EC Planning to Bypass NATO in Bosnia Moves

With the United States standing nervously on the sidelines, France and other members of the European Community said Wednesday that they intend to organize military escorts for overland relief convoys in war-torn Bosnia--a decision that could put Europe in command of any military effort there.

French President Francois Mitterrand told reporters here on the final day of the annual summit of economic powers that the Western European Union, the emerging defense arm of the European Community, intended to have a concrete plan for protecting the convoys ready on Friday.

Other European officials said France and Italy have volunteered to put troops on the ground to ride shotgun with the new convoys, which would carry food and medicine to Sarajevo, the besieged capital of the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On Tuesday, all seven leaders of the Group of Seven nations endorsed such military force if the U.N. Security Council found it necessary to guarantee the delivery of relief shipments. On Wednesday, France and the other EC countries, in effect, were proposing an answer to who would provide the force.

The mission of organizing the convoys would be the first significant military operation ever undertaken by the WEU, a long-moribund organization that France has been promoting as the core of a new European defense structure.

A senior U.S. official said the Bush Administration is willing to accept the WEU’s bid for leadership of the effort--but only as long as the Europeans coordinated their work with the United States and other countries.

And if the allies decided some wider military action is needed--something all parties say they are trying to avoid--the Administration would insist on a greater role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, U.S. officials said.

“You can’t use the WEU for that,” a White House official said. “The WEU doesn’t exist, except on paper. If you really want to get something done, the only organization in Europe capable of doing it is NATO.”

The United States is the most powerful member of NATO, but is not in the nine-member WEU. Some American officials say that France has been promoting the WEU as a means of reducing U.S. influence in Europe, a charge the French deny.

At a dinner with President Bush earlier this week, Mitterrand took pains to say he did not intend to exclude either the United States or NATO from the defense of Europe, but merely to make sure the Western European Union was fully included, an official who attended the meeting said.

“If that’s what is going on here (in the Bosnian relief effort), and if they don’t exclude everyone else from the process, it’s fine with us,” he said.

But Bush is caught in something of a Catch-22 on the issue: Although he wants to strengthen NATO’s role in defending against ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe, he has no appetite for putting U.S. ground troops in Bosnia, even on a humanitarian mission.

The President displayed his ambivalence at his news conference on Wednesday. NATO “is the fundamental guarantor of European security,” he said, but added: “Nobody has suggested that NATO troops are going to go into that arena.”

Bush and other U.S. officials have said they are willing to provide air and naval protection for the planned overland convoys, but no ground troops--largely because they believe that troops on the ground would be in far more danger than helicopter crews or naval forces.

That left the major role in organizing the convoys empty--until the French and Italians stepped in.

It remained unclear who the overall commander of the operation would be, but European officials said it would most likely be a Frenchman or an Italian if those countries provided most of the troops on the ground.

One official said a leading option is to combine the European task force with the U.N. troops now at the Sarajevo airport--giving the Europeans the most dangerous jobs.

Diplomats said that officials from the WEU countries had been working on their proposal for about 10 days and had informed the United States of their progress in a general way.

Mitterrand said the aim was to organize convoys “not only to Sarajevo, but to every urban area (in Bosnia), and those convoys must be protected militarily.”

The French president said the foreign ministers of the WEU will meet in Helsinki, Finland, on Friday. “I expect that they will get the material organization of this protection under way,” he said.

Not every WEU member has volunteered to send ground troops to the effort, however.

British Prime Minister John Major confirmed that the WEU is taking a leadership role on the convoys but added that, like Bush, he is not willing to put his own troops on the ground.

“These are humanitarian operations,” Major said. “There is not a proposition that is remotely agreed by anyone to put in land forces to fight in Yugoslavia.”

He added that a Royal Navy destroyer, the Nottingham, will begin “naval surveillance” of shipping into Yugoslavia under the WEU plan.

And several WEU members, notably Britain and Germany, suggested that there might yet be a role for NATO in the operation.

“It could well be that eventually CSCE will call on NATO to help,” German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said, referring to the 52-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Bush said that in that case, the United States would join in. “If NATO undertakes a role, of course the United States is going to be involved in it,” the President said. “But . . . I have no plans to inject ourselves into a combat situation in Yugoslavia.”

Bush, Mitterrand and Major all flew from Munich to Helsinki on Wednesday evening for a summit meeting of the CSCE, which includes every country in Europe plus the United States and Canada.

U.S. officials said the CSCE will approve an American-backed proposal to enable the organization to ask NATO to provide peacekeeping forces for future conflicts.

But at France’s insistence, the CSCE resolution will also give the Western European Union the same status as an official European peacekeeper--keeping open the question of who, in the end, will play the central military role in Europe’s next era of conflicts.

Times staff writer William Tuohy in Helsinki contributed to this article.