Military

SHAPE NEWS MORNING UPDATE 26 AUGUST  2002

BALKANS

¨         Serbia's justice minister has asked the United Nations mission running Kosovo to arrest and hand over three Kosovo Albanian ex-guerrillas to Serbia's judicial authorities, Belgrade daily Politika said on Saturday.   Vladan Batic addressed a letter to the UN mission (UNMIK), saying that Hasim Thaci, Agim Ceku and Ramus Haradinaj, who had been commanders of the Kosovo Albanian guerrilla who battled Serb forces in 1998-99, should answer in Belgrade to charges of terrorism and genocide.  The letter said: "Having in mind the above-mentioned persons are in the territory of Kosovo, their arrest and extradition to Serbia's judicial bodies should be carried out by UNMIK and KFOR.  A duty officer for UNMIK in Pristina told Reuters by telephone that according to her knowledge the mission had not received the request but added that she did not expect such an extradition to take place.(Reuters 1344 240802 Aug 02 GMT)

¨         Former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic returns to trial at the Hague on Monday after a four-week break. Proceedings are due to resume at 0700 GMT on Monday.  Prosecutors are to wrap up their case on Kosovo by mid-September.(Reuters 0615 250802 Aug 02 GMT)

¨         The U.S. State Department and prosecutors at the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Milosevic have been unable to agree on how several current and former U.S. officials would testify, officials said on Friday. Former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's special envoy to Yugoslavia, said a key issue is whether his and others' testimony will be in open or closed session during the trial in the Netherlands. War crimes prosecutors want the testimony to be in public to ensure the legitimacy of the trial, but U.S. officials don't want to give up any classified information in open court. In addition, they don't want to allow Milosevic to grandstand for television before former senior officials like Holbrooke and Wesley Clark, the retired general who oversaw some of NATO's military operations in the former Yugoslavia.  "I believe strongly that Milosevic is guilty of war crimes," Holbrooke said. "He started the wars. He was the political leader." Prosecutors will then have until Sept. 13 to wrap up their case of allegations in Kosovo.(AP 231929 Aug 02 GMT)

IRAQ

¨         Chancellor Schroeder on Sunday renewed his opposition to any military strikes against Iraq, saying in a televised debate one month before an election that Germany would not support a U.S.-led military attack.  "The international coalition against terrorism would be severely endangered if we did that, we would see it fall apart," Schroeder said. He said Germany would stand by its allies if they are attacked, but the situation in Iraq was different.  "I think it is wrong to consider military intervention in such a situation, in a region as sensitive as the Middle East," he said. "I don't want to create a false impression of Germany, creating concrete facts that we cannot back out of and that is why I said it, and I stand by my opinion, not with Germany's support," said Schroeder.  Schroeder said the issue was to raise the pressure on Saddam to allow the weapons inspectors in, not oust the Iraqi leader.(Reuters  2236 250802 Aug 02 GMT)

OTHER NEWS

¨         The U.S.-Russian effort that whisked a cache of weapons-grade uranium out of Yugoslavia this week is part of a larger nuclear materials security program given new urgency after the Sept. 11 attacks. Experts worry that terrorists or hostile nations may get their hands on enough uranium or plutonium to build a nuclear bomb from one of hundreds of research reactors around the world. The United States is focusing on 24 reactors in 16 countries that, like the site in Yugoslavia, were built and fueled with help from the former Soviet Union, State Department officials said on Friday. "We want to get at all of them. Some of them are more pernicious than others," said a top State Department official involved in the program, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We have plans to address every single one of these facilities."(AP 240126 Aug 02 GMT)