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A city prepares for
war
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
BAGHDAD - On Sunday, Hans Blix, lead UN weapons
inspector, held a press conference at the the city's
Canal Hotel, where he was careful to downplay the
importance of the next scheduled due date for reporting
to headquarters by his UN weapons inspections team in
Iraq. That date, February 14, he said, "is not the end
of the world".
Indeed, a stranger to Baghdad
would not imagine oneself strolling through a potential
ground zero. Shopping centers still remain open until
late at night. The historical Shah Bander coffeeshop is
full of poets, intellectuals and writers debating the
latest developments in Arab literature.
Diplomats, however, were taking no chances; by
Sunday, many had already begun packing to leave, in the
belief that the countdown for the next Gulf war had
already begun. It was not the only sign of imminent war.
This weekend, for the first time, Iraqi
television channels and radio stations began telling the
public to build their reserves, especially of water and
food. All five-star hotels have started taping windows.
Standby generators are being placed in important
commercial and industrial enterprises.
Meanwhile, an inside government source said that
workers of Iraqi Arab Ba'ath Party had been instructed
to coordinate their activities with superiors and remain
vigilant. Sources said that special contingents of
Ba'ath party workers were preparing for any signs of
unrest - particularly in the eastern sections of Baghdad
where about 5,000 members of the Shi'ite minority live,
most of them followers of the Shi'ite dissident Baqar
Al-Hakim. Iraqi authorities have already earmarked this
area as a potential threat.
As a measure of
response, perhaps, various cities throughout Iraq have
been recent scenes of displays of military might and
ideological purity. On February 9, for example, Iraq
celebrated its Revolution Day with a show in Tikrit
(hometown of Saddam Hussein) organized by the Iraqi Arab
Ba'ath Party and featuring about 70,000 members of the
national Al-Quds army. The volunteer soldiers - equipped
with light weapons such as AK-47s, rocket launchers,
anti-aircraft guns and machine guns - marched in a
convention center in front of Iraqi deputy president
Izzat Ibrahim and the local Tikriti party leadership.
"This is just the volunteer strength in Tikrit,"
said an official of the Ministry of Information.
"Otherwise we would have have 7 million workers of
Al-Quds army. The purpose of organizing such a big show
is to send a message to the US that they are going to
attack a completely militant nation and will get a
crushing reply."
The war preparations are taking
place amid a backdrop of intense diplomatic activity.
Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, chief UN nuclear inspector,
claimed to have seen a positive change in Iraq's
attitude towards disarmament after two days of key talks
with Iraqi authorities. ElBaradei said that he was
seeing a "change of heart" from Iraq about compliance
with UN disarmament demands. "We made good progress ...
we are leaving with a sense of cautious optimism," he
said. But ElBaradei added that "Iraqi cooperation in all
areas has to be simultaneous".
Blix earlier said
that he, too, "detected the beginning of a serious
attitude on the part of the Iraqis on substance". His
visit to Baghdad with ElBaradei was the "beginning of
taking those outstanding [disarmament] issues more
seriously ... access [to suspect sites] has been prompt
and practical ... cooperation on the process [of
resolution 1441] has been good". Cooperation on the
substance of the resolution, however, was "less good".
Lieutenant-General Amir al-Saadi, Saddam's
closest weapons advisor, had a mostly similar reply when
he appeared before the press on Sunday. But he was
nevertheless pessimistic about the results. "Perhaps Mr
Blix himself does not know how many more demands he has
to ask from Iraq ... It is not his duty to pursue
scientist to go abroad with their families and give
interviews to UN inspectors. If they say no, they do not
want to go abroad, it becomes their private business."
The press conference was the culmination of a
hectic week for inspectors in Iraq. That day they had
inspected various Iraqi facilities, including the
Al-Rasheed Water Project in Baghdad and the Djerf Al
Naddaf grain-handling facility in Mosul. Earlier in the
week the Iraqi regime had invited foreign journalists to
the Al-Rafah missile-testing facility 90 kilometers
outside Baghdad to convince them that Iraq was not
manufacturing long-range missiles in contravention of UN
arm conventions. The Al-Rafah factory is situated near
the border of Jordan and Syria within a wasteland with
few signs of life except the occasional anti-aircraft
bunker. The Al-Rafah compound comprises two buildings -
each about 15 meters wide and 34 meters long - made of
cement and iron. It was impossible to judge by
observation alone the correctness of Colin Powell's
assessment that the facility was involved in
manufacturing or testing banned weapons.
Ali
Jaseem, the head man at the facility, insisted they were
not. "The first facility was bombed in 1991 by US
planes. It was reconstructed later but was bombed again
in 1998. After that, the new site was selected in the
same compound, which is now under construction," he
said. "Before the site was bombed in 1998, only missile
engines [with ranges of] less than 150 kilometers were
tested at this site. After the bombing, the facility was
destroyed and we only recently started construction of a
new site at the same compound.
"Now Mr Powell is
objecting to a site which is just under construction, a
site which UN inspectors visited on November 27, after
which they filed no objections. The specifications of
the facility are self-evident; this site is not fit to
build extra-long-range missiles."
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