THE UN: Nuclear inspectors are to travel to Libya, perhaps as early as the weekend, to begin dismantling Col Muammar Gadafy's covert nuclear bomb project.
After Libya's promise last week to renounce weapons of mass destruction, Dr Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said yesterday that he would leave for Libya within days, escorted by inspectors, to start a long-term regime of verifying the African country's nuclear programmes.
"Libya has asked the IAEA to ensure through verification its decision to eliminate any nuclear-weapon related activities," the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog said.
In a breakthrough meeting in Vienna at the weekend after the Anglo-US announcement of a deal with Col Gadafy, a senior Libyan official, Matooq Mohammed Matooq, admitted that Tripoli had been engaged in a clandestine nuclear bomb project for more than a decade. Libya has now agreed to let UN nuclear experts conduct snap inspections of its sites.
The unusual step of disclosing a secret bomb programme, publicly renouncing it, and inviting international experts to monitor and verify its dismantling has few precedents. In 1989 the apartheid regime in South Africa decided to scrap its nuclear arms programme and the IAEA oversaw the final elimination of Pretoria's nuclear weapons facilities in 1993.
After months of crisis and a game of cat-and-mouse, Iran last week also signed up for snap inspections of its contentious nuclear programme. Tehran's 18-year project for uranium enrichment is much more advanced than Libya's, but while Tripoli has admitted that its efforts were aimed at building a nuclear bomb, Iran insists its nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.
Dr ElBaradei is also likely to use the Libya breakthrough to step up a campaign aimed at Israel, calling for a nuclear-free Middle East.
"I see a lot of frustration in the Middle East due to Israel's sitting on nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons capability, while others in the Middle East are committed to the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty]," he told an Israeli newspaper last week.
Libyan Prime Minister Shokri Ghanem urged Israel to follow Libya's lead.
He admitted Libya had in the past armed foreign guerrillas. "We have supported at certain times what we call freedom fighters," he said. "We are against terrorism."
The Libyans have admitted to the IAEA that they have been secretly importing raw uranium, sophisticated equipment for converting it into the gas required to spin through centrifuges to enrich the uranium to weapons-grade material, and cascades that form part of the centrifuge facility. "A considerable amount of importing went on," said Mark Gvozdecky, the IAEA spokesman. "Many things should have been declared. We don't know where it all came from."
The Libyans told the IAEA that the uranium enrichment plant had already been dismantled, and that at no stage in the past decade was enriched uranium produced.
Libya was unusually straightforward when challenged about weapons of mass destruction, a senior British official involved in the talks, which began in March this year, has said. The candour from the Gadafy regime convinced negotiators the problem could be solved by backroom diplomacy, rather than through high-profile pressure.
"Throughout the process they did not mislead us. When they had difficulties, they said when they had them and what they were. We formed a view we could deal with them," said the official.
The importance Libya attaches to the inspection issue became clear when Algeria said yesterday an Arab Maghreb Union summit due this week had been postponed at Libya's request, partly because Tripoli was preoccupied with talks with Western governments. Libya is due to take over the AMU leadership.
Libya's surprise moves could prompt the lifting of US sanctions and the return of US oil companies. - (Guardian Service, Reuters)