Global Policy Forum

Colum Lynch

The United States is seeking assurances from the United Nations that all U.N. personnel serving in a peacekeeping mission in East Timor would be shielded from prosecution by a local court or international tribunal on war crimes charges, according to U.S. and other Western officials.

The move, which is being resisted by leading U.S. allies, is the first concrete effort by the Bush administration to protect American citizens serving in U.N. operations from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, which will convene in July.

The administration renounced its support for the court last week out of concern that the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal might prosecute U.S. soldiers or other Americans serving overseas. It said it will seek agreements around the world barring U.S. citizens from being extradited to the court, which has the support of many of the United States' closest allies, including nearly all NATO members. But the U.S. initiative at the United Nations would go further, extending broad criminal immunity to all international officials serving in the U.N. mission in East Timor. Responsibility for punishing wrongdoing would be left to the alleged offenders' governments.

The United States has no combat troops serving in U.N. missions. U.S. officials acknowledge that there is little risk that American troops would be arrested on war crimes charges in East Timor, which hosts only three unarmed American military monitors and about 80 U.S. police officers. The island nation's vote to secede from Indonesia in 1999 sparked a wave of violence that resulted in the deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force.

U.S. officials said the effort is part of a broader strategy designed to lock in similar exemptions for Americans serving in more than a dozen other U.N. operations around the world. "The ICC is coming into being, this issue will come to a head and people will have to really decide what they believe and what they want to do here," said a senior U.S. official. "While East Timor is the first in line, it's not where the battle lines will be drawn."

Britain and France have, for the moment, persuaded Washington to drop a proposal to insert a clause reflecting the U.S. policy in a resolution extending the mandate of the U.N. mission in East Timor. The resolution is expected to be adopted as early as Friday. The amendment, according to a U.N. source, says that all U.N. personnel in East Timor "would not be transferred to any national jurisdiction in East Timor or any international jurisdiction."

"The Americans have been muttering about this in the corridors, but we've been trying to put them in a box," said one Western diplomat. "Nobody will agree to that because they feel that it would undermine the ICC."

The Bush administration is weighing whether to pursue other options, diplomats said. They include pressing U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to include similar guarantees in the organization's Status of Forces Agreement, which governs its military presence in East Timor. The United States is also considering pressing for a comprehensive Security Council resolution that would ensure that no U.N. personnel serving in a U.N. mission can be arrested on the order of a foreign court.

U.S. officials said they have avoided limiting the exemption to Americans to generate broader support for their policy. They noted that foreign military forces serving with the United Nations have long enjoyed diplomatic immunity from prosecution in the countries where they are deployed.

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