NATO Offers to Step Up Balkan Peace Effort

NATO defense ministers offered Wednesday to step up peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans to halt a “tragic and worsening situation.”

“We are deeply disturbed by the continuing violence and destruction in and around Europe and, in particular, we deplore the tragic and worsening situation in the former Yugoslavia,” the defense ministers said in a communique after a two-day meeting at this Scottish resort.

U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, at a news conference here, said, “The United States strongly supports an enhanced peacekeeping role for NATO.”

Though the ministers met as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Nuclear Planning Group, the new role of NATO as a military peacekeeping force among warring ethnic groups occupied much of the discussion, sources said.

The officials agreed to draw up military plans by the end of the year to expedite proposals for NATO to set up headquarters for U.N. military contingents on peacekeeping missions and provide logistics and backup. NATO earlier agreed to send troops to guard humanitarian convoys.

The alliance and the Western European Union, made up of nine European members of NATO, have sent warships to monitor U.N. sanctions from the Adriatic Sea, and NATO is using its early-warning surveillance planes to monitor airspace over Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been ruled a “no-fly” zone by the United Nations.

Among the nations that are sending about 5,000 troops to guard U.N. aid convoys are Britain, Canada, France and Spain. However, U.S. officials repeated that they do not think it wise to send American ground troops into the Balkans.

“We’re afraid U.S. troops might serve as a target to the various factions,” said a Cheney aide.

On nuclear planning, NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner disclosed that all tactical ground-based nuclear weapons have been removed from Europe--less than a year after the defense chiefs agreed to cut their nuclear arsenal in Europe by 80%.