Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

08 December 2003

ESDP

• Ireland led calls on Friday to water down plans for a compulsory mutual-defence policy in an enlarged European Union because of its long tradition of military neutrality. Foreign Affairs Minister Brian Cowen argued nations within the 15-nation bloc, which will welcome 10 mainly ex-communist states next May, should not be obliged to come to each other’s aid in the event of an attack on one of them. “We fully respect those partners who are committed to automatic mutual defence arrangements,” he said in a statement. “Equally, we would hope that partners respect the different security policy traditions of Ireland, Finland, Sweden and Austria which makes it impossible for us to accept the Presidency proposal as currently drafted,” he added. Ireland is set to take over the rotating EU presidency in January 2004. (Reuters 051814 GMT Dec 03)
  
  
• Germany said on Friday that the United States seemed to be coming around to plans for closer EU defence cooperation after proposals were pared back to address U.S. concerns that they could undermine NATO. “We believe that now we have reached a level of understanding where all the concerns of our American friends are met,” Foreign Minister Fischer told journalists. “Our Canadian and American friends understood that this is not directed against NATO but this is a contribution of Europe to the common security efforts,” he said. He added that new security threats could only be overcome if the EU and the United States worked together within NATO. (Reuters 051805 GMT Dec 03)

TERRORISM

• Al Qaeda told the Taliban last month it planned to divert a large number of anti-American fighters from Afghanistan to Iraq and cut by half funding to Afghan fighter groups, Newsweek reported on Sunday. Three representatives of al Qaeda leader bin Laden allegedly met with two emissaries from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar in the Afghan mountains of the Khost province near the Pakistan border in mid-November, the magazine said. Newsweek cited Taliban sources as saying that bin Laden ordered the shift of resources away from Afghanistan to Iraq because he saw it as an opportunity for killing Americans and their allies in Iraq and neighbouring countries such as Turkey. (Reuters 072032 GMT Dec 03)

BALKANS

• The United Nations and NATO have done little to suppress terrorism and organized crime in Kosovo in the more than four years they have run the Serbian province, Serbia’s prime minister claimed on Saturday. Zoran Zivkovic, speaking at a conference on fighting organized crime and terrorism in the Balkans, claimed security in Kosovo had not improved as expected. Zivkovic argued that in the years following Milosevic’s ouster in 2000, “Belgrade has become the safest city in the Balkans ... while Kosovo has a high level of crime and terrorism.” He said NATO and the United Nations had successfully suppressed terrorism and organized crime in neighbouring Bosnia, adding, however, that “in Kosovo, there is no desire or will to prevent crime and terrorism.” He was referring to protracted violence in the province where a dwindling Serb community is targeted by ethnic Albanian militants. Serbian leaders also accuse the militants of being involved in drug and arms trafficking. “There must not be a distinction between ‘justified’ terrorism and ‘unjustified’ terrorism,” he added, urging international officials in Kosovo to confront the threats. He also offered Serbian authorities’ assistance to any efforts to stem violence and crime in Kosovo. (AP 061557 Dec 03)
  
  
• A top official protested Sunday against UN-proposed guidelines for the future of the Kosovo province. Deputy Prime Minister Covic complained about the UN draft outlining democracy, human and minority rights standards that need to be achieved in the province before its final status can be considered. “Our suggestions have not been considered seriously,” Nebojsa Covic said, expressing fear that the document, to be presented at a coming EU foreign ministers’ summit in Brussels, might contribute to Kosovo’ full secession from Serbia-Montenegro. He did not specify why he thought the document could aid ethnic Albanian aspirations of an independent Kosovo. (AP 071614 Dec 03)

IRAQ

• Defence Secretary Rumsfeld said he wants senior commanders in Iraq to consider whether the Pentagon underestimated how many U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces would be needed before a sovereign Iraqi government can take over next summer. Donald Rumsfeld, who spent Saturday in Iraq, said he alone has raised doubts about whether the current goal of about 220,000 Iraqi security forces would be adequate, but he asked commanders to review their estimates. (AP 071713 Dec 03)
  
  
• Iraqi Kurds tried to reassure potential foreign investors on Sunday that they were committed to a federal country and had given up on plans for independence. “Our problems can only be solved within the context of Iraq, living with our Arab brothers in other parts of Iraq,” said Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan regional government. Douglas Mellor, head of the Kurdistan Development Corporation which is trying to promote the region said the Kurds wanted to attract investment by companies that could use the area as a springboard to move into the rest of Iraq. He said the Kurds would offer a central government rights to resources under the ground if it agreed that profits be shared between the regions equally. (Reuters 072321 GMT Dec 03)

CAUCASUS

• Georgia’s top candidate to replace ousted President Shevardnadze said Sunday that he expected “diversionary groups” to be sent to Georgia’s border with Russia to fuel instability in the Caucasus nation in the run-up to next month’s early presidential election. Mikhail Saakashvili made his comments during a visit to a Georgian border guards’ outpost near Russia’s Ingushetia region, which borders Chechnya. He said in comments broadcast on independent Rustavi-2 television he had information “that the dispatch of diversionary groups to the Georgian-Russian border is being prepared.” (AP 072207 Dec 03)

AFGHANISTAN

• A new cycle of violence, much of it claimed by defiant Taliban insurgents and increasingly targeting civilians, is threatening plans for a national election aimed at cementing Afghanistan’s emergence from anarchy. The challenge of organizing the impoverished country’s first vote in decades was highlighted on Saturday when a bomb, apparently planted by Taliban militants, exploded in a crowded marketplace in Kandahar. President Hamid Karzai and U.S. Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, on a visit here this week, insist the presidential vote planned for June will go ahead. “A delay of more than two months and there would be loss of legitimacy,” a Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity. “But security is the real wild card.” An explosion near the U.S. Embassy on Thursday evening, about two hours after Donald Rumsfeld left the country, underlined that the capital also remains unsafe. (AP 061446 Dec 03)