The UN disarmament chief, Mr Richard Butler, said yesterday that the latest Iraq-UN stand-off is due to Iraqi fears that arms inspectors have found facts Baghdad wants to hide about its biological weapons programme.
"I think they know we are onto something," Mr Butler, who is chairman of the UN Special Commission (Unscom) charged with locating and destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, said in a CNN interview. Last Wednesday, Iraq announced that it would suspend its co-operation with Unscom and demanded an immediate end to international trade sanctions imposed for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Unscom must certify to the Security Council that Iraq is free from all proscribed weapons before the embargo could be lifted.
"Last Monday in Baghdad the degree of protection Tariq Aziz [the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister] was running on their biological programme was a miracle to behold," said Mr Butler. "I mean, if people's behaviour is evidence of what they are really doing then that sent a very strong signal that they simply do not want us to take away their biological capability."
Mr Butler continued: "I think what is deeply exercising Iraq's mind now is that we found VX nerve agent in some missile warhead remnants. They've said they'd never made that stuff initially, and when they confessed they did make it they said they never put it in weapons."
But in Cairo the Arab League said Mr Butler had gone beyond his mandate.
"Butler's actions exceed his duties since Iraq has fulfilled all its commitments concerning weapons of mass destruction," an Arab League spokesman, Mr Talaat Hamed, told reporters. Mr Hamed did not specify how Mr Butler had overstepped his mission.
In Baghdad, Unscom has suspended inspections of new sites in response to the withdrawal of Iraqi co-operation.
But Unscom experts would continue to monitor sites already identified by inspectors looking for evidence of prohibited weapons, said Ms Janet Sullivan, special assistant to the director of the UN Baghdad Ongoing Monitoring and Verification Centre. "Inspection in respect of the commission's disarmament responsibility are temporarily suspended," she said. "In light of the present situation and pending further instructions, inspections are being conducted of the sites in Iraq which are subject to monitoring," she added.
UN arms monitors went out for work as usual on Saturday for the third day since Baghdad's decision. The monitors operate surveillance cameras installed in sites already identified by Unscom as having evidence of prohibited arms.
Meanwhile, a crowd of about 600 men and women gathered outside the UN headquarters in Baghdad. They publicly burnt the US, British and Israeli flags after stamping on them. "End the murder of children and women committed in the name of the United Nations," one protester's placard said.
The protesters handed over to a UN delegation a message addressed to the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, asking him to "end the crimes" against Iraq. They also accused Unscom of deliberately prolonging the embargo.
Iraq's ruling Ba'ath Party newspaper al-Thawra said that the row with the UN experts could only be resolved by easing the sweeping sanctions, saying Baghdad would not accept "a piece of sweet given to an angry child". The paper said Unscom was guided by a hostile American policy against Iraq.
"It [Unscom] is only an American commission under international cover to create excesses in order to prevent lifting the embargo," the paper argued.
Two British nationals, meanwhile, started a fast and vigil sit-in outside Unscom headquarters to protest against the continuation of the sanctions. Ms Andrea Needham and Mr Milan Rai said they belonged to Voices in the Wilderness group which is campaigning for ending sanctions on Iraq. They said the group was simultaneously holding similar sit-ins in front of the UN headquarters in New York and outside the the British prime minister's residence in 10 Downing Street.