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 Osiraq nuclear reactor before its destruction by the Israeli Air Force. Blix and the IAEA never discovered a highly advanced nuclear weapons program being pursued by Iraq since 1971, and Iraq was repeatedly praised by the IAEA for its full cooperation. Blix personally praised the cooperation of the Iraqi government in August 1990, around the same time Iraq had began a crash nuclear weapons program to prepare itself for its Invasion of Kuwait. It was only after the first Gulf War that the full extent of Iraq's nuclear programs, which had greatly increased since the destruction of Osriaq, were known.
During the Iraq disarmament crisis before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Blix's statements that contradicted Bush administration claims about the Iraq WMD program, attracted a great deal of criticism from supporters of the invasion of Iraq. After no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, US and British officials had to deal with numerous accusations that they had "sexed up" CIA reports on Iraqi WMD.
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 his account of the events and inspections before the United States began its invasion. Blix was awarded "Commander of the Legion of Honour" the same year.
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|- style="text-align: center;" | width="30%" |Preceded by:
Sigvard Eklund | width="40%" style="text-align: center;" |Director General of the IAEA
1981-1997 | width="30%" |Succeeded by:
Mohamed ElBaradei
|- style="text-align: center;" | width="30%" |Preceded by:
None | width="40%" style="text-align: center;" |Executive Chairman of the UNMOVIC
2000-2003 | width="30%" |Succeeded by:
Demetrius Perricos
