As threatened, Iraq on Monday turned back a U.N. weapons inspection team that included an American. Hours later, the U.N. secretary-general said Iraq accepted his proposal for a three-member team to come to Baghdad to try to defuse the crisis.
Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, said the three would not negotiate whether American arms inspectors will be allowed to stay - a point U.N. officials insist is not negotiable.The team's goal is "to discuss with the Iraqis a firm implementation of the U.N. resolution" permitting the inspectors to determine whether Iraq has destroyed illegal weapons, Annan said.
The team includes Algerian Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan; Emilio Cardenas, Argentina's former U.N. ambassador; and Jan Eliasson, a Swedish foreign ministry official. They were expected to arrive in Baghdad late Tuesday or early Wednesday.
In Washington, White House press secretary Mike McCurry expressed support for Annan's initiative but made clear the United States would not condone negotiations.
"They are not negotiating. They are there to make clear that Saddam Hussein must comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions," McCurry said.
Iraq's refusal to allow American inspectors has deepened the crisis between the United Nations and Iraq, which has accused the Americans on the U.N. teams of being spies and trying to delay the lifting of economic sanctions imposed for its 1990 occupation of Kuwait. A U.S.-led coalition drove Iraq from the emirate in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Maj. Gen. Nils Carlstrom, the Swedish head of the U.N. monitoring office in Baghdad, said Monday that a missile inspection team that included at least one American expert was told by Iraqi officials that inspectors from the United States were no longer allowed to work in Iraq.
After the incident, Carlstrom said, the missile team and two other inspection groups sent out Monday returned to their headquarters at a hotel in the Iraqi capital. It was not clear how many of the seven American inspectors in Baghdad were involved.
Carlstrom said there were "no threats at all, and the only thing was that we were told that the Americans were not allowed, so the inspection was called off."
He added that the inspectors were awaiting further directives from U.N. headquarters in New York.
Reporters were barred from the area around the Canal House Hotel, where the inspectors are headquartered. And, as usual, they were not allowed to accompany the teams that headed out at mid-morning and returned an hour and 15 minutes later.
Iraq's information minister, Humam Abdul Khaliq, told the official Iraqi News Agency the United Nations was welcome to resume its monitoring "and that only the Americans are barred."