EU force takes on Bosnia peacekeeping

THE European Union took another step yesterday towards becoming a fully fledged military power when it assumed responsibility for peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, taking over from NATO.

With 7,000 soldiers, under British command, it is the EU’s largest and most complex operation to date. Last year, EU troops took on two smaller, short-term deployments to Congo and Macedonia, but now it is keen to show that it is capable of flexing its military muscles.

The operation is a major step in the EU’s drive to develop a military arm, an initiative launched after the failure to halt the war that tore Bosnia apart in the early 1990s.

Plans are under way to set up ten European "battlegroups" by 2007, each with 1,500 troops primed for intervention in the world’s troublespots, notably in Africa. About 1,000 British soldiers are expected to be committed to the force.

Yesterday Major General David Leakey, the commander of EUFOR, the name given to the European force, said the unit had a mandate as strong as its predecessor.

The EU flag replaced NATO’s at the takeover ceremony in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, attended by NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and the secretary general of the Council of the European Union, Javier Solana, as well as the Bosnian three-member presidency. "This is a truly historic occasion," said Mr Scheffer.

A multi-national, 60,000-strong, NATO-led force crossed the border of war-torn Bosnia in December 1995 to silence the guns of the three armies locked in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the Second World War.

Over the years, the security situation improved enough to allow NATO to decrease the number of troops to the current 7,000. Under NATO leadership, the country started slowly absorbing its three ethnically divided armed forces into one army in readiness for applying for NATO membership.

The EU is limiting its military missions to peacekeeping and humanitarian operations at the service of the United Nations, but there is already talk that the next step could be the EU force replacing NATO’s 17,500-strong mission in Kosovo. However, the EU has stressed that its stronger defence arm will complement NATO, allowing European allies to share more of the military burden within the Atlantic alliance.

Opposition from Britain and other more Atlanticist EU members forced France and Germany to back away from ambitious plans last year to set up a separate EU military headquarters. Washington had denounced those plans as a threat to NATO unity at the height of the dispute within the alliance over the Iraq war.

Most of the NATO troops in Bosnia were already European, and the only major change on the ground with yesterday’s handover is the replacement of about 1,000 US troops with Finnish soldiers.

Meanwhile, a little of the gloss was taken off NATO’s last day in the country when thieves masquerading as NATO soldiers stole 1 million from a Bosnian security van.

The robbers, wearing the insignia of NATO’s outgoing Stabilisation Force, set up a checkpoint and stopped an armoured van carrying cash for the Raiffeisen Bank.