Statement by Ambassador Sergei Lavrov, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, at the Formal Open Meeting of the Security Council on the Iraq Issue

RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

October 17, 2002

For almost twelve years now, the world community has been trying to find a way for resolving the situation around Iraq. In these years more than 50 Security Council resolutions have been passed, and several acute crises lived through. The still-continuing impasse has its roots not only in the position of the Iraqi side, although we are by no means going to justify Baghdad. With regard to the necessity of the fulfillment by Iraq of all its obligations under the Security Council resolutions much has already been said today and yesterday, and we fully share those evaluations. However in a number of cases the Security Council too proved unable to travel its part of the road as concerns an objective evaluation of the state of affairs and the discharge of its obligations for a comprehensive settlement in the Persian Gulf.

It is well known that in the many years of work in Iraq of the UN Special Commission and IAEA approximately 7 thousand inspections took place. As a result considerable progress was made in shutting down Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The inspections enabled destroying more components of WMDs than there had been destroyed in the course of the military strikes at Iraq in the period of the Gulf war.

It was possible to draw up the material balance in the nuclear sphere, allowing, in the opinion of IAEA, for placing this dossier in the long-term monitoring condition. This conclusion was reconfirmed in the letter from IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei to the President of the Security Council of October 14, 2002, which clearly states that there are no unresolved disarmament questions left in the nuclear sphere. Practically a full picture is available in the missile field as well. The greatest problems remained in the biological field, but on them too, just as on all the other outstanding issues, solutions could have been found. Anyway, the documents of the former UNSCOM evidenced in favor of that possibility.

That, however, was not done. In December 1998 the chief of the former UNSCOM provoked a crisis, and willfully withdrew the inspectors from Iraq without Security Council sanction. His report came in to the Security Council only when US and British warplanes were already delivering military strikes at Iraq. (By the way, the United States leadership then declared that the military strikes had solved the task of eliminating the remnants of Iraq's WMD programs, but appropriate information was not presented to the SC.) The former UNSCOM by its provocative actions completely discredited itself, and simultaneously undermined the prospects of arriving at a comprehensive settlement that had existed until December 1998.

The Security Council found itself confronted with a deep crisis not of its making on the Iraq issue and for a long time was unable to get out of the impasse. It was until a year later that Resolution 1284 was worked out permitting resumption of inspections on a new, truly international basis. However, extremely ambiguous criteria for suspending and lifting the sanctions were set into this resolution that enabled individual SC members at their discretion to maintain the embargo indefinitely. For that reason Russia together with France, China and Malaysia abstained in the vote on Resolution 1284. Our proposals for concretizing the criteria for lifting the sanctions in the context of a comprehensive settlement are well known and remain valid. Neither shall we forget that in Resolution 1382 the Security Council members unanimously expressed their commitment to a comprehensive settlement on the basis of existing Council decisions, including the clarification of Resolution 1284. The Council has yet to meet this its commitment, just as there was implemented the other part of Resolution 1382 - the creation of the Goods Review List.

Russia, as a responsible member of the international community, has done and will continue to do everything necessary to prevent Iraqi WMD programs from being resumed. We are prepared to cooperate in this matter with all states. Up to this point we, just as all the unbiased observers, have seen no convincing evidences of the existence of WMDs in Iraq or programs for their development (just as, by the way, we have seen no facts whatsoever to permit considering the Iraqi situation in the context of the struggle against terrorism).

Now, the only way of removing any doubts is by sending international inspectors to Iraq without delay. There are neither legal nor technical obstacles to that at present. As a result of the intensive efforts by a whole array of countries, including Russia, as well as by the UN Secretary General and the leaders of UNMOVIC and IAEA Baghdad has given consent not only to the return of UN inspectors without any conditions, but also to the enhanced, effective parameters for the conduct of inspections, as formulated by UNMOVIC and IAEA. Thus, everything is now in place for control over the non-resumption of Iraq's proscribed military programs and, accordingly, for a politico-diplomatic resolution of the crisis. We see no reasons to delay the deployment of UNMOVIC and IAEA structures in Iraq.

No new decisions, either formally or legally, are needed by the Security Council for the start of inspections. That was clearly affirmed by Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei. They do not need new decisions but clarity: Whether all of the Security Council members support the earliest possible start of inspectors' work in Iraq. If a striving prevails in the Council to additionally support UNMOVIC and IAEA in the interest of effectively carrying out the existing resolutions, we will be prepared to consider appropriate proposals, proceeding from, among other things, the special importance of ensuring the unity of the Security Council. We are strongly in favor of collective steps by the world community. Unilateral actions do not help efforts at settlement, as we have been seeing from the example of the unilaterally declared so-called no-fly zones.

In parallel it is necessary to continue to seek Iraqi compliance with all the other, apart from disarmament, demands of the Security Council. In the first place we're talking about the necessity of ascertaining the fate of missing persons and expeditiously completing the process of the return of Kuwaiti archives and property.

Following media reports one may get the impression that the most important thing now is to come to an agreement on whether one resolution will be adopted or two. Actually the question how many resolutions are needed and whether they are needed at all diverts the attention from the substance of the problem. And its substance is in the following: If we are all sincerely interested in the non-resumption of Iraqi WMD programs, so what's the holdup? The inspectors can leave tomorrow, if you like, and Iraq knows that it is obligated to fully and irreproachably cooperate with them. If, however, the question is not the deployment of inspections, but an attempt to provide through the SC a legal basis for the use of force and even a change of the regime of a Member State of the UN (and this aim has continually been publicly affirmed by certain officials), we simply do not see how the Security Council can give its consent to that. So, I repeat, the essence of the matter is by no means the number of resolutions. The Charter authority of the Security Council allows it at any moment to adopt a decision on any measures which may be required to eliminate real threats.

The most important thing now is to achieve a comprehensive settlement by politico-diplomatic methods with the central role of the Security Council and strict compliance with Council resolutions and the rules of international law. In this we see a common platform for work in the UN on Iraq and are prepared on this platform to cooperate with the other members of the Security Council. This is precisely what the overwhelming majority of the international community has appealed to us for in the course of the current debate. We are convinced that the members of the SC cannot ignore this appeal.