Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

5 May 2004

AFGHANISTAN

• According to Helsingin Sanomat, May 3, Finnish President Halonen and the government’s committee on security policy decided in a joint meeting Friday that up to 20-30 soldiers or civilian experts could be sent to take part in the reconstruction in Northern Afghanistan. A group of 16-18 soldiers and three civilian experts are to be sent to the Maimana region in the northern part of Afghanistan. They are to join a British-Nordic reconstruction team of 71 people with the task of monitoring the development of the situation there and organizing reconstruction in the region, the newspaper stressed. It noted that the “while the UN expanded its ISAF operation outside Kabul, so far one German-led PRT has operated in Northern Afghanistan.”
  
  
• BBC News quoted Afghan officials saying two Britons and their Afghan interpreter were killed in an attack Tuesday in the Mandol district of the Nuristan region, 200 kilometers east of Kabul. The workers were reportedly helping the UN prepare for landmark national elections due in September. They had already visited two districts as part of the registration process and were killed while surveying a third. The network’s Kabul correspondent said the Interior Ministry was blaming the attacks on militants from either the Taliban or from the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin group. The program observed that the UN recently warned the vote would fail if security did not improve.

NATO

• Boeing has succeeded in signing contract terms for a NATO AWACS contract, which had come into question amid concerns about whether the price was fair and reasonable, reported the Financial Times, May 3. The newspaper quoted a Boeing spokesman saying the renegotiated contract price, agreed at the end of last week, had fallen from $551 million to $524 million. “We went to NATO unilaterally and said, ‘Let’s renegotiate to remove any doubt you are receiving a fair deal,’” the spokesman reportedly added.

BALKANS

• According to AFP, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura called Tuesday on the international community to take “urgent” measures to protect Serbian cultural heritage in Kosovo after Albanian extremists destroyed 29 Serb churches and monasteries during unrest in March. “I will act immediately to mobilize urgent action to save the monuments” endangered in Kosovo, Matsuura reportedly told a news conference at the end of a visit to Serbia. The dispatch adds that a team of UNESCO experts who visited Kosovo following the destruction are expected to report on actions needed to protect sites by the end of May.

OTHER NEWS

• Reuters reports Georgian Defense Minister Gela Bezhuashvili said Wednesday the key Black Sea oil exporting port of Batumi had been mined, but it was not clear who laid the explosives. “It’s a catastrophe—it’s oil, it’s pollution. It could explode. It could be a huge explosion,” Bezhuashvili is quoted saying. The dispatch notes that traders say the port—the capital of the Adzhara region which is currently locked in a tense stand-off with the central government—typically ships as many as 100,000 barrels a day of light Kazakh and Turkmen crude. Earlier, BBC News reported that protests were mounting in the Adzhara region to press local leader Abashidze to resign. According to the broadcast, several thousand people spent all night on the streets of Batumi and on Wednesday, more people were arriving from surrounding areas. The broadcast noted that Georgian President Saakashvili on Sunday gave Abashidze a 10-day ultimatum to disarm his militia and to comply with the Georgian constitution. He offered Abashidze safe passage if he resigned but warned that any use of force would be met by an “appropriate response.” Saakashvili has been at odds with Abashidze since he swept to power in Georgia last year vowing to end corruption and remove figures like the Adzharian leader, the program stressed. It remarked that the United States is backing the construction of a multi-billion dollar pipeline to transport Caspian Sea oil through the volatile region to the international market.