted for the maintenance of international peace and security should be in keeping with the principles of international law and justice.

The sanctions are a violation of Article 1, paragraph 2 of the Charter, which deals with respect for the principle of equality among peoples - their equal rights and their right to self-determination - since no sanctions should be imposed that will cause international disagreements that are incompatible with the legal rights of the State or that prejudice the people's right to self-determination.

The sanctions are also a violation of Article 1, paragraph 3 of the Charter, which concerns the promotion of and respect for human rights.

The system of sanctions also violates Article 2, paragraph 7 of the Charter, which does not allow the United Nations to intervene in matters that are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State.

Sanctions also go against Article 55 of the Charter, which calls upon the United Nations to guarantee higher standards of living for all people and to work towards economic and social progress and development. We do not want to dwell at length on the fact that they are also a violation of many other international conventions and instruments on human rights.

All this has been documented by United Nations agencies, humanitarian organizations, human rights organizations and many researchers and writers in this area. The sanctions imposed on Iraq have caused a humanitarian catastrophe comparable to the worst catastrophes that have befallen the world throughout history. The sanctions have claimed the lives of thousands of children, women and elderly people. They constitute genocide by any standard; the number of victims goes far beyond the victims of the use of weapons of mass destruction throughout history.

Parallel to the imposition of the comprehensive embargo, since April of 1991 the United States and Britain have declared two no-fly zones in the south and north of Iraq, in blatant violation of the Charter and the established rules of international law, as well as the relevant resolutions of the Security Council, which have underlined the importance of respecting Iraq's sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence.

By imposing those no-fly zones, the United States and Britain have carried out military aggression continuously, killing thousands of Iraqi citizens and destroying property. Those two States are violating daily the resolutions of the Security Council and carrying out continuous aggression against Iraq. The Council has been unable to put an end to such aggression or even to condemn it.

In order to end the impasse in the situation with the Security Council, Iraq took the initiative of opening a dialogue with the Secretary-General, with the aim of achieving full implementation of the obligations contained in resolutions of the Council in a balanced and equitable manner and in accordance with international law and the Charter of the United Nations.

The Iraqi side held four meetings with the Secretary-General which led to some progress but which did not achieve their objective. This was due to pressure by the United States, which prevented the Council from participating in the efforts to seek a comprehensive solution that would deal with all aspects of the relationship between Iraq and the Council while guaranteeing the implementation of all the requirements of the Council's resolutions - I repeat, guaranteeing the implementation of all requirements of the Security Council.

This American position actually means that a comprehensive solution would not serve the aggressive intentions of the United States against Iraq and the region as a whole. That is the very reason which has led the United States to prevent the Security Council from examining the possibility of implementing operative paragraph 6 of the Council's resolution 1382 (2001). This paragraph calls on the Security Council to reach a comprehensive settlement concerning the relationship between Iraq and the Council, including clarification concerning the implementation of resolution 1284 (1999).

In response to the calls and appeals of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, the Arab States and many friendly countries, the Iraqi Government on 16 September 2002 agreed, unconditionally, to the return of United Nations weapons inspectors, in order to dissipate any doubts concerning Iraq's continued possession of weapons of mass destruction, and as a first step towards a solution that would include lifting the overall embargo imposed on Iraq and implementing the other provisions of relevant Security Council resolutions.

In his letter dated 16 September 2002, the Secretary-General conveyed to the President of the Security Council Iraq's agreement and mentioned the following:

"As I had the honor to mention to the General Assembly a few days ago, this decision by the Government of the Republic of Iraq is the indispensable first step towards an assurance that Iraq no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction and, equally important, towards a comprehensive solution that includes the suspension and eventual ending of the sanctions that are causing such hardship for the Iraqi people and the timely implementation of other provisions of the relevant Security Council resolutions." (S/2002/1034, p. 1) The Iraqi technical delegation held talks in Vienna on 30 September and 1 October 2002 with delegations from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) under the chairmanship of Mr. Hans Blix and Mr. Mohamed El-Baradei. Both delegations agreed on arrangements for the return of the weapons inspectors and chose 19 October 2002 as the date when the first UNMOVIC team would reach Baghdad.

The Iraqi delegation, in the course of that meeting submitted the semi-annual reports concerning the sites that are subject to monitoring, and that had not been monitored since the inspectors left Iraq four years ago. These reports show Iraq fully respects its obligations pursuant to Security Council resolution 687 (1991), despite the absence of the monitoring and inspection teams. Bear in mind that these developments clearly reflect the wishes of Iraq and the United Nations and their readiness to begin confidence-building measures and pave the way for the Security Council to implement its own obligations.

In spite of these developments the United States of America has tried to hamper such agreements by increasing its threats against Iraq, appearing before the Security Council in order to obtain the blank check needed to carry out its aggression and by calling for the imposition of unfair, impossible and arbitrary conditions on Iraq. These conditions are, at the least, an insult to the international community, the United Nations and international law and constitute a return to the law of the jungle.

The war hysteria that seems to have hit the current American Government is fed by hatred and by a desire to settle old accounts and impose its hegemony on the world politically, militarily, and economically. The United States is not interested in the implementation of the Security Council resolutions, for the United States of America is the main ally of Israel, which has refused to implement more than twenty-eight Security Council resolutions and scores of General Assembly resolutions that have called on Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab territories and to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. The United States of America has been providing Israel with state-of-the-art weapons to kill the heroic Palestinian people and destroy their property.

This aggressive American hysteria has nothing to do with ending the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the world, for the United States of America possesses the largest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and has a longer history of using these weapons against people, starting with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Viet Nam and most recently by using depleted uranium against Iraq and Yugoslavia. The United States is the country that revoked the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty. It unilaterally hampered the implementation of paragraph 14 of Security Council resolution 687 (1991) which calls for making the Middle East a zone free of weapons of mass destruction.

Allow me to mention, as an example, a statement of the former Director-General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Mr. José Bustani, published in Le Monde Diplomatique in July of this year, where he stated "From the very beginning we were faced with difficulty when the Americans refused to allow the members of the organization to carry out their inspections. Very often the inspectors could not enter the laboratories so we remained unable to ascertain that they were actually producing chemical material for peaceful purposes only. It was very difficult for us to examine the samples, for it was not possible to carry out such an inspection, except in the American laboratories. In the final analysis, we had no guarantee as to the validity of the results. At every inspection operation the Americans were trying to change the rules of the game."

We call on the international community loudly to voice their objections to the aggressive designs of the United States of America against Iraq, in order to prevent it from using the Security Council as a tool to carry out its policy of aggression. Not to speak out in the face of these attempts would have serious repercussions on international peace and security, for this would be the beginning of the end of the collective security system as set out in the Charter of the United Nations and of all other instruments, agreements and conventions governing international relations. The key principles underpinning all of these include resorting first to peaceful means in the settlement of conflicts; refraining from the use of force, or the threat thereof, and from violating the territorial integrity or political independence of any State; respecting equal sovereignty among States Members of the United Nations; and following a policy of non-intervention in matters that fall under the jurisdiction of a given State. This hegemonistic attitude will claim many victims if we do not bridle it.

Today we must urgently reject Washington's attempts to hinder the return of the inspectors. It is doing so even though Iraq has taken all the necessary practical measures and arrangements and paved the way for the return of the inspectors and made the necessary preparations for them to carry out their work easily.

Iraq has pledged to cooperate with the inspectors in every possible way so as to facilitate their task of ascertaining that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

There is therefore absolutely no need for the adoption a new Security Council resolution. The attempts being made by the United States of America to hamper and delay the return of the inspectors and to make the Security Council adopt a new resolution laying down conditions that are impossible to respect are but a pretext for aggression against Iraq. The goal of that aggression is the colonization of our country and the imposition of American domination over our oil, as a first step towards the imposition of American colonialism in the region as a whole and the control of its oil and towards allowing Israel to continue its genocidal war against the Palestinian people and its aggression against the Arab countries.

The United States of America does not want the inspectors to return, because if they do there will be proof that the Americans have consistently lied and made false allegations. At that point the Security Council would have to lift the unjust embargo against Iraq, ensure respect for its national and regional security concerns, and implement of the other requirements set out in Council resolutions; and that is exactly what the United States of America does not want.

Finally, we are confident that, now that Iraq has expressed its readiness before the Security Council unconditionally to receive the inspectors, the States Members of the United Nations will defend its decisions, just as all peoples have done in rejecting the American war of aggression.