IRAQ: Michael Jansen follows a convoy of UN weapons inspectors to a munitions factory outside Baghdad and encounters a scene of wreckage anddisorder
We were the first of the news hounds to arrive at the Canal Hotel, where the UN weapons inspectors are based. Inside the compound, people wearing blue-peaked caps with the UN logo were loading their equipment into their white, four-wheel drive vehicles.
A cold, biting wind blew in from the desert, the blue of the sky was laced with thin cloud. My companion, Dr Andre Brie, a German member of the European Parliament, was told by the UN guard that the inspectors would be leaving after half an hour so so. More cars carrying press turned up and formed a ragged line on the verge of the road outside the hotel. Three busloads of Iraqi men and women bearing placards and banners calling for peace staged a rally at the gate.
At about 8.30 a.m., the vehicles carrying the inspectors assembled in a staging area beside the hotel. Raad, our driver, manoeuvred his elderly but well-sprung Chevrolet into a good position for the start.
As the UN vehicles sped away, we were off on the daily rally drive, dodging perilously between commuter cars and delivery lorries caught in the morning rush. Stopping for no traffic light, nearly brushing shoulders with a bus, braking only to avoid a collision, we stuck to the inspectors.
They took the highway towards Hilla, a key industrial city, where Raad continued to exercise his skills as a rally driver until we turned off onto a secondary road into the countryside.
We zipped past fields of lettuce, fat caterpillars covering delicate tomato and bean seedlings, village houses in yellow brick and dull, earthen-mud brick, cows and sheep, irrigation ditches, men and women tending their crops.
Productive fields gave way to vast stretches of salt-bleached land - desolate, empty. The salt lay on its surface like a thin sprinkling of snow, killing all but tough spikes of scrub. We followed a long stretch of well-maintained wall and turned into the drive of the facility under inspection. The convoy of inspectors and cars carrying officials from the Iraqi monitoring organisation sped through the tall arch of the gate built in the style of ancient Babylon. We remained outside.
A rotund military officer in green uniform, black beret flat on his head, told us that this was al-Qaqa plant for explosives and munitions. "They have come here several times before," he added.
The wait began at around 9.30 a.m., while the BBC and other television crews set up their cameras in front of the gate. The BBC's presenter did her two-minute turn before her crew packed up and left, along with all but us and Iraqi cameramen working for Abu Dhabi, Saudi and Japanese networks.
We paced the drive and peered expectantly into the vast grounds of the compound, hoping to see the flash of the inspectors' white cars, but they did not come. Dr Brie and I decided we would stay until noon, when we were given the promise of a briefing by the conducting officer and a visit to the facility. We stayed on. Off to one side yellow-orange smoke poured into the sky throughout our vigil.
For a few minutes we were diverted by a pretty display of flares, fired as ranging shots.
The officer invited us to drink tea in the gate house, warmed by the long element of an immersion heater on bricks in a metal box. The tea was prepared by a large woman in long skirts and a headscarf, and served in a motley of cups.
At about 1.30 p.m., a group of women - some in long black cloaks, others dressed in skirts and warm coats - came from the gate. The shift was beginning to change. The women boarded a bus and departed.
At 2.00 p.m., the television crews rushed to their cameras. But it was a false alarm. At 2.30 p.m., buses brought the new shift, men carrying their meals packed in plastic bags. They entered by a side gate after a cursory inspection of identity cards by a civilian. Just before 3.00 p.m., the inspectors sped out, accompanied by their Iraqi escorts.
The company's liaison officer, Omar Ahmad Hoja, met us just inside the gate. He said: "This was the 13th visit to the facility by the inspectors. Thirty-two came in 12 vehicles, members of UNMOVIC's 10 chemical unit. They went to all parts of the property, visited our stores and checked all our products. They took away six samples.
"While most of the inspectors behaved naturally, one was provocative. He drove his vehicle at 140 kilometres near the stores. It is very dangerous, not necessary and very provocative." He told us to get into our cars for our tour.
We drove into more salt wasteland, past abandoned rusting pipes, pipes in use, collapsed irrigation canals, earth bunkers, broken trees and the wreckage of buildings bombed in 1991 and 1998.
Twisted metal sheeting and rods, roof slates and tiles, bricks and boards lay where they had fallen when the bombs struck.
In this desolate landscape were two new, large storage sheds. At one boxes of small munitions stood in the open beneath the overhang of the roof. Mr Hoja took us to a field of bombs. Small red bombs, medium-sized green bombs and large silver bombs.
As we gathered round him, he said: "All empty. These have been here since 1989", well after the end of the war between Iraq and Iran. "These are bombs meant to be dropped from planes," he observed. "We make all kinds of munitions here for defence. We make sulphuric and nitric acid, nitro-glycerine and other explosives." He recited a string of products which Dr Brie noted down.
"We do not have anything to do with weapons of mass destruction," Mr Hoja declared.
As we left, hundreds of men were leaving the facility at the end of their day's work. A woman selling sweets and biscuits from a makeshift stand at the edge of a parking lot began to pack up her wares as skinny dogs nosed empty chip and chocolate packets for crumbs.
During the drive to Baghdad, Dr Brie, a member of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs, Security, Common Defence and Human Rights Committee and an active member of the Pugwash movement, gave me his assessment of the situation.
"Although I am cautious, I think I can see that Iraq is in no position to make weapons of mass destruction." In his view the "1991 war, the 1998 US bombing campaign and a decade of sanctions have deprived Iraq of the ability to make such weapons". He agrees with expert estimations that Iraq never had the ability to build nuclear weapons. "For chemical weapons to make sense, you have to have a lot of them," he asserted.
"Due to sanctions and the strict verification procedures [carried out by the UN] it was impossible for Iraq to engage in programmes of any militarily relevant extent."
He added: "Iraq's military capabilities do not constitute a danger to its neighbours, Israel and America.
"I have visited six to eight factories producing precursors for chemical weapons and even precursors need a high level of security. There is an almost total absence of security at al-Qaqa."
He came to Iraq, he said, "to talk to Iraqis and gain first-hand experience of their lives and problems, assess their situation and try to understand their thinking".
He said too few policy-makers take the Iraqi people into consideration when taking decisions on their fate.