Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

28 June 2004

NATO

• NATO defence ministers postponed a decision on Sunday to set new targets to ensure their armed forces can deploy and sustain themselves on far-flung missions. Ministers from the 26 allied nations were due to set the goal of having 40 percent of their armies ready for such missions, which have become the focus of NATO’s planning since the Sept. 11 attacks. However, officials said they put off a decision on the target, leaving it for EU leaders who hold a summit on Monday and Tuesday. (AP 271835 Jun 04)
  
  
• British Prime Minister Blair said on Monday that NATO’s top priority was to help stabilise Afghanistan, but that the military alliance also had to expand its international role, notably to Iraq. “It is in all our interests to help Hamid Karzai, the president, to stabilise Afghanistan, counter threats from terrorism and drugs, and prepare for the first democratic elections,” he wrote in an article in the Financial Times. It must respond positively to requests from interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi for help in training Iraq’s security forces, Mr. Blair wrote. “They (the Iraqi government) are not talking about NATO taking control of the multinational force, nor of a large-scale deployment of NATO assets. But they do want to take advantage of NATO’s expertise.” Tony Blair said a radical overhaul of NATO’s military capability initiated at a Prague summit in 2002 was delivering results and needed to be continued. “The rising demand for deployable military forces also means that it makes sense to build up European military capabilities equally available to NATO and the European Union,” he added. (Reuters 280250 GMT Jun 04)
  
  
• U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday proposed that NATO help train the militaries of African nations to improve their capacity to run peacekeeping missions. “Africans have that manpower, they have the capacity to do it, what they need is the training and what they need is the kind of capabilities NATO has,” he said. He added that the training for Africans could be extended to include peacekeeping units from other parts of the world. (AP 271732 Jun 04)

BALKANS

• A reformist, pro-Western politician defeated a nationalist ally of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia’s presidential elections and pledged to take the Balkan republic closer to the European Union and NATO. Democratic Party chief Boris Tadic won 53.5 percent of votes in the Sunday ballot. Tomislav Nikolic of the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party won 45.09 percent in the election. (AP 280040 Jun 04)
  
  
• Bosnia won’t be invited to join NATO’s Partnership for Peace program during the alliance’s summit, which begins Monday, because the country has failed to meet conditions required for membership, the defence minister said. Nikola Radovanovic told state television on Sunday that Bosnia “most surely will not be admitted” into the program even though NATO earlier hinted it might issue an invitation during this week’s summit in Istanbul. Speaking from Istanbul, Mr. Radovanovic said Bosnia would be “left out” because it failed to fulfil requirements such as merging its two armies into a single, multiethnic force. (AP 271844 Jun 04)
  
  
• Bosnian Serb police, under pressure to arrest war crimes suspects before this week’s NATO summit, said further searches on Sunday failed to find any of the fugitives. Special police seeking suspects wanted by the UN tribunal in The Hague blocked roads and raided houses in the western villages of Beraci and Maslovare but did not find genocide suspect Stojan Zupljanin, a spokesman said. On Saturday, police said they failed to capture another suspect, Savo Todovic, during an operation in eastern Bosnia, in an area where Karadzic has been believed to be hiding. (Reuters 271308 GMT Jun 04)

IRAQ

• Iraq’s new government wants to bring back more former members of Saddam Hussein’s security forces to help stabilize the country, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday. She signalled that the U.S. would allow the interim government’s plans to proceed to try to rectify what Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has called Washington’s big mistake in disbanding Saddam’s army. (Reuters 271948 GMT Jun 04)
  
  
• The United States may not have to send more troops to Iraq, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday. “The real task of security is not to flood a country with more and more troops,” Mr. Rumsfeld told BBC Television from Istanbul. He said the U.S. Army was making contingency plans for more troops, should commanders in Iraq request reinforcements. (Reuters 271222 GMT Jun 04)

AFGHANISTAN

• Any Spanish reinforcements to NATO’s peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan would be “very limited,” Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said in an interview published on Sunday. “If the government decides to strengthen the presence in Afghanistan as Eurocorps is requesting it will only be after consulting with parliament and the reinforcement will be limited in troop numbers: very limited,” Mr. Zapatero told La Vanguardia newspaper. Mr. Zapatero also said his government would aim to hold a referendum on the new EU constitution by the end of this year or the beginning of 2005. (Reuters 271101 GMT Jun 04)