The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
261.
The report
said that Iraq’s sixth version of an FFCD on its biological
warfare
programme,
produced on 22 June 1996, was “not credible”. “Major sections”
were
“incomplete,
inaccurate or unsubstantiated”, and the lack of documentation was
“difficult
to
accept”.
262.
UNSCOM had
“evidence that chemical warfare agents and munitions
were
produced in
1989” although Iraq had “consistently denied this”; and that it
believed that
“production
of different types of chemical weapons was also carried out in the
first half
of 1990”.
263.
Iraq’s FFCD on
ballistic missiles, submitted on 2 July 1996, had reported
the
previously
undisclosed acquisition of important proscribed missile components,
but
UNSCOM’s
view was that Iraq had “still … not fully accounted for all
proscribed
weapons”.
“… concerns
related to undeclared facilities where equipment … was
evacuated
before
January 1991 and the unilateral destruction conducted secretly by
Iraq in
the summer
of 1991, when, among other items, chemical warheads for Al
Hussein
missiles
and nerve agent VX precursors were allegedly
destroyed.”
265.
The report
concluded by stating that the requirement for full, final and
complete
disclosures
had “not been fully met”. It had “a good understanding” of Iraq’s
programme
“to create
a massive number of tactical chemical weapons” before August 1988.
But
details of
two later phases, to integrate the “programme into Iraq’s chemical
industry and
production
of more stable and storable chemical agents” and “the design and
production
of
strategic chemical weapons”, had not been disclosed. An
understanding of those two
phases was
“absolutely necessary” before UNSCOM could complete its task and
verify
that
nothing remained.
266.
In January
1997, Mr Kofi Annan became the UN
Secretary-General.
267.
In his memoir,
written in 2012, Mr Annan wrote that, in the six years after
the end of
the Gulf
Conflict in 1991, Iraq “became transformed from an example of the
international
community’s
acting lawfully in pursuit of the highest aims of the UN’s founders
to an
albatross
around the organisation’s neck”. The UN mandate had been only to
“reverse
the
invasion of Kuwait, nothing more”. But that:
“… left
Saddam Hussein in power, the predatory leader of a brutal,
tyrannical regime
that
demonstrated little evidence of intending to comply fully with the
demands of the
international
community.”121
121
Annan
K. Interventions:
A Life In War And Peace. Allen Lane,
2012.
70