Storm in a tea cup

Officials dismissed claims that an international inspection team was in Egypt to investigate unreported nuclear activities. Magda El-Ghitany reports

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Egypt has responded to queries raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about its nuclear programme, reassuring the global watchdog organisation that it was honouring the commitments it had made.

The only reason Cairo had failed to report some elements of its "peaceful nuclear" experiments, a senior Egyptian official said on Tuesday, was because it did not perceive it as mandatory to report these experiments, according to its reading of the commitments it had made. "Egypt is always committed to cooperating with the IAEA with full transparency," the official said.

Egypt's nuclear programme has been in the spotlight for several weeks now, after allegations -- all attributed to anonymous "Western diplomats" -- were first brought up in late December 2004, and extensively reported by the Western media. Egypt's possible possession of a physical infrastructure that could be used to promote a military nuclear programme was the crux of the sudden burst of speculation.

Anonymous sources were also quoted as claiming that Abdel-Qadeer Khan, the "nuclear black marketeer" and founder of "Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme", had recently visited Egypt; high-ranking Egyptian officials rejected the claims, saying Khan had not been to Egypt since the 1960s.

Then, in mid-January 2005, the anonymous diplomats spoke of Egypt's failure to inform the IAEA of individual experiments some Egyptian scientists conducted, using uranium, as part of their research. The diplomats also claimed that the IAEA had visited Egyptian laboratories to find evidence of uranium enrichment or plutonium extraction.

According to these reports, most of which appeared in the Western press, a nuclear inspection delegation from the Vienna-based IAEA subsequently made an "unusual" visit to Egypt last week to investigate a reprocessing laboratory that could be used to make plutonium and uranium enrichment substances that can help to fuel atomic weapons.

Egyptian officials met all of these allegations with flat-out denials. "None of this is true," said Abdel-Fatah Helal, deputy director of the Egyptian Atomic Energy Agency. Helal told Al-Ahram Weekly "the [Egyptian] agency's staff was celebrating the Eid, and has been on vacation for the past week." Thus, he said, the IAEA delegation had certainly not been in Egypt because "the agency is the party with which the IAEA delegation deals when it comes to Egypt." He also said the delegation was not "here at present either".

In any case, Helal said, "IAEA inspections are a normal process that is part of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT] Egypt signed 21 years ago." According to Helal, Egypt has not been accused of anything by the IAEA. The country had made a "frank decision not to take part in any nuclear weapons' race. Therefore its laboratories are not structured, in the first place, in a manner in which substances like plutonium can be made or used." Thus any claims about "unreported" Egyptian attempts to extract plutonium or enrich uranium are "totally false and out of place". There is simply "nothing to hide", Helal said, because Egypt limits itself to using its nuclear knowledge in "peaceful activities like generating electricity and medical treatment".

As for IAEA visits, they "normally occur several times a year," and most recently at the start of January. There was "nothing unusual" about it, he said.

Other high-ranking Egyptian officials agreed with Helal. Presidential spokesman Suleiman Awad said, "Egypt's dealings with the IAEA [were marked with] transparency," and that "there are delegations from Vienna visiting Egypt, and Egyptian delegations visiting Vienna."

Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit told reporters on Monday that there are "joint cooperation, signed protocols, and agreements" between Egypt and the IAEA, by which the latter "send teams that ask questions, that are all answered by an appointed Egyptian team". Sometimes, Abul- Gheit said, the IAEA delegations ask questions about "programmes that have not been used for more than 25 years. Egypt's answer would then be that there is no need to talk about anything that has not been used all that time, and will not be used."

The major hype surrounding the allegations, nonetheless, surprised many observers, who said the whole situation seemed odd in light of the current positive state of Egyptian-American relations, and relatively stable Egyptian-Israeli ties. Mohamed Abdel-Salam, a nuclear weapons expert at Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, attributed what he described as an "unjustified, aggressive Western campaign" against Egypt's peaceful nuclear programme to "some Western states' desire" to prevent Mohamed El-Baradei, the Egyptian IAEA director, from serving his third term at the agency's helm.

The easiest way to try to convince other states to rally against El- Baradei, he said, was to "make up a nuclear issue in a hot region like the Middle East; and because the issue will be related to El-Baradei's own country, it will sound as though he had failed to deal with it properly," Abdel-Salam told the Weekly. It would also cast doubts on El-Baradei's ability to deal with other nuclear threats, and "question his capability in dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem."

Abdel-Salam was convinced, however, that the allegations would not stick, because none "were really based on solid grounds. All the information was attributed to anonymous sources, and there was not a single official piece of information that would prove any of the allegations." Instead, Abdel-Salam said, everything was very general, and basically "referred to nothing".

Also in Egypt's favour, he said, was its official stance as a leader in the campaign for a nuclear-free Middle East, "which has not changed" since the 1990s.

In any case, Abdel-Salam said, the allegations never referred to an official Egyptian stance, choosing only to speculate about some Egyptian scientists doing individual experiments based on their research. "There is absolutely nothing illegal in doing academic research, which takes place everywhere," Abdel-Salam said. NPT prohibits the possession of nuclear weapons, but "it does not prohibit scientific research."

Many, it seems, are coming round to the Egyptian point of view. Meir Dagan, the chief of the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, acknowledged on Monday that Egypt "uses its nuclear capabilities for merely civilian purposes".