No Final Decision on IFOR Withdrawal
Until After September Elections
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — NATO's military commander Friday voiced concern over violence against refugees returning to their homes in Bosnia and said 60,000 peacekeeping troops will press to establish full freedom of movement by September.
"It's not going as fast as I would like," U.S. Army Gen. George Joulwan said of the problem of reconciling Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats to peace in that country. "We have made some progress ... Over the next several months, we will concentrate on freedom of movement in advance of elections (in September)," Joulwan, the supreme allied commander in Europe, told a press conference.
He stressed that commanders of the 60,000 NATO-led troops involved in the Bosnia peace implementation force would make no decisions on a final withdrawal — officially scheduled for next December — until after the elections.
"What will determine what happens (between September and December) will be determined by what we do now," he said. The issue of refugee returns, a right guaranteed under the Dayton peace agreement that ended Bosnia's 43-month war late last year, has been simmering for weeks.
Two Muslims trying to visit relatives' graves east of Doboj on Monday were killed and up to 10 wounded in a clash with Serbs who blocked their way. It was the latest in a series of confrontations in recent weeks.
Although more than two million Bosnians were displaced during the war almost none of them have been able to return home, even for a visit, into territory controlled by a rival ethnic group.
The one-year target date for removing the peacekeeping force, which includes 18,000 Americans, is December 20, but U.S. officials have already made clear that the final pullout will slip into January at the earliest. Joulwan said the peacekeepers were working closely with the U.N. High Commission on Refugees to assure better freedom of movement in the country and that troops had already repaired or rebuilt 51 war-shattered bridges. "IFOR (the peace implementation force) is trying to prevent violence. We don't want violent clashes and we are working with the UNHCR," he said.
Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation and its Serb republic are divided by an "inter-entity boundary line" which is supposed to be an administrative demarcation but is functioning like an international border.
The consequence of continued failure to ensure repatriation and freedom of movement would be Bosnia's de facto partitionalong ethnic lines.
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