Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

30 July 2004

IRAQ

• Iraq’s national conference, intended to be a little step into democracy, was postponed Thursday for the second time amid allegations of mismanagement and botched local caucuses, writes the Christian Science Monitor. The official in charge of arranging the meeting, Fuad Masoum, reportedly announced the conference would be delayed for two weeks, after facing relentless pressure from Iraqi leaders and the UN to postpone it. The conference, says the paper, required by law to take place in July, is now scheduled to start in Baghdad on August 15. Its main purpose, explains the article, is to choose a 100-member council that will serve as the de facto parliament until January elections. Modeled after Afghanistan’s loya jirga, argues the newspaper, the three day-day conference intended to draw in indigenous Iraqi leaders not represented in Iraq’s new government, had become an exercise in partisan politics. It has deepened already bitter divisions between ethnic and sectarian groups, in particular between exiles and homegrown leaders, observes the daily, and many Iraqis claimed that six political parties, most of them made up of returned exiles, dominated the process and alienated exactly the kind of popular leaders the conference was supposed to attract.

AFGHANISTAN

• AFP, July 29, reported analysts saying the pullout by prominent aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) from Afghanistan due to security concerns underscores the need for NATO to assume a bigger role in restoring public order in the country. Robert Hathaway of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars was quoted saying: “It is a very worrisome development because we are two and a half years after the fall of Kabul and large portions of the country are virtually off limits not simply to Westerners in general but also to humanitarian workers.” The medical charity reportedly announced Wednesday it would pull out of Afghanistan after 24 years, blaming the government for failing to protect aid workers and chase militants who killed five of its staff. Rick Burton, senior adviser for conflict reconstruction in the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, was reported saying NATO is moving “very bureaucratically” at a time when the problem of public safety was evident throughout the country. Meantime, Afghan police sealed off a main road leading to NATO and U.S. military bases in Kabul Thursday saying they had found a bomb on the back of a motorcycle and another in a fruit cart, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, July 29. NATO troops, added the paper, have mounted stepped up patrols with armored vehicles and helicopters.

BALKANS

• According to an AFP report, July 29, the Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said Thursday the Serb minority in troubled Kosovo should boycott forthcoming parliamentary elections in the province. He reportedly said to reporters: “The Serbian government has recommended that Serbs in Kosovo do not take part in the legislative elections,” due to be held on October 23. The recommendation, the prime minister reportedly added, was made after a plan drawn up by Kosovo’s UN mission and the ethnic Albanian government to reform local institution failed to provide adequate protection for Serbs and other minorities. “By non-participation in the elections we will fight for our plan…Serbs have no interest in taking part in the elections,” he was also quoted as saying. The dispatch notes that ahead of previous Kosovo elections in 2002 Mr. Kostunica, who was then federal president, had appealed to Serbs to take part in the vote following an accord with UNMIK to improve the security situation for Serbs. But, commented the prime minister, “Nothing has been done since…and the result was the March 17 violence.”