Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

30 April 2004

IRAQ

• U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Thursday waning support among Americans for the occupation of Iraq would revive once U.S. forces there stamped out a surge of armed resistance. “Obviously when casualties are going up, and April has been a particularly bad month for casualties...this causes people to stop and think and reflect, ‘What are we doing?’ and you can expect this to be reflected in the polls,” he said during a news conference in Copenhagen. He predicted that the U.S. would end the crisis in the Sunni-dominated city of Falluja well before the June 30 transfer to Iraqis of limited self-rule. “That will be over, and we can get on with the process of getting ready for the transition to a sovereign government,” he told CNN in an interview. In turn, Denmark urged the U.S. to listen more to the views of its European allies on Iraq and the Middle East. “There is a feeling that European views are not always taken fully into account,” Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a news conference after talks with Mr. Powell. (Reuters 291628 GMT Apr 04)

KOSOVO

• The parents of three ethnic Albanian boys whose drowning last month sparked violent anti-Serb riots in Kosovo voiced anger on at a UN finding that no crime had been committed. They said their own lawyers would continue investigations and Albanian media denounced the report on the drowning, made public in summary form on Wednesday, as a whitewash. The respected daily Zeri noted that the UN team had not resolved the mystery of why the boys plunged into such a dangerous river. The tabloid Kosovo Sot called it a UN whitewash. (Reuters 291547 GMT Apr 04)
  
  
• The Serbian parliament on Thursday adopted a plan which it says would ensure the safety of minority Serbs living in Kosovo by giving them autonomy in the UN-run province. Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, who has publicly dropped proposals to partition Kosovo, said five years of UN rule and NATO peacekeeping had resulted only in taking majority Albanians closer to their goal of independence and ethnic cleansing. “This plan guarantees the security, survival and return of Serbs to Kosovo,” he said. He recognised that any plan had to be implemented by the international community and did not use the expression “cantonisation,” which the EU has dismissed as code for partition. The plan envisages creation of five non-contiguous Serb regions with their own police, civil protection, judiciary, health and social policy, culture and media. (Reuters 291506 GMT Apr 04)

EU

• Turkey’s aspirations to be the first Muslim nation to join the European Union were shot down in the short term on Thursday when French President Jacques Chirac said Ankara would likely not meet the conditions required for membership for another 10 to 15 years. Turkey must improve its human rights record and reform its judicial system before consideration for candidacy, which could take years, the French leader said. A Turkish Foreign Ministry official, who asked not to be named, said Turkey accepted what President Chirac had to say but was still hoping the EU would decide later this year to open membership talks in 2005. “Negotiations are one thing, and membership is another,” said the official. “President Chirac was speaking about the long term. There’s nothing new about what he said,” he added. (AP 291608 Apr 04)

TERRORISM

• Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5 launched a new Web site on Friday that called on businesses to help the government in its fight against international terrorism. The site lists security threats facing the United Kingdom and provides advice, tips and emergency planning guidelines for businesses and organisations responsible for protecting others. “For the most part details of our operations must and should remain secret,” MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller said in a statement published on the site http://www.mi5.gov.uk. “But stopping terrorists is only one part of our collective defences against terrorism.” (Reuters 300350 GMT Apr 04)