Global Policy Forum

By Mohamad Bazzi

Bowing to pressure from its European allies, the United States agreed Wednesday night to a 12-day extension of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia after threatening a veto unless U.S. soldiers were exempted from the reach of a new global court on war crimes.

The delay gives the Bush administration and other members of the Security Council, especially Britain and France, more time to work out a compromise over Washington's demands for blanket immunity from the International Criminal Court for all American peacekeepers. The court, which is empowered to prosecute gross violations of human rights, came into existence Monday in The Hague, Netherlands.

The Bush administration has been alone in its fight against the court, alienating longtime allies on the Security Council and shattering the sense of international solidarity forged after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Europeans have said they sympathize with U.S. objections to the international court, but they were surprised by the hardening of the Bush administration's position.

After the United States cast a veto Sunday in the Security Council to block a routine six-month extension of the Bosnian missions -- established after a U. S.-brokered peace agreement in 1995 -- European diplomats and other supporters of the court accused the Bush administration of jeopardizing U.N. peacekeeping missions in order to get its way.

U.S. diplomats pulled their veto and agreed late Sunday to a three-day extension of the two forces: a 1,500-member U.N. police training mission and an 18,000-member NATO-led peacekeeping mission.

"This exercise of the veto gives the unfortunate impression that peacekeeping is being held hostage," Canada's U.N. ambassador, Paul Heinbecker, said Wednesday. "In fact, fundamental issues of international law and international relations are in jeopardy."

At the heart of the dispute are fears by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress that American citizens would be subject to politically motivated prosecutions by the court. They argue that foreign countries could use the court to try American soldiers for war crimes, in effect threatening U.S. sovereignty.

Even more broadly, analysts say, the battle being waged by the Bush administration against the court reflects deep U.S. fears about international institutions such as the United Nations and potential international restraints on American powers.

"Rather than having an assault on the court, the Bush administration should become involved in developing this institution, particularly because the U.S. needs international support in its war on terrorism," said Thomas Weiss, a professor and director of the Institute for International Studies at the City University of New York's Graduate Center in Manhattan. "In the long run, this stand is going to damage our own security interests.'

Former President Bill Clinton signed the treaty creating the International Criminal Court, despite expressing reservations about its structure, but the Senate never ratified it. In May, the Bush administration advised the United Nations that the United States no longer considered itself bound by Clinton's signature.

The court is empowered to prosecute war crimes, acts of genocide and other crimes against humanity committed after July 1, but only if the home country of the accused is unwilling or unable to bring the case before a domestic court. Supporters of the court consider it the most important development in international law since the Nazi war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg after World War II.

In an unusually blunt letter Wednesday to Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said no peacekeeper in U.N. history had "been anywhere near the kind of crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court."

"The whole system of United Nations peacekeeping is being put at risk," Annan wrote, adding that the United States also risked discrediting the Security Council by trying to pressure it to revise the international treaty that established the court. Legal experts say there is little precedent for the council altering an international treaty.

European officials say the Bush administration misjudged the depth of their commitment to the court, assuming wrongly that Britain and France would eventually give in to U.S. pressure. The court is genuinely popular in Europe, diplomats say, because it is not controlled by the United States, the sole global superpower.

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