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Declaration analysis 'will take time'
From Rebecca MacKinnon
TOKYO (CNN) -- The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Chief has called for patience from the international community as the dissection of Iraq's declaration begins. "It is going to take some time," Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters as he arrived in Tokyo. "It is not an issue which we are going to decide in a day or two. "I hope the international community will bear with us, give is time to do a proper job." The IAEA expects to be able to provide a preliminary analysis of the document to the Security Council within the next ten days, a statement from the agency said, with a fuller assessment to be provided when it reports to the U.N. Security Council at the end of January. The document arrived in at U.N. headquarters in New York Sunday evening. It marked the end of a trip that started Saturday in Baghdad, where Iraqi government officials gave the 11,807 page document to the U.N. weapons inspectors a day ahead of a deadline imposed by Resolution 1441. In addition, they handed over 12 CD-ROMs containing 529 megabytes of information. The material was then sent to a U.N. staging ground in Cyprus, from there to Frankfurt, Germany, and finally on a Lufthansa flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, where the bags were taken in a motorcade to the United Nations. Separately, the document's nuclear-related material was sent to the IAEA in Vienna. ElBaradei said that portion of the document comes in seven volumes and is 2,400 pages long. The first six volumes are in English and cover the history of the Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The seventh volume covers the program from 1991 to the present, is 300 pages long and is written in Arabic, which must be translated. Resolution 1441 required Iraq to provide "a currently accurate, full, and complete declaration of all aspects of its programs to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and other delivery systems ... as well as all other chemical, biological, and nuclear programs, including any which it claims are for purposes not related to weapon production or material". In calling for international patience, ElBaradei said, as long as Iraq continues to cooperate, the inspection process must be given time to work, noting the IAEA had essentially neutralized Iraq's nuclear weapons by the time inspectors left in 1998. "We have been out for 4 years. So even if it takes us a year to come to a conclusion that should be looked at in that perspective," he said. Inspections resumed November 27 after the hiatus. "An inspection takes time. You know that an inspection is not just something you flip a coin and say, 'all right, they are in compliance or they're not in compliance,'" ElBaradei said. "As I said we have been out for 4 years. We know that our conclusions are very crucial to decisions which can involve war and peace." In words directed at Baghdad, ElBaradei said Iraq should welcome the inspections "as an opportunity to come clean and prove to the world that they have no weapons of mass destruction. "This is, this is the way for them to rejoin the international community as full-fledge members."
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