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 country is not a democratic state. Therefore we fear that they might carry a recorder in their pocket or there may be bugs in the walls, and you cannot be absolutely sure that you get a straight testimony.
Now the idea about taking people abroad is that if they come over to Cyprus, which we have in mind, and bring their families and would have the possibility to defect after they would be ready to speak their mind, well I hope so.
I think that we have to do our job well, investigate thoroughly and then describe very honestly what we see to the Security Council. And some of the things might please people there and other things may not please the people.
Look at the Palestinians with the huge, huge percentage of unemployed. What does that breed? Anyone who's unemployed in the world, you feel there's no meaning and there's a risk that you drift over to something desperate. Yes, we have to tackle the social problems as well.
I can imagine that the Iraqis undertake the destruction out of fear. If they had denied it, if they had said no, that certainly would have played into the hands of those that would like to take armed action immediately. I have no illusions in that regard.
The patience that they require for themselves now was not anything that they wanted to give to us,
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,
We want to be serious when we come forward with accusations, as we were when ordering the Iraqis to destroy a very large missile program.
Our role is not to humiliate the Iraqis.
They said they had been surprised themselves ... They were in boxes, never opened -- there were bird droppings on them. But of course they should have been declared and destroyed.
You never get quite down to the bottom of the barrel, but we are much higher than that at the present time. There is quite a lot left in the barrel that could be explained by them. If they have some weapons, if they have some anthrax, they should deliver that.
Denying us access would then be like smoke. It's not finding a smoking gun, but finding the smoke. And that would be a very serious matter. If they deny us access we'll report it to the Security Council,
This does not necessarily mean that such items could not exist. They might. There remain a long list of items unaccounted for, ... But it is not justified to jump to the conclusion that something exists just because it was unaccounted for.
They sort of showered us with letters trying to explain this or that.