Wed, Aug 20, 2003 page9

• Weapons of mass destruction are beyond control

  Although an agency was created to enforce a 1997 treaty banning such horrific tools of war, its operations are severely hampered by a lack of funds and international cooperation

  • AP
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  When they head out around the world with their cases of high-tech gear, their chemical suits, their global authority, the men and women from The Hague represent an agency viewed as a model for 21st century disarmament. But it's a flawed model whose problems run deep.

  The young agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), enforces the 1997 treaty banning a tool of war that horrified the world in the last century. The birth of the OPCW spelled progress at a time when arms control was making little progress elsewhere.

  

  ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA

  But OPCW finances are weak. Its inspectors are checking less than 1 percent of potentially suspect chemical plants. The treaty timetable for Russia and America to destroy huge stocks of mustard gas, sarin and other deadly agents is slipping further into the future year by year.

  Even the UN experts' ability to pull surprise inspections is stalemated, by order of the US Senate. And the gear they tote is also compromised: The spectrometers -- chemical detectors -- are "blinded," intentionally limited in what they can detect.

  The organization's former director-general, Jose Bustani of Brazil, complained it was hobbled by "political agendas" and "unilateralism," mainly from Washington. President George W. Bush's administration accused him of mismanagement and engineered his ouster last year.

  Just last month, a UN tribunal ruled he was wrongfully dismissed on "extremely vague" allegations, and awarded him US$57,000 in compensation.

  The US undersecretary of state responsible maintains the move was necessary. "We were able to get good management installed at the OPCW and the organization is now proceeding ahead with its mission," John Bolton said in an interview in Washington.

  A year into his tenure, new OPCW chief Rogelio Pfirter of Argentina calls his agency "a good example of functionality." But Pfirter acknowledges fundamental weaknesses, too, the same as confronted Bustani. And another Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called OPCW's financial straits "a ticking time bomb" that might "possibly break this organization."

  The Chemical Weapons Convention was the first treaty in history requiring elimination of an entire class of weapons under a timetable and under oversight of international inspectors. The vast majority of nations -- 153 -- are treaty members, but significant gaps exist, especially in the Middle East, where Israel, Egypt and other Arab states have failed to ratify it.

  From their headquarters, a striking, drum-shaped building in this staid European capital, OPCW specialists armed with long lists of controlled compounds keep watch on a world of complex chemicals that destroy skin on contact, blind or choke, paralyze and kill, substances that nations packed into artillery shells, bombs, rockets and land mines for generations.

  More than 200 chemists and other inspectors, of a total OPCW staff of 500, crisscross the globe checking on weapon storage sites and chemical plants to verify that munitions are being destroyed and industrial products are not being diverted. A typical "dual-use" product is thiodiglycol, a chemical usable in felt-tip pen ink or to make mustard, a gas that burns skin, lungs and eyes.

  The treaty set a deadline of 2007 for the US, Russia, India and South Korea -- declared possessors -- to destroy their chemical weapons.

  At nine locations stretching from Johnston Atoll in the Pacific to Edgewood, Maryland, the US Army held 31,280 tons of mustard and the nerve agents sarin and VX. The Army has incinerated or chemically neutralized about one-quarter of the stockpile, in a US$24 billion program slowed by local disputes over safety and other delays.

  Washington may have to ask the OPCW for a deadline extension. But Moscow has encountered much worse problems, eliminating only 1 percent of its stockpile thus far, and has requested a five-year extension to 2012. For one thing, the US Congress, demanding a better accounting of Moscow's program, froze hundreds of millions of aid dollars meant for a giant neutralization plant in southern Russia.

  Overseeing destruction takes up 80 percent of the inspectors' time, and Washington and Moscow are far in arrears reimbursing those costs. On top of that, one-third of the 2003 member assessments due last Jan. 1 are still outstanding, deepening the hole in a budget already considered paltry -- US$77 million this year -- by arms-control specialists.

  "It's impossible to do the trick with that budget," Bustani, now Brazil's ambassador to Britain, said in an interview.

  New director Pfirter, like Bustani a career diplomat, pointed up a worsening problem of balance: An upcoming "bulge" in US and Russian destruction activity will put still more stress on his inspectors, leaving the more than 5,000 declared industrial chemical plants worldwide almost untouched.

  "We're still inspecting too little," Pfirter said. "We're not even at 1 percent at the moment." Inspectors worry especially about small, versatile chemical plants in developing nations that could be quickly converted to military production.

  Aggressive inspection would meet resistance. India and Pakistan, for example, object to talk of inspecting plants other than those making the most dangerous substances.

  Other fundamental defects were built in at the OPCW's birth.

  The US Senate, in ratifying the treaty, decreed that the president could reject an OPCW "challenge," or surprise, inspection on US soil. That defied treaty language and put a chill on any attempt by governments to demand such inspections anywhere. The legislation also claimed to exempt US chemicals from testing in foreign laboratories, an option inspectors consider crucial for independent analysis.

  "These exemptions deprive the inspectors of their two strongest tools. They're treaty-killing provisions," said arms-control scholar Amy Smithson at the Henry Stimson Center in Washington.

  A third tool was "blinded." Not wanting to give inspectors free run of chemical industries, to identify any compound they found, governments insisted their spectrometer software indicate only whether a sample matches one on a limited database of the most dangerous chemicals. Thousands of other harmful, often novel compounds are not detected.

  "That really limited on-site analysis," said a former OPCW verification chief, Ron Manley of Britain.

  In Washington, Undersecretary Bolton said the OPCW's long-term effectiveness "remains to be seen." Of the Senate "exemptions," he said: "I don't think they're an obstacle. Nobody worries about them. I haven't heard it raised."

  One who worries is Patricia Lewis, director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva. "I don't think they" -- the US leadership -- "want to give any credibility to multilateral institutions that do the inspections," she said in an interview.

  It was in Geneva nine months ago, as diplomats grappled with the threat of germ warfare, that the US administration handed international advocates of inspection and verification one of their worst setbacks.
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