- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq,
facing the threat of U.S. attack over its alleged weapons of mass destruction,
Monday opened to reporters a facility it says the West suspects of being
an arms site.
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- The tour for the media, part of a campaign by Baghdad
to repudiate U.S. allegations that it is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction,
was the latest in a series conducted over the past weeks.
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- It came as Iraq stepped up a diplomatic drive to avert
threatened U.S. military action, saying it would discuss a conditional
return of United Nations weapons inspectors with U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg Tuesday.
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- The White House dismissed the meeting as pointless. "Iraq
changes positions on whether it will let the inspectors in more often than
(Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein changes bunkers," President Bush's
spokesman, Ari Fleischer, told reporters.
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- Reporters were flown by helicopter to a site at al Qaim,
in Anbar province, 280 miles west of Baghdad, accompanied by Hussam Mohammed
Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, the office used
for liaison with U.N. inspectors.
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- They were shown a uranium extraction plant destroyed
during the 1991 Gulf War. The floor was littered with empty and damaged
barrels and heaps of twisted iron bars and concrete slabs.
- a
- Debris was removed from the plant, built in the 1980s,
under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision, Baghdad says.
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- "This site, as you see, is completely destroyed
and allegations that Iraq has rebuilt this site and it is now working to
extract uranium for a secret nuclear program are absolutely false,"
Amin said. "There is no such activity neither here nor anywhere in
Iraq.
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- "It is impossible to rebuild this site because we
need to import sophisticated equipment and material from abroad, and the
second essential reason is that we have no intention to carry out nuclear
activity," he said.
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- FACILITY DESTROYED
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- Amin said the site was worked from 1984 to 1991 to extract
so-called yellowcake, the raw material of uranium. He said the plant produced
a total of 168 tons of the material.
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- "This quantity was accounted for by the IAEA inspection
teams," he said, in accordance with a safeguard agreement between
Iraq and the IAEA.
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- According to the plant's director Riyadh Aziz al-Hadithi,
the facility was damaged in the Gulf War and U.N. arms inspectors destroyed
what had remained.
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- IAEA teams visited the site six times to verify its destruction.
They also conducted 21 surprise inspections during the period 1994-1998,
Baghdad says.
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- On similar tours last month, Iraqi authorities took Western
reporters to a pesticides plant and a warehouse full of baby milk and sugar
in a bid to repudiate what they said were U.S. reports that the buildings
housed chemical and biological weapons sites.
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- Bush has labeled Iraq part of an "axis of evil"
along with Iran and North Korea and is seeking to topple Saddam Hussein
over his alleged possession of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear
weapons.
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- Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, speaking at
the Earth Summit, said Monday he would meet Annan to discuss the deepening
crisis in relations between Iraq and the United States.
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- Aziz said Baghdad would consider the return of U.N. inspectors,
but only under an overall deal to tackle its disputes with Washington.
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- U.N. arms experts left Iraq in December 1998 ahead of
a U.S.-British bombing campaign to punish Baghdad for its alleged failure
to cooperate with the inspectors.
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- Copyright 2002 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved.
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