Weapons inspection team lands in Iraq

9.20am

BAGHDAD - United Nations weapons inspectors have arrived in Iraq as UN chief Kofi Annan warned Baghdad the only way to avoid war was to co-operate with them.

The 17 inspectors were due on Wednesday to start their first search in four years of President Saddam Hussein's Iraq, looking for nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

"I hope the government of Iraq will fully co-operate with the inspectors and respect its obligations unreservedly. That is the only way to avoid conflict in the region," United Nations secretary-general Annan told a news conference in Paris.

Shortly before the inspectors' plane touched down, British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned Saddam not to play a game of "hide and seek" in the hunt for illicit armaments.

The Iraqi leadership denies it has weapons of mass destruction and must make a formal declaration by December 8.

"We have no doubt that he does have weapons of mass destruction," Blair told a news conference in London.

"So let's wait and see what he actually says. But I've made it clear throughout, this has got to be a situation in which there is an honest declaration by Saddam."

Blair said a false declaration would constitute a "material breach" of Resolution 1441 -- widely understood as a trigger for US-led military action -- but that it was up to the weapons inspectors to pass judgement.

In another incident on Monday that the United States says could be such a breach of the resolution, an Iraqi military spokesman said anti-aircraft batteries opened fire at US and British planes over the south of the country.

Most of the international community disagrees with the tough US stance about the Iraqi firing on Western warplanes patrolling "no-fly" zones set up after the 1991 Gulf War.

An advance team of UN logistics experts has been in Iraq since last week, preparing the ground for the new mission. UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998, accusing Baghdad of failing to co-operate. The United States then mounted punitive air strikes.

"We have had a lot of promises of cooperation (from Iraq) and we believe that is a good start, but we have suspicious minds. We are here to test cooperation," said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has experts on the UN inspection team.

"We are going to start our first inspection on Wednesday... We have a systematic operation plan of where we want to go, but this plan is also flexible we can take other directions depending on the leads and clues," she told reporters in Baghdad, warning they faced a huge task and had limited time.

Iraq is obliged by a toughly worded Security Council resolution to permit unfettered access to the inspection team.

Resolution 1441 obliges Baghdad to allow the inspectors to peer into every corner of the country. The inspectors must give their first report to the UN Security Council by January 27.

On Sunday, Iraqi authorities made public an angry letter to the United Nations over the resolution's terms.

In the first detailed response since Iraq accepted the resolution on November 13, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri gave an item by item reply.

"The real motive was to create pretexts to attack Iraq under an international cover," Sabri wrote in the letter.

Baghdad agreed to produce a full account of its weapons program by a December 8 deadline and said UN inspectors would be given free access to all sites across the country.

Oil prices were steady on Monday, but traders fear war in the Middle East may disrupt crucial flows of crude oil from the region, which pumps a quarter of global supplies.

In Cairo, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters that if inspectors had free access and found no arms, war would be averted: "If we can give a positive report, the inspections will be an alternative to war, not a precursor to war," he said.

Fleming said the inspectors who flew to Baghdad from Cyprus included 11 from the UN agency UNMOVIC and six from the IAEA. One Arab woman from Egypt was on the team, as well as experts from Europe, Australia, the United States, China and Russia.

"This team is a continuous team. It will be rotating in and out. We expect to be here for weeks and months to come. This is a big country and we have a huge mandate. It's going to take its time and require a lot of passion from our member states as well as transparency and cooperation from Iraq," she said.

"We need to operate discreetly and objectively and we won't be able to allow journalists to accompany teams."

She said about 35 inspectors would arrive on December 8.

Twenty tonnes of equipment have already been flown to Baghdad from the Cypriot airport at Larnaca, including communications gear, computers, furniture and medicine.

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix was to brief the 15-nation Security Council in New York on Monday about last week's talks with Iraqi officials on resuming inspections.

The Security Council has also scheduled a vote on Monday on extending the Iraq humanitarian oil-for-food program for six months. The program covers food, medicine and a host of other civilian supplies to ease the human impact of UN sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

- REUTERS

Herald feature: War with Iraq