Hans Blix

Hans Blix (born June 28, 1928 in Uppsala in Sweden) is a Swedish politician. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs 1978-1979. Blix was also the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from January 2000 to June 2003, when he was succeeded by Demetrius Perricos. In 2002, the commission began searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.

Blix had previously been the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (1981-1997), and chaired the Swedish Liberal Party's campaign during the 1980 Referendum on nuclear power.

While head of the IAEA in the 1980's, Blix made repeated inspection visits to Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor before its destruction by the Israeli Air Force. Despite the regular inspections of Iraq's research facilities, Blix and the IAEA never discovered a highly advanced nuclear weapons program in Iraq. In fact Iraq was repeatedly praised by the IAEA for its full cooperation with the IAEA. It was only after the first Gulf War that the full extent of Iraq's nuclear programs were known.

In an interview on BBC TV on February 8, 2004, Dr. Blix accused the U.S. and British governments of dramatising the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

In 2004, Blix published a book, Disarming Iraq, where he gives is account of the events and inspections before the United States began its invasion

Quotes

• Blix stated on BBC TV's Breakfast With Frost (February 8, 2004):
  • "It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it."

• Another quote from BBC World
  • "It's sort of puzzling, I think, that you can have 100 per cent certainty about the weapons of mass destruction's existence, and zero certainty about where they are."

• Blix stated in the Guardian (June 11, 2003):
  • "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media."
  • "There are people in [the Bush administration] who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East River ...and other crude things."
  • "It's true that the Iraqis misbehaved and had no credibility, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were in the wrong."

• "In the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly 'found' them." -- Sarcastic reference to the British and American governments' insistence that there are WMD in Iraq after Blix had already concluded and reported there was nothing to be found.

• Hans Blix

See also

• Mohamed ElBaradei
• Iraq disarmament crisis
• Iraq and weapons of mass destruction
• Hans Corell
• Operation Rockingham