Hans Blix

Hans Blix (June 28, 1928) is a Swedish diplomat and politician with an extensive career in international organizations.

Titles obtained

In 1959 he received a doctor of law degree from Stockholm University and in 1960 he was appointed assistant professor of international law.

He has received an honorary doctorate from Moscow State University (1987), and the Henry de Wolf Smyth Prize (Washington, 1988).

Positions held

He was born in Uppsala, Sweden. Although sympathetic to the Social Democratic Party, Hans Blix was Foreign Minister in the government formed by the liberal Ola Ullsten in 1978 and held office in a coalition of bourgeois parties until 1981. From 1981 to 1997 he headed the International Energy Agency. Atomic, responsible among other issues for surveillance aimed at limiting nuclear proliferation.

His greatest achievement was in South Africa, whose government, after the abolition of apartheid, proceeded to unilateral nuclear disarmament. The IAEA inspections were requested by Pretoria after signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1991. Two years later, the South African government announced that six nuclear bombs and a seventh in the making had been destroyed. IAEA inspectors easily verified this destruction, but the chemical and biological weapons remained outside the scrutiny of the United Nations and shrouded in the greatest secrecy.

In 2004, Blix published the book Disarming Iraq, where he recounts his perception of events, placing great emphasis on the state of Iraq before the US invasion.

Chernobyl accident

Hans Blix worked alongside Mikhail Gorbachev during the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, giving his damage assessment after being alerted by unusual airborne radiation readings. He called the Kremlin and reported that a high reading of radioactive gases was coming from the USSR. He assisted in the completion of the plant's sarcophagus, and gave reports and support to Glasnost in order to inform the Soviet people about the accident.

Campaign in Iraq

His public notoriety increased when he was appointed by Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, to direct the inspection of the disarmament operations imposed by this international organization on Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War. He headed the UNMOVIC Control, Verification and Inspection Commission from January 2000 to June 2003. In 2002, the commission began searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction whose existence the United States had claimed to have demonstrated without providing any significant evidence or evidence.. The inspectors returned to Iraq at the end of 2002 after being withdrawn in 1998. A few months later Blix's report to the Security Council recommended the continuation of the inspections, which so far had found no weapons of mass destruction, but these they were interrupted by the invasion in March 2003. The weapons did not turn up, but the US administration did its best to discredit Blix and excuse its misjudgment as inevitable.

Blix described the difference between South Africa and Iraq thus:

Unlike South Africa, which decided to eliminate its nuclear weaponry and welcomed the inspections to create confidence in its willingness to disarm, Iraq seems to have not yet reached a genuine acceptance of the need for disarmament, which has been demanded and must realize to achieve the confidence of the world and live in peace.

Hans Blix

Blix has repeatedly assured that in Iraq a mistake is made with the war. He has even gone so far as to ensure that the invasion cut his work, preventing him from demonstrating the total non-existence of Hussein's weapons.On the other hand, he has also affirmed that the war has only strengthened Al Qaeda.