Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

6 May 2003

IRAQ

• NATO has no position yet on whether it will have a role in post-war Iraq and the issue is unlikely to be decided until the situation becomes clearer, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said on Monday in Brussels. “There is no NATO position in relation to operations in Iraq,” Lord Robertson told reporters after a closed-door conference on Ukraine’s relationship with the alliance. “A number of foreign ministers expressed a view that perhaps NATO might find a role in Iraq once the situation became clearer,” Lord Robertson said. “I have no doubt that in due course when the situation does become clearer, then we will discuss it again,” he added. Gen. Yevhen Marchuk, secretary of the national security and defense council of Ukraine, said his country would take its cue from NATO when it came to a role in Iraq. “We will answer that question once NATO has defined its stance on this issue,” Gen. Marchuk said through a translator. (Reuters 060128 GMT May 03)
  
  
• The United Nations nuclear watchdog agency said on Monday it had asked the United States to let it send a mission to Iraq to investigate reports of widespread looting at the country’s nuclear facilities. The spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency said IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei had written to the United States with a request to send a mission to Iraq...to investigate the state of the facilities there. She added that the letter was dated April 29, nearly a week ago. The mission ElBaradei wants to send to Iraq would be separate from the teams who hunted for signs Baghdad renewed its ambitious alleged atomic weapons programme. “I don’t think the international community would be satisfied as long as we, the UN weapons inspectors, do not go there and examine the discoveries,” ElBaradei said on Monday in an interview with the German broadcaster ZDF. “We have years of experience, the mandate of the UN and the credibility.” (Reuters 051856 GMT May 03)

BALKANS

• The Defense Ministry said Monday it will oversee the military’s central command for the first time in decades in an attempt to shift the republic’s armed forces to civilian control. Defense Minister Boris Tadic said the change - subject to approval by the country’s Supreme Defense Council - would “serve as the precondition for further reforms.” Tadic also announced further army reforms aimed at getting Serbia and Montenegro ready to join NATO’s Partnership For Peace program. “Without the international community, we cannot reform our military,” he added. (AP 051532 May 03)

OTHER NEWS

• The al-Qaida terror network remains a serious threat, with sleeper cells and agents “ready to act” and bases apparently relocated outside of Afghanistan, the world’s top justice and interior ministers said in Paris. In a grim assessment, ministers from the Group of Eight nations said Monday that terrorism is still “a pervasive and global threat” and warned that terrorists could use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in attacks. The ministers pledged to strengthen cooperation between police forces and intelligence services to thwart terrorist attacks, and approved measures to combat the financing of crime and terrorism. “In spite of the elimination of most of its bases in Afghanistan, it seems that other camps have been reactivated in other areas,” said the statement. It gave no details. But French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said al-Qaida appears to have moved bases to the former Soviet republic of Georgia and Russia’s restive Chechyna region. (AP 060127 May 03)
  
  
• The United States is trying to persuade Russia to acknowledge Iran is pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program and hopes for Moscow’s support when the UN nuclear watchdog discusses Tehran’s alleged violations of the nonproliferation regime next month, a top U.S. diplomat said Monday in Moscow. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said he had discussed Washington’s longtime concerns over the Iranian nuclear program with Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev, referring specifically to the findings of a recent visit to Iran by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei. Those included a cascade of centrifuges that could be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, and other nuclear activities Tehran had started over the past several years and never disclosed to the IAEA, Bolton added. (AP 052115 May 03)
  
  
• The U.S. Air Force will hold periodic training exercises with Gulf nations’ air forces, even should most combat aircraft and crews be withdrawn from bases they have used there for more than a dozen years, the Air Force’s top general said Monday in Washington. Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, also hinted in an Associated Press interview that air patrols over the United States, which were ratcheted up shortly before the Iraq war in March, might be scaled back. (AP 051955 May 03)