U.S. FORESEES END TO NATO MISSION IN BOSNIA...
Speaking at a NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels on 4
December, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Bosnia is "one of
NATO's greatest successes," adding that the alliance's SFOR mission
will be largely completed by the end of 2004, RFE/RL's South Slavic
and Albanian Languages Service reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 29
October and 18, 19, and 24 November 2003 and "RFE/RL Balkan Report,"
19 September 2003). Powell called on Bosnian authorities to arrest
indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, adding that bringing such
individuals to justice is a key precondition for Bosnia's admission to
NATO's Partnership for Peace program. PM
....CONTINUITY IN KOSOVA...
Powell stated in Brussels on 4 December that he expects Kosova to have
met the democratic standards set down by the international community
by mid-2005, noting that KFOR's mission will continue there while the
people of Kosova implement those standards, RFE/RL's South Slavic and
Albanian Languages Service reported. Powell stressed that the NATO
countries went into Kosova together and will leave together, as he has
said often in the past. Several U.S. officials previously said that it
is too early to discuss NATO's complete exit from the Balkans, where
many Muslims and ethnic Albanians trust the United States but not the
EU, which is anxious to show that it can deal with the region's
problems alone. Several top-ranking Kosovar leaders recently told
"RFE/RL Newsline" in Prishtina that armed conflict could resume in
Kosova if all U.S. forces left, because such a move would have a
highly unsettling effect on the ethnic Albanian majority (see "RFE/RL
Balkan Report," 1 August and 19 September 2003). PM
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