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The High Representative, Wolfgang Petritsch, today urged NATO, its partners and other countries contributing troops to SFOR to continue their vital peacekeeping role in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He stressed in his speech to the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council that the NATO-led SFOR peacekeeping force in BiH remains crucial to the return of refugees and displaced people, overall political stability in the country and allows for civilian implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords.
In his speech to the EAPC -- made up of ambassadors from the 19 NATO countries, 27 Partnership for Peace countries, and attended by ambassadors from countries contributing troops to SFOR -- the High Representative said: "The implementation of Annex 7 of the Dayton Accords -- the right to return -- is working. The divisive messages of the nationalists are losing their power to frighten people. SFOR has played a creative, flexible and vital role to make returnees feel secure in difficult areas like the hard-line Drina Valley in eastern Bosnia." The High Representative backed up his argument with the latest return figures. Last year, more than 67,000 refugees and displaced people were registered as returning to their homes in areas where they are a minority, nearly double the 1999 figure. The upward trend continues this year: the U.N. refugee agency has recorded more than 4,000 such returns in January 2001 compared to less than 1,700 in the same month last year. The High Representative reiterated that close cooperation with SFOR's commander, COMSFOR Lieutenant-General Michael Dodson, had proved a major part of the real progress made in Dayton implementation in recent months. The High Representative told the EAPC: "We fail when we are not clear. We are succeeding in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Croatia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia whenever the international community speaks with one voice. All these states must cooperate with the UN war crimes tribunal; that borders are not up for discussion; that we will no longer tolerate the bloody nationalism of the 1990s." He added: "And we have a very powerful weapon in our arsenal: the dream of integration with Europe. The peoples of southeastern Europe might not agree on much right now but they do in this -- all want to be members of a prosperous European Union. The journey will be a long one for them but it must be more than a vague hope. We must continue to present this -- as we are through the Stability Pact and elsewhere -- in concrete terms." The meeting was followed by a lively debate on a whole range of issues. The EAPC ambassadors pledged support for the High Representative’s measures to tackle hardline elements in the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ); official corruption; the issue of special parallel relations and the Dayton Accords.
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