SECURITY CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS ARRIVE IN MUNICH
RIA Novosti
MUNICH, February 11 (RIA Novosti's Taras Lariokhin) - Participants in the 41st Munich Security Conference will start arriving in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, on Friday. Officially, the forum is opening on Saturday and will last two days. Friday will be wholly devoted to the gathering of participants and their getting acquainted.
Scheduled to attend the conference are UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, German Defense Minister Peter Struck, NATO's Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. The Russian minister will arrive in Munich from Nice (France), where he took part in an informal meeting of NATO defense ministers.
There is a question mark over the attendance of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld. According to German military sources, he is not planning to go to the forum because of a legal action brought against him in Germany. At the end of last year, the American human rights organization, Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a claim against the Pentagon chief in Germany on behalf of four Iraqis. According to the claim, the defendants were kept in the notorious Abu Graib prison in Baghdad, and were subjected to humiliation by American wardens.
The Munich conference, which will be devoted to resolving political conflicts through dialogue, promises to be interesting. One of the main items on the agenda will be the situation in Iraq and North Korea's claim that it possesses nuclear weapons.
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