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War related news highlights Jordan Times, 3/31/03
Egypt `thanks' Straw for his comments on Israel CAIRO (AFP) — Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher thanked Sunday his British counterpart Jack Straw for saying the West was guilty of hypocrisy by taking action against Iraq and not against Israel. "We thank the British minister for this position and we hope that it will be translated into concrete measures to put an end to these double standards," Maher told reporters. Straw told the BBC last Tuesday that "there is a real concern too that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine." Israel's foreign ministry summoned Thursday British Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles to protest Straw's remarks, branding them "revolting." Kuwait expels Libyan envoy over embassy assault KUWAIT (R) — Kuwait on Sunday ordered Libya's charge d'affaires to leave the Arab Gulf state in protest at what it said was an attack on its embassy in Tripoli during a demonstration a week ago against the Iraq war. Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Khaled Al Jarallah also told Reuters the Libyan mission had been told to reduce the size of its staff to three. A Kuwaiti official said the mission currently had five or six staff. "Because of the assault by Libyan crowds on Kuwait's embassy we asked Charge d'Affaires Ali Ahmad Al Alous to leave the country," Jarallah said. Kuwait, the launchpad of the US and British ground war against Iraq, says its embassy was mobbed on March 23 during a protest in the Libyan capital against the US-led war on Iraq. Thousands have protested across the Middle East and North Africa since the assault on Iraq began. Iraqis selling on coalition food aid, say British soldiers NEAR BASRA (AFP) — British soldiers who have been handing out boxes of food to "hungry" Iraqis near the besieged southern city of Basra accused villagers Sunday of selling on the supplies. Soldiers from Zulu Company, 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, had been doling out rations including tins of tuna, beans, pineapple juice, milk, biscuits and honey to families but they will now change the contents of the packages, according to their commanding officer Major Duncan McSporran. "That was enough to last them for several weeks but it was also worth the equivalent of about three months' wages and we have discovered the food supplies being sold by the villagers for cash," McSporran said. "To avoid them selling the aid we give them we will switch to the staples that they need and which have less market value. "So along with the freshwater they will also get rice and pulses and we know that they already have about a month's supply of those foodstuffs." Coalition efforts to supply locals in southern Iraq with food and water have gathered paced after a British naval ship Sir Galahad docked in the southern port city of Umm Qasr with a million litres of water and hundreds of tonnes of food and medicine. US to use Iraqi opposition soon to get message across in Iraq WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US plans to use Iraqi dissidents soon to urge the Iraqi population to rise up against President Saddam Hussein, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday. "Yes, there are plans to do that, and soon," he said on Fox News when asked whether Iraqi expatriates, members of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and others would be recruited to talk directly to their own people to help foment an uprising. "The process is under way," Rumsfeld added. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph British newspaper published Thursday, Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi, who heads the London-based INC umbrella opposition group, hailed the US and British advance into Iraq. But he stressed that "the (US-led) coalition has not been able to win the confidence of the Iraqi people, who feel completely disempowered." "The only ones who can mobilise the Iraqi people are the opposition, and so far there is little role for us in this war," Chalabi said. Majority of Americans feel Washington was too optimistic over war — poll WASHINGTON (AFP) — A majority of Americans feel their government has been too optimistic in its forecasts about progress in the war against Iraq, according to a new poll released Sunday. Some 55 per cent of respondents to the Time Magazine/CNN poll thought Washington had falsely raised expectations about the conflict, with 29 per cent saying that officials did so not of their own convictions but to increase public support. Overall though, the Harris Interactive poll conducted for Time and CNN makes reassuring reading for US officials. Almost nine out of 10 of those questioned (86 per cent) thought the US military was doing everything it could to avoid killing Iraqi civilians, while nearly half (43 per cent) said more Iraqi casualties would be an acceptable consequence of defeating the country's military. In terms of US casualties, 59 per cent of respondents said they would support the war if it resulted in the death of up to 500 US troops. Support would drop to 47 per cent if the toll rose to 1,000, while 34 per cent would still back the conflict even if it resulted in 5,000 US deaths. Some 83 per cent of those polled think that US forces are treating their Iraqi prisoners of war appropriately, while a similar number (81 per cent) think the Iraqis are not doing so with their US prisoners. Arab heritage body urges UNESCO to save Iraqi culture TUNIS (AFP) — The Arab League's body for education, culture and science (Alecso) on Sunday demanded that the UN's cultural agency take urgent steps to preserve Iraq's rich cultural heritage from destruction in the US-led war. In an open letter to UNESCO head Koichiro Matsuura, the head of Tunis-based Alecso, Mongi Bousnina, voiced concern at the "scale of the damage done to Iraq's cultural heritage since the start of the aggression" on March 20. Bousnina urged the UNESCO chief to "remind the invading powers with the utmost urgency of their duties and obligations to conform to international conventions" on the protection of cultural assets in the event of war. He also urged the UN Security Council and the Council of Europe to "act in order to end this assault on one of the richest and most ancient parts of humanity's cultural heritage." The world's first urban communities flourished in Mesopotamia in the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers some 6,000 years ago. According to UNESCO experts, Iraqi museums and sites under the gravest threat are those in the likely war zones of Ashur, Nineveh, Samarra and Tikrit, as well as Babylon, Ktesiphon, Karbala and Basra to the south. Only the northwestern Hellenistic shrine at Hatra has been declared by UNESCO a site of world cultural heritage.
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