Hans Blix
Hans Blix
Hans Martin Blix; born 28 June 1928) is a Swedish diplomat and politician for the Liberal People's Party. He was Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairsand later became the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As such, Blix was the first Western representative to inspect the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union on site, and led the agency response to them. Blix was also the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from March...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionDiplomat
Date of Birth28 June 1928
CountrySweden
The Iraqis have been putting themselves in a position to rejuvenate their weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.
We know exactly who is going to be there, and the advance team that I am going to lead,
would seem to have only limited practical relevance in the current situation.
Now we are curious, we are the most curious of all to know, are the Americans and Brits and others going to find some weapons of mass destruction?
Many issues have been clarified, and we will continue tomorrow, ... By the end of tomorrow, when we are finished, I hope that we can say a little more than we have done today.
There are very many of these missiles and a lot of items that pertain to them, which we had enumerated in our letter. It is a very significant piece of real disarmament.
is a disarmament resolution and not an inspection resolution.
Our inspectors had been there, and they had taken a lot of samples, and there was no trace of any chemicals or biological things, ... And the trucks that we had seen were water trucks.
Our role is not to humiliate the Iraqis.
We had hoped that it would clarify a lot of issues that remained open since 1998. It did give information about peaceful programs concerning biology and chemistry, but it did not really shed any new evidence from the chemical weapons and biological weapons program.
What we have said we need all the time is the presentation of more evidence -- that they have not been taking the questions seriously which were posed in the report with which they are familiar, and we would like to have responses to those questions,
The patience that they require for themselves now was not anything that they wanted to give to us,
We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks,
We have not seen a serious effort on the Iraqi side ... or evidence that would clear up the question marks.