Global Policy Forum

By Mark John

The European Union offered on Wednesday to take charge of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Bosnia to prevent its collapse if last-minute negotiations failed to produce an accord over the United States' role.

Negotiators have until midnight on Wednesday New York time to avert a U.S. threat to veto the mission's renewal unless U.S. peacekeepers are given exemption from the jurisdiction of a new global war crimes court.

"We are going to do everything in our power to reach a compromise (with the Americans)," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told the French daily Liberation in an interview.

"But if we don't succeed, we must, I think, take the decision to run the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia," he said, noting the EU was due anyway to assume control in January 2003.

Washington has threatened to veto the renewal of the Bosnia mission if the 15-nation U.N. Security Council fails to grant U.S. peacekeepers immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, which came into force on Monday.

U.S. envoys circulated a draft compromise text in the Security Council late on Tuesday, and hopes of a compromise remained as U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice met officials from Denmark, holder of the EU's rotating presidency.

"It is crucial that the UN peacekeeping operations in Bosnia can continue in the future, and that the international community also in the future will fulfil its obligations," Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said in a statement released in Copenhagen after the talks late on Tuesday in Washington.

"I clearly sensed that this is also the wish of the United States," added Moeller, who was due to meet Secretary of State Colin Powell later on Wednesday.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said on Tuesday the EU was "working on some interim arrangements" to prevent the Bosnia mission's collapse and cited the possibility of it taking over the 1,500-member police training program ahead of schedule.

U.S. PROPOSAL

The United States has threatened to shut down peacekeeping missions one by one unless the Council passes a resolution placing U.S. personnel overseas beyond the court's grasp or adds language to each mission's mandate shielding U.S. peacekeepers.

The U.S. proposal circulated in the Security Council late on Tuesday would give 12 months' immunity for crimes by peacekeepers from any country that had not yet ratified the treaty establishing the war crimes court.

That would give accused peacekeepers ample time to return home to the jurisdiction of their national courts.

After 12 months, the court could pursue a peacekeeper only after a vote in the Security Council, where Washington has veto power along with Britain, France, Russia and China.

Jacques Klein, the American who heads the U.N. mission in Bosnia, said earlier this week that the number of U.S. personnel in the force, at 46, was "very, very small" but warned that it would still be hard for the EU to take full control this year.

"It is coming in an uncomfortable period because we have an election coming up on October 5 where IPTF (UN police) play a key role in terms of monitoring police performance," he told Reuters.

He said that UN police were also directly involved in extensive planning for the July 11 anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces killed up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

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