BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — Caribbean Community (Caricom) states are today expected to issue a second statement on the region’s opposition to the current war in Iraq, a week after the United States warned some members that it would view with disfavour, their attendance at a proposed meeting of the UN General Assembly that would condemn the conflict.

“The statement will reflect the continued commitment of Caricom against military action without UN endorsement,” a senior regional official told the Observer yesterday.

According to the official, a draft of the statement was being finalised by Caricom ambassadors at the United Nations Security Council emergency meeting in New York yesterday and is likely to be made by Jamaica on behalf of the 15-member community.

The two-day Security Council meeting ends today.

Last week, the US State Department incensed some Caricom governments by sending them an urgent diplomatic note emphasising that Washington would view the region’s participation in the proposed meeting as “inimical to its national interest”.

The message was apparently relayed verbally in some cases and in written form in others.

Although Jamaica’s junior foreign minister, Delano Franklyn, confirmed to the Observer that Jamaica had been contacted by the US Embassy here on the matter, his boss, K D Knight, denied knowledge of the correspondence.

US Embassy spokesperson, Orna Blum, was also unable to elaborate on the US position.

“I haven’t seen the document,” she said last week. “I don’t have any information on that.”

Yesterday, an Observer source insisted that the only Caribbean governments that were not approached on the issue by the Americans were those who are not members of the Non-Aligned Movement, at whose summit in Malaysia last month the idea of the General Assembly meeting was raised.

At the time of the summit, the Security Council was at a stalemate over US attempts to gain a resolution authorising war against Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, whom the Americans accuse of hiding weapons of mass destruction.

The proposed General Assembly meeting was to address the implications for peace and security if war was declared without Security Council endorsement.

But the US and its ally, Britain, facing a veto from France on a second resolution authorising the war, declined to go back to the UN and launched military strikes against Iraq last week.

Since then, the war has been raging with disastrous human consequences.

In addition to the diplomatic note sent by the US to some Caricom governments, there has also been reported pressure to get others to make statements that could justify some measure of support for the action taken to disarm Iraq.

While Caricom ambassadors to the UN were finalising the draft of the statement to be made today, Prime Minister Lester Bird of Antigua and Barbuda said his administration “regretted that concerted diplomatic efforts failed to bring about the desired progress” in getting Iraq to comply with UN Resolution 1441 for the “complete and unconditional disarmament of Iraq…”

This, said one Caricom diplomat, was “a surprising variation” of the “spirit” of the original unanimous statement issued last month by the Caricom leaders at a meeting in Trinidad. But he also noted that Bird’s statement did “urge all countries to remain steadfast in their commitment to, and support for the United Nations”.

The original Caricom statement had raised concern over the “legitimacy” of going to war with Iraq without UN sanction.

“We are deeply disturbed,” the community leaders said on February 15, “at the prospect of the use of military force in Iraq without the endorsement of the United Nations Security Council and in the absence of a final conclusion by the UN weapons inspectors that Iraq is in material breach of Security Council Resolution 1441…”