United Nations: United Nations chief weapons Inspector Hans Blix will give a
preliminary assessment of Iraq's declaration on the status of its weapons of mass
destruction to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on December 19.
"The assessment would be pronounced possibly Thursday next week (December 19) after
distributing the sanitised version to five non-permanent members on Monday," Blix
told reporters, hoping by that time the United States would have completed its own
evaluation, which it is now carrying out.
Blix indicated list of companies, establishments and main suppliers given by Iraq
would be edited out by inspectors before it is distributed to non-permanent members,
as they were of "very sensitive nature".
"I would discuss the working version of the text, shorn of sensitive details about
Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programmes including the name of foreign
suppliers," he said.
The inspectors plan to keep the names of companies "confidential" as it is necessary
to extract vital information from "these suppliers who might not have known the
purpose for which Iraq is buying the item", Blix explained.
He said 3,000 pages, including 500 in Arabic, constituted the core of the 12,000
page Iraqi document and the material to be translated was the bottleneck.
"We should have been through the main part of the document by Friday this week
(December 13) and also need to compare notes with five permanent members who have
already received unedited copies of the declaration," Blix said.
Both inspectors and the US, which has seen the unedited version, say that a large
part of the material is recycled from old documents. But Blix said, "Evidently,
there will be something new," as the declaration contained information up to the
present time.
The chief inspector said he has assigned 15 experts headed by a former French
Military officer and a chemical weapons specialist Jean-Louis Roland for the initial
assessment.
Blix also sought help from the five permanent members – the United States, Britain,
Russia, France and China – in deleting the sensitive material including any recipe
for making weapons of mass destruction.
PTI
