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Dear list members,
Rolf Ekéus, the head of Unscom from 1991 - 1997, has now given an English
language interview on the current Iraq crisis to the BBC's Radio 4 Today
programme. The audio file is available at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin//radio4/today/listen/audiosearch.pl?ProgID=1028
107542. Ekéus' clip starts at 3:00 minutes into the file. Prior to that,
Jim Hoagland (Washington Post), Rear Admiral Stephen Baker (retired) and
Senator Biden are interviewed briefly.
This is an incomplete list of the elements of the Ekéus segment:
- Unscom/IAEA effectively cleaned out the country prior to their departure
in 1998
- Iraq's capacity (i.e. engineers, etc.) is still intact
- Iraq would need imports to reconstitute its previous programmes, and we
don't know much about its attempts or successes
- from the outset John Humphreys, the interviewer, pressed Ekéus for a
statement on the appropriateness of an attack on Iraq. Ekéus was not drawn
in this direction, stressing instead the importance of weapons inspections
("you can't bomb the weapons away") and of the restoration of unity of
purpose in the Security Council
- Humphreys also asked Ekéus if he agreed with Scott Ritter's deep
skepticism about Iraq's reconstruction of weapons since 1998. Ekéus was
"not quite sure that Iraq has focussed ... it may have focussed", and
returned to Iraq's existing capacity, which (I think) he felt was likely to
be larger in the biological and chemical areas than in the nuclear given the
'dual use' nature of biochem inputs.
Best,
Colin Rowat
work | Room 406, Department of Economics | The University of Birmingham |
Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK | web.bham.ac.uk/c.rowat | (+44/0) 121 414 3754 |
(+44/0) 121 414 7377 (fax) | c.rowat@bham.ac.uk
personal | (+44/0) 7768 056 984 (mobile) | (+44/0) 7092 378 517 (fax) |
(707) 221 3672 (US fax) | c.rowat@espero.org.uk
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