Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

5 May 2003

NATO-ACCESSION

• President Bush will meet next week with foreign ministers of seven eastern European nations invited to join NATO. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the May 8 meeting would include the foreign ministers of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. McClellan said Bush would also invite leaders of the U.S. Senate to the meeting to try to push the Senate toward ratifying the expansion of NATO to include the seven invitees. “Their membership in NATO will strengthen the alliance, which remains the central pillar of trans-Atlantic relations,” he said. Bush will meet with NATO Secretary-General Robertson on May 5 at the White House.(Reuters1939 020503 GMT)

IRAQ

• A multinational force plans to deploy in Iraq this month, Poland’s foreign minister said on Saturday. The United States, Britain and Poland are to lead the 10-nation force, which Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz said would arrive by the end of May. “The idea is to have all the countries, ready to engage, there by the end of this month,” he said on the sidelines of a EU foreign ministers meeting in Greece. A senior U.S. official has said Iraq will be divided into three as yet undefined sectors, one patrolled by about 20,000 U.S. soldiers and the other two by contingents under British and Polish command. Ten nations have so far offered troops. The official said the stabilization force would be separate from the 135,000 U.S.-led combat troops still in Iraq.(Reuters 1657 030503 GMT)

ESDP

• EU foreign ministers agreed on Saturday to draft the bloc’s first common European security strategy in a bid to avoid future damaging diplomatic rifts like the Iraq crisis. Greek Foreign Minister Papandreou announced the plan after ministers from 25 current and future member states debated European defense and strained transatlantic relations. “We all agree that, yes, there is a crisis or at least a problem in our transatlantic relationship,” Papandreou said. “We arrived at a very important proposal: that we should set up a European security concept. If we want to have a substantive discussion with the United States, we first and foremost have to agree what our own priorities are,” he told a news conference. The ministers mandated EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to produce a first draft before a summit in Greece in mid-June, as well as proposal for closer European defense integration and on EU cooperation with NATO’s planned rapid reaction force.(Reuters 1331 030503 GMT)

BALKANS

• Albania signed an agreement with the United States on Friday to exempt Americans from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. The deal commits Albania not to hand over U.S. citizens to the newly established tribunal, which is opposed by President Bush on the grounds that it could expose Americans to politically motivated prosecution. The accord was signed by U.S. Secretary Powell during a brief visit to Tirana for talks with Prime Minister Fatos Nano, who tried to balance a desire to please the United States with Albania’s aspirations to join the EU. “What we did today is a further step to strengthening strategic partnership with the United States, but in the meantime a new step towards Europe and Euro-Atlantic standards and institutions,” Nano said. Powell said the agreement “does show the closeness of the relationship that we enjoy, a relationship that will grow ever closer in the months and years ahead”.(Reuters 1305 020503 GMT)

OTHER NEWS

• President Putin and President Bush will discuss possible cooperation in missile defense when they meet later this month, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said in an interview broadcast on Sunday. Spokesman Alexander Yakovenko told NTV television that missile defense would be discussed in the context of the latest U.S.-Russian arms treaty, which is expected to be ratified by the Russian legislature before the celebration at the end of May. The treaty, which Putin and Bush signed in May 2002, calls on both nations to cut their strategic nuclear arsenals by about two-thirds, to 1,700 to 2,200 deployed warheads, by 2012. “It is a very serious issue which, we think, will be a very important channel for further interaction and strategic military partnership between Russia and the United States,” Yakovenko was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. He said that Washington and Moscow could cooperate on so-called theater missile defense, Interfax reported.(AP 041240 May 03 GMT)