Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2002, pages 48, 78

Special Report

 

UNMOVIC Chief Hans Blix Prepared for New Round of Weapons Inspections in Iraq

 

By Ian Williams

Hans Blix is one of the archetypal Swedes who have kept the U.N. running for half a century. Some, like Count Folke Bernadotte, died as a result of the Middle Eastern conflict. Others, like Blix’s predecessor, UNSCOM head Rolf Ekeus, were caught between the millstones of Washington and Baghdad.

Blix first came to the U.N. as a student in 1950, he reminisced in a recent interview with the Washington Report. At that time, in order to bypass Moscow’s Security Council vetoes, the U.S. was putting together the “Uniting For Peace” procedure—the very one the Palestinians are now using against U.S. vetoes!

Blix has an ironic sense of humor, which comes in handy in his position of head of UNMOVIC, the body set up two years ago to verify Iraq’s disarmament. Formerly head of the International Atomic Agency, Blix now has to certify to the Security Council himself Iraq’s cooperation and weapons-free status—a heavy responsibility.

Since UNMOVIC has not actually been allowed into Iraq, Blix made few headlines—until The Washington Post revealed in April that John Bolton, under secretary of state for disarmament affairs, had ordered a CIA investigation on him to determine if Blix was “soft” on Iraq.

Although the CIA apparently “cleared” him, Blix emphasized that there are no such security checks by national agencies against UNMOVIC staff. “Not even the Russians or the CIA can guarantee that you cannot get a mole!” he pointed out. “However, if we discovered someone, as they say, wearing two hats, then we’d invite them to walk out—wearing the other one.”

And as for operations, “When we get to anything sensitive we will keep it on a need-to-know basis,” Blix stated. “For example, when we get to decide the sites to inspect, on a no-notice basis, that has to be kept secret. We will try to do that—but we can’t guarantee it. In any case, many of the things we do are transparent. I have about four lectures that I have given to the inspectors and they are available to everyone, including the Iraqis. There is no mystery.”

In some ways, Blix thought, the two years of waiting have not been wasted. “We did not want any unnecessary expenses,” he noted, “nor do we want to have people sitting around idle, so what we have done is to train about 230 people ready to go as inspectors.”

He also is happy that, with inspectors from 44 nations, UNMOVIC represents a more diverse body than did UNSCOM. “No one has criticized us yet,” he said, “but we do not have so many Africans yet, and few South Americans. People who are knowledgeable about chemical and biological weapons and missiles are of course mostly from industrialized countries, but there are many industrialized countries to choose from!”

UNSCOM relied upon staff seconded from other governments. “However we have money,” Blix chuckled, “with the compliments of the Iraqis, since 0.8 percent of the oil revenues goes to finance UNSCOM. That gives us independence, so we do not need to go begging to governments. In fact we don’t go to them at all—we advertise for staff on the Web.”

There still is a shortage of Arabs and Arabic-speakers, but he added, “it is not our fault. We have turned to Arab states to have names, and on the Web and through the missions here, but we don’t get candidates.”

This, he suggested, reflects the reputation of UNMOVIC in the Arab world. “On the other hand,” he pointed out, “we do have Arabic interpreters, so it is not crippling.”

Apart from the language problem, Blix explained that, since the Security Council mandate includes training in “cultural sensitivity,” “in our training courses there are lectures on Iraqi culture, and the high standard of living that they enjoyed before the war. So we deal with the culture, the religion, the history.”

Asked if that includes an overview of the Ba’ath Party’s glorious history, he replied with a smile, “Indeed, we also usually have someone on these courses who can be relied upon to take the Iraqi point of view. It’s not always from an outside view. We have some people who are friendly to Iraq, because we think our inspectors need to be exposed to what they are saying as well as what the world says about them.”

In addition to training, the time waiting has been used to analyze the UNSCOM archives—a million pages of them—which Blix described as “very sectoralized, so you couldn’t find anything. Nothing was related—interviews, test searches, photographs. We have been computerizing it and have search engines that will reveal information and cross references.”

In the absence of recent inspection data, commercially bought satellite maps of Iraq have been added to the old material so “we can see what industries they have built, and where they have expanded,” Blix said. “Another source is the media, and we have a contract with the Monterey Institute, which provides us with 4,000 press and TV entries from all over the world dealing with weapons of mass destruction, which is fed into our system…And lastly,” he told the Washington Report, “we have set up a network of contacts with intelligence agencies.”

Blix prefers not to say which agencies, but he has imposed new rules on relations with them. “It is strictly one-way traffic,” he insisted. “We serve the Security Council, not anybody else. If they want to give us something, they should not expect us to give anything back.”

So far he has had two meetings with the Iraqis, when they came to see U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York. Blix described their concerns as “above all, that we will not engage in espionage in Iraq—which is the easiest question,” he stated. “They also voice a lot of criticism of what UNSCOM did: they cannot criticize us yet, because we have not been there yet.…They are also concerned about how long this process will take. We answer that if they cooperate in all respects and we are able to make progress on some of the key tasks, then it could be done within a year.”

Indeed, with the Security Council’s passage of a new sanctions regime in May, UNMOVIC has new tasks, Blix said: “to examine any of the contracts, to check on dual use both for mass destruction weapons and conventional weapons. We have to report such items to the Security Council—and so we are hiring people, highly specialized who know what to look for.”

Reinforced by Israel’s thwarting of the Jenin fact-finding mission, the constant Arab complaint is that resolutions against Iraq are compulsory, while those against Israel are discretionary. “Our resolutions are under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter,” Blix responded, “and so are compulsory. But it’s worth mentioning that Resolution 687 sees verification of Iraqi disarmament as a step toward a Middle East Zone Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Sometimes Iraqi spokesmen have said they would be happy to have inspections in the context of wider area inspection,” he added, “but that is a misreading of the resolution, which says that the establishment of inspection in Iraq would constitute steps toward such a zone.”

Even so, Blix said, “I think that the naming of a zone is a big step, which is a resolution for which the whole Middle East, including Israel, votes, every year in the General Assembly and at the IAEA conference. In all such areas there are perceived security needs toward declaring them. As long as one country there has such weapons, there will be an incentive for others to acquire them.

“There is no way now to establish such a zone immediately,” Blix said. “But it is a prospect for the future.”

And his future? How much longer is he prepared to spend on UNMOVIC? “I only know that this not a career job for me!” Blix replied. “I have no time frame—except to get home as soon as possible.”

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.

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