More UN News

Names of the victims of the UN attacks in Kosovo have been released, but few additional details have followed.

Long Island Newsday:

Lynn Williams, a former Rikers Island guard from Elmont, was identified Monday as one of the two U.S. correction officers shot to death in Kosovo on Saturday.

Williams' mother said Monday night that she had been happy in her new job working in eastern Europe for a United Nations contractor, and had been there for only two weeks.

Williams, 48, retired last year after 20 years as a New York City correction officer. Her new employer was Dyncorp, a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corp., which trains police, correction and judicial personnel for overseas duty.

"I heard from her last Monday. She called and told me, 'It's strange over here. The people don't know what to make of me.' They'd never seen her color," said her mother, Hazel Moultrie. Williams was black.

"She said she was a celebrity over there. She said, 'I'm happy and I'm all right.' And that was Monday," her mother said.

Five days later, Moultrie learned her daughter was dead.

Williams' son, Joseph, 24, of Kansas, and her four sisters and her brother were devastated by the news, she said.

Williams and Kim Bigley, 47, of Paducah, Ky., were shot and killed Saturday by a Jordanian UN police officer. Investigators still don't know what led to the shooting.

And the front page of the Southern Illinoisian:

A former warden of Shawnee Correctional Center was killed and a Vienna resident critically injured Saturday when a Jordanian U.N. police officer opened fire on American correctional officers in Kosovo.

Former warden Kim Bigley, a 47-year-old Paducah resident who lived most of her life in southern and southwestern Illinois, and Gary Weston of Vienna, a retired employee of Shawnee Correctional Center, were among a group of DynCorp International employees who had just completed their first day of job orientation when the Jordanian fired on them as they left a Kosovo prison.

The news stunned family and friends of Bigley and Weston in Vienna, which has just over 1,200 residents. Suddenly the turmoil of a far- distant conflict had hit home.

The two were serving with the United Nations as international police officers in Kosovo.

Mike Dickerson, a DynCorp spokesman, said the group was "attacked without warning and for unknown reasons."

(Sidebar note: DynCorp employees would definitely meet Kos' definition of "mercenaries". Those interested in details of Sean Penn's encounter with and response to some Dyncorp employees in Iraq see this earlier report from Mudville)

The shoot-out occurred in Kosovska Mitrovica, a city in northern Kosovo that has a history of violence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, including riots that broke out a month ago, killing 19 and injuring 900.

The motive of the attack was not clear Monday. Lou Fintor, state department spokesman, said an investigation into the incident was initiated immediately by the U.N. Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo.

"We will not speculate on the motivations of the attack while the investigation is under way," Fintor said. "We will be following the investigation closely."

...

Marilyn Whiteside, whose daughter Nina has been married to Weston for 30 years, said little Monday. Her face and voice were composed as she was leaving her daughter's home a few blocks from her own, but her eyes revealed the strain of the past days.

Whiteside said she had been told not to talk about the incident. But she did say Gary "wanted to be there -- he was doing what he wanted to do" in trying to promote peace in Kosovo.

...

Gary Weston received two gunshot wounds to the head, family members said. He was flown first to Greece for surgery and stabilization before being flown to Macedonia and finally to a U.S. military hospital back in Kosovo.

...

Information on the incident was scarce Monday. But even before official sources confirmed the news about Bigley and Weston, many in the town knew.

At Dolly's Restaurant on the east edge of town, shift manager Diana Taylor was hoping the news wasn't true.

"I hope they all come home safe," she said.

...

At the Veach Short Stop station, friends Jon Simmons, Joe Perry and Wendell Clardy, all of Vienna, and Sandy Johnston of Jonesboro expressed their concern about the families. They said they all had heard "rumors" and hoped they were only that. "We're all just in the dark," Simmons said.

The New York Times provides the AP report of the few additional details available at this time:

Four U.N. police officers from Jordan were stripped of their diplomatic immunity Monday to be questioned in a fellow Jordanian's killing of two American guards in Kosovo.

It wasn't clear why Sgt. Maj. Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali opened fire on a convoy of corrections officers on Saturday. He and the two female American guards were killed in the shootout that followed, and 11 people were wounded.

Ali was a member of a highly trained unit in Jordan and had been decorated for warding off an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Amman, a Jordanian official said.

The four other Jordanian police officers at the prison in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica were detained. Authorities lifted their diplomatic immunity, opening the way for them to be interrogated, officials said.

A delegation of Jordanian police officials arrived Monday in Kosovo to assist with the investigation, which is led by an international prosecutor, officials said.

Eight of the 10 Americans were moved to a U.S. military base in Kosovo for treatment, a U.S. military spokesman said Monday. The other two were treated and released, and an Austrian also wounded was flown home Sunday for treatment.

One American officer remained in critical condition following brain surgery in neighboring Macedonia, U.S. peacekeeping spokesman Staff Sgt. Michael Houk said.

The attack shook the United Nations mission in Kosovo, already in turmoil following violent ethnic clashes last month between ethnic Albanians and Serbs that killed 19 and wounded more than 900 in Kosovska Mitrovica.

``The shooting struck a huge blow at the very idea of peacekeeping,'' said Alex Anderson, the Kosovo project director of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based organization that monitors the Balkans.

An American police officer serving with the U.N. mission in Kosovo told The Associated Press that the shooting was ``clearly an attack against Americans.'' The officer spoke on condition of anonymity.

Officials denied rumors that a quarrel about the war in Iraq had sparked the gunbattle.

...

Jordan's government expressed regret for the shootings, a statement carried by the official Jordanian Petra agency said.

In an apparently unrelated story,

King Abdullah of Jordan dealt a rebuff to President Bush on Monday, abruptly putting off his visit to Washington scheduled for later this week. Jordanian officials said the visit had become impossible in light of Mr. Bush's recent support for Israel's territorial claims in the West Bank.

A statement from Jordan said the king, who was in California on Monday and went home rather than to Washington, would not meet with Mr. Bush this week as planned.

It said the meeting would wait "until discussions and deliberations are concluded with officials in the American administration to clarify the American position on the peace process and the final situation in the Palestinian territories, especially in light of the latest statements by officials in the American administration."

A Jordanian official said the statement, in deliberately cool tones, was meant to send a message of displeasure.

Perhaps Sgt. Maj. Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali meant only to send a message of displeasure too?

Meanwhile, back at the headquarters building:

NEW YORK — Russia dropped its opposition yesterday to a U.N. resolution endorsing an investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq, clearing the way for former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to take charge of the inquiry.

U.S. lawmakers have said the U.N.-run program allowed billions of dollars in illegal oil revenue to flow to Saddam Hussein. Critics have said Saddam for years manipulated the program through illegal surcharges, kickbacks and illegal oil shipments.

With the exception of Russia, Security Council members had been prepared to endorse an inquiry into accusations of corruption in the U.N. humanitarian program and to call for countries and companies to cooperate.

"There will be a resolution," Russia's deputy U.N. ambassador, Gennady Gatilov, said, dropping his objection and adding that Security Council experts were working on a text.

Russian companies will undoubtedly come under scrutiny in any investigation because they were major buyers of Iraqi oil and suppliers of humanitarian goods to the program, which allowed Saddam's regime to sell oil and use the money to buy humanitarian goods and pay reparations to victims of the 1991 Gulf war.

...

Mr. Gatilov said Friday that Russia believed a council statement on March 31 pledging cooperation with the inquiry was sufficient support for the panel. He said Russia didn't want "to look backwards into the history, and to stir up the old issue of the humanitarian program, which is closed."

But the Russians apparently changed their mind after Mr. Annan spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Saturday and after extensive consultations by Germany's U.N. ambassador, Gunter Pleuger, the current council president.

"We are in a good way," Mr. Pleuger told reporters yesterday, saying he hoped to have a draft resolution soon.

...

Under the oil-for-food program, which began in December 1996 and ended in November, the former Iraqi regime could sell unlimited quantities of oil, provided the money went primarily to buy humanitarian goods and pay reparations to victims of the 1991 Gulf war.

Saddam's government decided on the goods it wanted, who should provide them and who could buy Iraqi oil — but a U.N. committee monitored the contracts.

The complaints of corruption surfaced last January in the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada. It included a list of about 270 former government officials, activists and journalists from more than 46 countries suspected of profiting from Iraqi oil sales that were part of the U.N. program.

And (or "but")

Pakistan, Brazil, Germany and other Security Council members are working to scale back a U.S. initiative meant to halt the spread of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to terrorist groups, on grounds the proposals could subject governments to sanctions and weaken the international system of disarmament treaties.

Representatives from the governments say they support Washington's goal of outlawing the transfer of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and renegade arms dealers. But they maintain that a U.S.-sponsored resolution under negotiation in the 15-nation council would impose new legal obligations on all members of the United Nations without their consent.

The diplomatic standoff shows the difficulty in forging new agreements -- even among friendly nations -- aimed at halting the illegal spread of the world's deadliest weapons. It is also a fresh setback for President Bush, who urged the Security Council in a September 2003 address to criminalize the transfer of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.