INTERVIEW-US to retain strong role in Bosnia, diplomat says
01 Nov 2006 15:44:11 GMT Source: Reuters
By Nedim Dervisbegovic SARAJEVO, Nov 1 (Reuters) - The United States will withdraw its last ground troops from Bosnia by next month but it is building a big new embassy that symbolises its future commitment, the U.S. ambassador told Reuters in an interview. The U.S. Army first moved into Bosnia in 1995 when the 1st Armored Division crossed the Sava River to lead the biggest peacekeeping operation in the history of NATO, an initial force of more than 60,000. That was after Washington brokered the 1995 Dayton accord that ended the war in Bosnia. With the European Union it has been the main military and political sponsor of the Balkan country's recovery, but the EU has gradually been taking over. "It is not as though the United States is abandoning this region," ambassador Douglas McElhaney said on Tuesday. "I think in the future the United States will be there bilaterally and it is certainly not the case that our influence will be any less here." The 150 U.S soldiers about to be withdrawn are all that is left of about 20,000 deployed in the winter of 1995-96. The EU force EUFOR took over peacekeeping two years ago but the peace largely has kept itself. "I would hope that people would take it as positive sign that we feel comfortable after we look at the whole situation to say we don't need to do this any more," McElhaney said. The United States has also had a prominent role in the office of the powerful international peace overseer, currently Germany's Christian Schwarz-Schilling, that will be closed next year and be succeeded by a lighter EU representative body. Militarily, the United States will maintain a presence in Bosnia through a NATO headquarters in Sarajevo under the command of a U.S. general with dozens of U.S. officers. McElhaney said the construction of a new U.S. embassy in Sarajevo drove home the point about the continuing political presence in the former Yugoslav republic, one of Europe's poorest countries with about 4 million people. "It's going to be quite large, there are embassies that are larger but for a country of some millions of people let's put it this way...it will have hundreds of people and it will be a good-sized embassy," he said. He said the most important thing for Bosnia, however, was for its leaders to take the country's affairs into their hands.
