Court OKs German Crews for NATO Missions : Bosnia: The alliance announces it will begin enforcing the ‘no-fly’ zone next week.

Germany’s highest court gave the nation’s military permission Thursday to join a combat mission abroad for the first time since World War II, and NATO announced that it would begin enforcing the “no-fly” zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina next week.

Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, meeting in Brussels, gave final approval to the first combat mission in the alliance’s history. NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner said its warplanes will begin patrolling the skies over the former Yugoslav republic on Monday.

Serbian officials reacted angrily.

“NATO enforcement of the no-fly zone is a classical form of military aggression against a sovereign state and its people,” Gen.-Maj. Zivomir Ninkovic, commander of the air force of the self-styled Bosnian Serb Republic, told the British news agency Reuters. “This is bound to escalate the conflict. . . . Naturally we . . . will take certain measures.”

Woerner told reporters after a meeting of ambassadors from the 16 alliance nations that “every element is in place. We have already started to deploy.”

Most of the 56 fighter jets contributed by three countries already have arrived at bases in northern Italy and are scheduled to launch the operation at 5 a.m. PDT Monday. Woerner declined to give further details.

The Pentagon said the United States will contribute 12 Navy F/A-18 fighter-bombers on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and a dozen Air Force F-15 fighter planes. They will be joined by 18 Dutch fighters and 14 from France.

The ruling by Germany’s Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe opened the way for German airmen to participate. They will fly aboard radar surveillance planes known as AWACS--for airborne warning and control system. The AWACS are to help spot no-fly violators and guide allied jets to intercept them.

Under NATO’s rules of enforcement, the alliance’s warplanes can fly alongside violators and order them to return to their bases; escort them from the zone, and as a last resort, fire on them.

There have been about 500 violations of the ban on flights over Bosnia since it was approved by the United Nations last October. A few have involved military operations.

The AWACS operation was very nearly jeopardized by political paralysis in Bonn over united Germany’s international military role and responsibilities. The dispute at one point even threatened to topple the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

The controversy was referred to the Constitutional Court, which declared Thursday night that failure to join the operation would cause “irreparable damage” to the country’s international image.

The emergency court ruling was a clear victory for Kohl and his Christian Democrats, who regarded participation in the AWACS mission as a critical signal of German willingness to bear more international responsibility.

Kohl maintained that deploying the AWACS crews would not violate constitutional prohibitions against German troops fighting outside the NATO theater and that it is covered under provisions for U.N. peacekeeping missions.

Defense Minister Volker Ruehe, a Christian Democrat, told journalists that “the government welcomes this decision.”

The AWACS planes, which are based in Germany, are an integrated NATO force, with the Germans making up one-third of the crews. Woerner told the Constitutional Court on Wednesday that grounding the German crews would hamper the mission.

Strife within Kohl’s center-right coalition over the constitutionality of German soldiers flying over Bosnia might have led to the government’s collapse if the high court had decided otherwise.

Kohl’s junior coalition partner, the liberal Free Democrats, had filed the suit in an effort to have united Germany’s military role legally clarified.

Times researcher Ullrich Seibert in Bonn contributed to this report.