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End Near, Cash Low, Bosnia Mission Head Tells UN - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum End Near, Cash Low,
Reuters
Bosnia Mission Head Tells UN
December 13, 2000
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 13, 2000 -- (Reuters) The UN mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in charge of police and judicial reforms, could wrap up its work in two years but will need more money to do the job right, UN envoy Jacques Klein said on Tuesday. Klein told the Security Council that despite setbacks, the mission had achieved much in the five years since the Dayton peace accords, which marked the end of nearly four years of warfare among Bosnia's Muslim, Serb and Croat communities. "The mission stands at a point where we can see the end in sight, but we do not have the financial resources to get there," Klein, an American, said.
In a withering commentary on Klein's report, however, Netherlands Ambassador Peter van Walsum painted a grimmer picture of the situation in the former Yugoslav republic. "Five years after Dayton, we can only conclude that despite generous foreign aid to the tune of $5 billion, both the political and economic situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina is disconcerting," van Walsum said.
Although most criticism is directed at Bosnia's Serbs, the Croats are equally to blame for trying to destroy unity in the country, van Walsum said. "It is difficult to be optimistic if only the Muslim population seems to take the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina really seriously," he said. "There is no political will among the leaders of the large parties to reinforce the institutions of Bosnia-Herzegovina."
The Dayton Peace Accords divided Bosnia into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic loosely tied together by a federal parliament, a three-member presidency and other federal institutions.
NOT ONLY PRESENCE
The UN operation for police training, judicial reform and refugee assistance works alongside the chief international representative for Bosnia, Wolfgang Petritsch, and NATO-led troops who went to the country at the end of the war.
U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who spoke at the debate, assured council members that Washington would stay the course in the Balkans. Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush has said he would rethink the U.S. commitment, even though Europeans are fielding most of the peacekeepers. "To disengage before our goals are accomplished would only guarantee renewed violence and a much more costly re-entry in the future," Biden told the council. "We must stay the course and prevail, regardless of how long it takes."
Klein said in his address that the world community had been too meek in implementing the Dayton accords, failing to crack down quickly on crime and corruption or to arrest indicted Bosnian Serb war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. But he said that the UN mission had managed to transform the Bosnian police into a force of 20,000 trained civilian officers. A registry has been set up to determine the background of each officer, so officials will soon be able to begin weeding out any war crime suspects still on the force, he said. Full freedom of movement is now taken for granted, and over 46,000 members of ethnic minorities returned to their homes in the first 10 months of this year, twice the number that did so last year, Klein said.
A key goal to achieve by the end of 2002 is control of Bosnia's borders, where illegal immigration, customs and tax evasion, prostitution and other crimes are common, he said. He said another top goal was rebuilding Srebrenica, site of a 1995 Serb massacre of Muslims in what had been declared a UN safe area.
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