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Blix confident Security Council will want UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq

22 April – Top United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix voiced confidence today that the Security Council would want his inspections team to return to Iraq to search for evidence of banned weapons of mass destruction as a guarantor of an independent process not beholden to any government.

"The purpose of the setting up of the UNMOVIC was to have an independent verification, one that was not on leash from any government and I am sure that the Council would want to persist in that attitude," Mr. Blix, Executive Chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told reporters as he arrived at UN Headquarters in New York for his first meeting with the Security Council since the war.

Asked whether it was possible to have full credibility in what the United States might find in Iraq without UNMOVIC's involvement, he replied: "We may not be the only ones in the world who have credibility. But I think we do have credibility for being objective and independent."

Mr. Blix said he would discuss with the Council UNMOVIC's readiness to go back to Iraq but also "the need for some signals and adjustments of the basis for our work there by the Security Council. We are serving the Council, as you know."

He was questioned about earlier assertions by the US about Iraqi nuclear weapons activities. "If you take the contract about the yellow cake, it was more than shaky. It was a fake," he said in reference to an alleged contract by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger.

Mr. Blix is addressing one of two informal closed-door Council sessions today. The second, on the UN Oil-for-Food programme, will hear from Benon Sevan, Executive Director of the UN Office of the Iraq Programme (OIP). Under the humanitarian programme, Baghdad was allowed to use a portion of its oil revenues to buy food and other relief supplies, while the rest was used for reparation claims against Iraq.

US President George W. Bush said last week he would ask the Council to lift the sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent 1991 Persian Gulf War. With sanctions in force, the UN administered Oil-for-Food programme is the only legal way of selling Iraq's oil.