EU-NATO Deal on Bosnia Closer
March 11, 2004NATO will only have a "residual role" in Bosnia once the EU takes over peacekeeping operations there. After reportedly tense negotiations over who will run the show, it emerged that NATO will only keep "a couple of hundred" people, mostly civilians in the former Yugoslav republic. The United States has been keen to retain some control of the operation, something which had not gone down well in Brussels. The mission is likely to be the EU’s most taxing militarily and logistically. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said on Wednesday after a meeting with the EU head of foreign policy, Javier Solana, that there would be a chain of command which is "good and transparent," according to the Spanish paper El Mundo. Solana said that after the EU takes over -- which is expected towards the end of this year -- NATO’s force would be "some hundreds of people, many of them civilians, more looking into questions of intelligence and maintaining vigilance over possible contacts with other terrorist organizations." (EUobserver.com)