Brussels, 15/10/2004 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament's foreign affairs committee has just approved a draft resolution on the European Union's ALTHEA military operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, by 50 votes to 12. The resolution was drafted by Dutch Socialist Jan Wiersma. This text, which still has to be formally approved by the November plenary, calls on the European Parliament to approve this first EU military mission. The mission will deploy 7000 soldiers next December in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The resolution is critical, however, of the "non-association of the European Parliament, the limits imposed by the treaty on the right of parliament to be consulted and the limited supply of information".
The Commission welcomes a continued NATO presence in Bosnia but with its own headquarters independent of NATO (in Sarajevo), as part of the Partnership for Peace. It is, however, expected to ask for the peacekeeping mission and responsibilities for anti-terrorism operations and the arrest of war criminals to be transferred to the European Union. The resolution recommends that the EU Special Representative should not only closely co-ordinate his action with the commander of the EU, but also invite a representative from NATO to the EU Special Representative's co-ordination group to ensure co-ordination and consistency in all EU activities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The resolution also explains that the Union's force follows current practice (which NATO's SFOR has recently implemented), with the deployment of a network of small squads rooted in the local population, living amongst the locals in an effort to gather intelligence and maintain a deterrent, despite the reduction of troops from 12,000 to 7,000 in June 2004. Parliament should be informed, as part of the goal of preventing situations arising that are similar to those that broke out in Kosovo in March of this year, in a way that activates the decision-making process between the different EU institutions in the event of an escalation of violence.
The resolution considers it important that the EU force include a solid element, such as a special integrated and armed police unit for carrying out tasks for which soldiers are usually not trained, and which ordinary police are unable to do. In this connection, the EU police mission should have a non-executive mandate for providing opinions and monitoring developments. It also highlights the importance of increasing efforts to set up a local multi-ethnic police force that enjoys the confidence of all the different communities in the country.
The parliamentary committee is hoping that the setting up of an EU military-civilian planning cell will constitute an important step forwards, due to the provision of analyses and intelligence gathered from the Althea operation, with a view to making the Union a more effective player in military or civilian conflict management. It appeals for intelligence co-ordination and the implementation of a specific mechanism for co-ordinating information flow between the EU, NATO, USA and other actors involved in the region on the possibility of ethnic tension. It is calling on the Council to delineate and re-assess the EU's monitoring mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina in an attempt to adapt and integrate the civilian component into the Althea mission.
Parliament is expected to request that the Althea mission respect Community and international legislation on human rights, and ask the EU Special Representative and COPS president to provide it with a declaration on the progress of the operation in six months and send an EP fact-finding mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina to check progress. (Source: Our publication: Atlantic News)