BOSNIA: The EU has taken over NATO's security duties in Bosnia, in a key test of its peacekeeping ability and an important step towards its eventual EU membership. Daniel McLaughlin reports
The 7,000-strong EUFOR force assumed its powers yesterday at the Sarajevo base which has been used for nine years by SFOR, which helped to stabilise Bosnia after a three-year war which killed 250,000 people and set its Muslim, Serb and Croat communities at bitter odds.
"In the safe and secure environment that NATO's presence has created, Bosnia-Herzegovina has made considerable progress," NATO chief Mr Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said at the handover ceremony. "The citizens of this country no longer live in fear."
The peacekeeping mission will be the EU's biggest such operation yet. It made its military debut last year with short-term deployments in Congo and Macedonia.
Plans are in place to set up more than a dozen European "battlegroups" by 2007, each with 1,500 troops primed for intervention wherever necessary. Also in the pipeline is a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force for bigger peacekeeping operations.
Much rests on how the EU copes with a Bosnia not threatened by an imminent return to war, but where there is deep mistrust between ethnic groups and dozens of war crimes suspects are still at large.
Last month, the Dáil approved the deployment of 42 Irish troops to serve with SFOR, as part of a commitment expected to cost the State almost €3.5 million.
The EU force will work alongside local security services under the guidance of a EU police mission led by senior garda Mr Kevin Carty, the former chief of the Dublin metropolitan area force.