U.N. Aide Hopes to Find Clues at Iraqi Ministry

MANAMA, Bahrain — Tired but determined, the head of the U.N. special commission charged with tracking and disposing of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction said Monday that the nine-man inspection team he will lead into Baghdad today expects to find traces of Iraq’s secret weapons program inside the city’s padlocked Agriculture Ministry building.

Rolf Ekeus, the commission’s Swedish chairman, declared that the compromise permitting the search is in no way the victory Iraq has claimed--even if Baghdad used the interim period to remove key documents and equipment from the building.

“The material may have been moved out, but we will make our observations . . . (and) see what was there,” Ekeus told reporters moments after he arrived in Bahrain, the regional headquarters of the United Nations’ yearlong effort to enforce Iraqi compliance with the cease-fire resolutions that ended the Persian Gulf War 16 months ago.

Early this month, a U.S.-led team of U.N. weapons inspectors sought access to the Agriculture Ministry in Baghdad in the belief they would find evidence of Iraq’s nuclear and ballistic missile program. But their way was barred by the government, and they were endangered daily by crowds of anti-U.S. street demonstrators.

They left the building site in frustration last week. In three grueling days of talks that ended Sunday, Ekeus eventually convinced the Iraqis that their government risked another round of punishing military strikes from the West if they continued to bar his inspectors from the ministry building. A compromise was reached allowing the team access.

During a lengthy, wide-ranging session with a handful of reporters in his hotel lobby here on the eve of a scheduled dawn departure for Iraq, Ekeus bristled at Iraqi proclamations from across the Gulf earlier in the day that Baghdad had won a “splendid victory” in the resolution of the standoff.

“I don’t think they have won the day,” Ekeus said. “They said the building was a symbol of Iraqi sovereignty . . . and now a top, qualified (U.N. inspection) team is going in.

“They have made a breach of the cease-fire . . . and put themselves into a situation where they caved in. I’m sorry for Iraq, but that’s it.”

In fact, Ekeus explained, the Iraqi leadership was forced, in the end, to accept his handpicked team leader, German inspector Achim Biermann, a veteran of the U.N. weapons-destruction program who has made three trips into Iraq to identify and destroy ballistic-missile facilities.

The team also includes Swiss, Swedish, Finnish and Russian members, but the Iraqis had objected specifically to Biermann’s presence, Ekeus said. “When they saw the team, they were dismayed. . . . But they had to take it or leave it.”

Iraq had insisted that the inspection team exclude representatives of nations that joined in the allied military assault on Iraq to force its troops out of neighboring Kuwait last year. That demand was granted as part of the compromise.

The soft-spoken Swede conceded that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime “has given itself great possibilities to clear out the building” by prolonging the negotiations at the United Nations in New York.

But Ekeus indicated that the U.N. weapons experts who gave up their two-week vigil outside the ministry last week believe that the building itself may yield clues that could help them identify the material they suspect was hidden inside--a suspicion the Iraqi leadership has repeatedly denied.

“We had well-founded concern that this material existed in the building,” Ekeus said, later referring to it as “documents and interesting equipment.”

“If it’s not there, it’s somewhere else. We’ll try to find it,” he said, adding later, “We will look at the structure of the building itself.”

Ekeus echoed the skepticism voiced by President Bush, who vowed Monday to continue exerting pressure on the Iraqi leadership until it complies with a wide range of cease-fire commitments. He said Sunday’s 11th-hour compromise solution to the immediate crisis is far from the final confrontation in the United Nations’ ambitious program to identify and destroy every fragment of Iraq’s program to manufacture nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles.

“We have assurances from the Iraqi side that this is the end of the confrontation, but my experience is such that we can’t take that for granted,” Ekeus said.

And when asked whether Iraq’s decision to back down should be rewarded with an easing of U.N. economic sanctions, which continue to press down on Iraq’s economy and its people, he added curtly: “Certainly not. You look how they behave.”

In Baghdad on Monday, there was ample cause for such concern.

“We owe nothing to the (U.N.) Security Council,” Abdel-Jabbar Mohsen declared in a blistering attack on the United Nations in Monday’s editions of Al Thawra, the official newspaper of Hussein’s ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party.

“We have nothing else to do but despise them . . . and march ahead, trampling on their decisions and the resolutions of their council under our feet,” said Mohsen, press aide to Hussein.

Striking a more buoyant tone, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Hamza Zubaidi declared Sunday’s settlement “a brilliant and splendid victory” for Iraq’s authoritarian leader, who personally congratulated the nation for its steadfastness to “our cherished goal” during a speech just hours before the compromise agreement was announced in New York.

Veteran observers of the Baghdad regime viewed such pronouncements as much-needed image-boosting for Hussein, who has often given the Iraqi people interpretations of key events that are opposite those heard in the outside world.

OTHER IRAQI VIOLATIONS: Killing of Shiites, interference with aid cited. A8