Vienna - Mohamed ElBaradei is retiring Monday as chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency with the Iran nuclear issue unresolved and IAEA inspectors banned from North Korea. But the 67-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate ends his tenure as one of the world's most respected diplomats, who has made the most of his agency's limited powers and managed to retain his independence amid intense political pressures.
As he turned from little-know Egyptian IAEA official to outspoken leader during his 12 years in office, ElBaradei has used his stature to call for a reduction of nuclear arsenals and to talk about how to prevent the spread of such weapons.
He succeeded the Swede Hans Blix in 1997, having climbed the career ladder from studying law in Cairo, through the Egyptian diplomatic service and on to becoming Blix's deputy and head of the IAEA external relations department.
His tendency to "speak truth to power," as he is fond of saying, and to protect the integrity of the IAEA, came into the spotlight shortly before the Iraq war started in 2003.
He told the UN Security Council that his inspectors had found no Iraqi efforts to build a nuclear programme, contradicting US claims that were used as a reason to go to war.
"It gives me no consolation that the agency's findings were subsequently vindicated," he said earlier this month, in his last statement at the UN General Assembly in New York before Yukiya Amano of Japan becomes the next director general.
"He demonstrated he was going to go on the evidence that the IAEA itself could build, and he was very cautious about playing the Bush administration's political game," said Rebecca Johnson, head of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy in London.
Despite pressure from the US and Israel, ElBaradei followed the same policy in the probe of Iran's contentious nuclear programme, an issue that has exposed the IAEA's limited powers.
IAEA inspectors have found out much about the nuclear programme since it was revealed in 2002, but Tehran has refused to answer questions about alleged nuclear-weapons studies, making the most of the IAEA's limited rights to demand access to key documents, sites and officials.
In interviews with the German Press Agency dpa, several experts said that ElBaradei could not be faulted for failing to resolve this nuclear standoff, nor for the fact that his inspectors were twice expelled from North Korea.
"ElBaradei can only be as tough as the member states on the IAEA Board of Governors are," said Daryl Kimball, who heads the Arms Control As
