Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

15 April 2003

IRAQ

• Saudi Arabia will host a meeting of Iraq’s neighbors at foreign minister level on Friday, the Saudi foreign minister said on Monday. Prince Saud al-Faisal said the meeting would attempt to respond to “the current circumstances in Iraq and their developments, which affect the Iraqi people in particular, and have repercussions on the region as a whole.” The prince was speaking to reporters at Riyadh’s airport after his return from a quick trip to Damascus, where he held talks with Syrian President Bashar Assad. The foreign minister did not specify which countries would attend the Friday meeting. (AP 141708 Apr 03)
  
  
• The work of building a new Iraq begins Tuesday with a U.S.-picked gathering of some of the country’s fractious factions to plot the nation’s future as combat wanes. The meeting in the southern Iraqi city of Ur brings together representatives from across the country: Kurds, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as exiles who have lived for years outside Iraq. The moderator will be Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House envoy to Iraq who also played a key role in guiding the formation of a transition government in Afghanistan. (AP 150013 Apr 03)

EU

• The body charting the future of the European Union will unveil proposals next week on the creation of an EU foreign minister, officials said on Monday in Brussels. The draft legislation will seek to combat criticism that the EU speaks with two voices on the world stage - currently European External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten, who sits in the EU’s executive body, and High Representative Javier Solana, who is answerable to EU heads of state. The proposals will be launched at the Convention on the Future of Europe headed by former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing on April 24-25. (Reuters 141712 GMT Apr 03)

BALKANS

• The parliament of Serbia and Montenegro cleared the way on Monday for its nationals to be extradited to the UN war crimes tribunal, removing a source of tension with the international community. The legislature voted to scrap a controversial article that blocked handovers of suspects wanted by the court in The Hague after the law came into force in April 2002. Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic told deputies he expected the UN court to issue up to seven new indictments against nationals of Serbia and Montenegro. But he did not give names. (Reuters 141846 GMT Apr 03)
  
  
• Serbian police said on Monday they had detained a well-known Serb businessman, Momcilo Mandic, accused by the West’s top peace envoy in Bosnia of being a key financier of war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic. Momcilo Mandic, a wartime associate of the former Bosnian Serb leader, was detained on suspicion that he had committed a number of criminal acts, police said in a statement. The statement gave no details and did not mention Karadzic. (Reuters 141748 GMT Apr 03)
  
  
• Gunmen opened fire on a Kosovo Albanian family travelling by car on Monday, killing two people including a prosecution witness in a recent trial against former guerrillas. UN police said they did not know who carried out the attack on a small road near the western town of Pec, nor the motive. One of those killed, Ilir Selimaj, was a witness in a high-profile trial late last year against five members of the now disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army. (Reuters 142039 GMT Apr 03)
  
  
• A shadowy rebel group claimed responsibility Monday for a weekend explosion that damaged a key railway bridge in northern Kosovo linking the province with the rest of Serbia. A unit of the so-called Albanian National Army targeted the bridge early Saturday after the group decided “to cut all links of Albanian territories with Belgrade,” it said in a statement. Two rebels were killed, it added without elaborating. (AP 141110 Apr 03)
  

OTHER NEWS

• Syria on Monday rejected U.S. accusations that it had chemical weapons and was sheltering former Iraqi leaders. The increased U.S. pressure on Syria now that the Iraqi regime is overthrown prompted a warning from Europe. “We need to concentrate on winning the peace, and not on getting into a new confrontation,” German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said as he arrived at an EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg. (AP 141832 Apr 03)