Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

22 March 2004

NATO

• NATO Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer on Sunday, during a visit to Hungary, said that the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo should not resort to violence to achieve its political aims. “It is quieter, but violence should absolutely come to a full stop,” he said, adding that KFOR, the international troops under NATO guidance, was “doing everything it can, now reinforced, to protect every single citizen living in Kosovo.” Mr. De Hoop Scheffer reiterated that NATO would consider taking a “more structural” role in Iraq after July 1, if such a request was made by the new, sovereign Iraqi government due to take power then. NATO officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was possible that Mr. De Hoop Scheffer would visit Kosovo in the near future. (AP 212005 Mar 04)

BALKANS

• Thousands of fresh NATO forces took up positions throughout the province, days after every major city here was hit by rioting. A UN police spokesman said the situation was calm Saturday, and the president of Serbia-Montenegro, Svetozar Marovic, said in a statement that NATO’s top commander in Europe, Gen. James L. Jones, had told him that “international forces are in control of the situation in Kosovo.” The commander of NATO forces in southern Europe, Adm. Gregory Johnson, declared that the violence “essentially amounts to ethnic cleansing.” Unable to provide a secure environment, NATO gathered endangered groups of Serbs and sheltered them on their bases across Kosovo. The peacekeepers created makeshift camps for Serb evacuees, but the threatened minority insisted the time had come to abandon hope of ever establishing a coexistence with the province’s ethnic Albanians. Also Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the recent violence in Kosovo as “ethnic cleansing” and called for protection to be given to its Serbs. NATO showed new resolve in cracking down on lawbreakers. Peacekeepers hunted down and killed a sharpshooter who had fired at French forces from one apartment building inhabited by ethnic Albanians in the Kosovska Mitrovica, said a spokesman for NATO. (AP 201501 Mar 04)

IRAQ

• Spain’s withdrawal from Iraq is all but inevitable, Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said in an interview on Sunday, one day after Spanish protesters sent him a stark message to bring troops home. “A lot would have to change (in Iraq). The return of Spanish troops is a decision that will be difficult to avoid,” Zapatero told El Pais newspaper. “The only viable form of occupation would be for the UN to take political control, for more multinational forces including many Arab countries led by the Arab League to be involved,” he added. European Union’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana said in a separate interview that no country was more committed to the fight against terror than Spain and his native country would stay in Iraq with a UN mandate. “My compatriots will be the last to give up the fight against terrorism,” Mr. Solana told Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper. (Reuters 211108 GMT Mar 04)

TERRORISM

• Al Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri claims that the militant Islamic organisation has bought briefcase nuclear bombs on the central Asian blackmarket, according to bin Laden’s biographer. Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir has told an Australian Broadcasting Corporation television programme, to be aired on Monday night, that when he interviewed Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahri in 2001 he asked whether al Qaeda had nuclear weapons. Mir said al-Zawahri laughed and said: “Mr Mir, if you have US$30 million, go to the black market in central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist and a lot of dozens of smart briefcase bombs are available.” “They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other central Asian states and they negotiated and we purchased some suitcase bombs,” Mir quoted al-Zawarhi on the ABC programme “Enough Rope,” recorded last Monday from Islamabad. Security experts say it is highly unlikely that bin Laden and his al Qaeda network have got anywhere close to acquiring nuclear weapon technology, but they do not rule it out. (Reuters 220252 GMT Mar 04)