NZ Done Playing Soldiers

New Zealand to Pull Troops out of Iraq

By Patrick Goodenough - CNSNews.com Pacific Rim Bureau Chief April 02, 2004 Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - New Zealand's Labor government said Friday it would withdraw the country's small contingent of 60 military engineers from Iraq in September. Prime Minister Helen Clark made the announcement as she met with the visiting leader of the Labor Party in neighboring Australia, Mark Latham, who is at the center of political storm over his position on withdrawing Australian troops from Iraq. Clark said that after pulling out its troops -- which are working with British forces in southeastern Iraq -- New Zealand may investigate other ways of helping Iraq to return to full sovereignty. "With the commitments we have made to the international effort against terrorism and the reconstruction of Iraq, we have tended to take ... decisions which have a time period on them," she said. "But we may then come back and do the same thing again at another point when we have force regeneration." Clark noted that New Zealand had contributed Special Air Services forces to the U.S.-led war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The SAS troops were later withdrawn and then subsequently redeployed there again. At an international donors' conference in Berlin this week, New Zealand said it was extending by another year its commitment to help Afghanistan's reconstruction. "New Zealand is contributing more than 80 million New Zealand dollars [$53.3 million] in military and development support to Afghanistan, a significant sum for a small country of four million people, thousands of kilometers from Afghanistan," Foreign Minister Phil Goff said....