FRANCE will ask the UN Security Council to give a precise mandate to Nato peacekeeping troops in Bosnia to arrest indicted war criminals, the French Defence Minister, Mr Charles Millon, said yesterday.
"The arrest of war criminals does not come under the mandate that was given to I-for (Nato force in Bosnia)," Mr Millon told a news conference during a visit to the Bosnian capital Sarajevo.
"For that reason France will use all available means to [get] the Security Council to deliberate without delay a procedure to be established so that war criminals are pursued and arrested."
Mr Millon made clear France was dismayed that the Bosnian Serb leader, Dr Radovan Karadzic, and army chief, Gen Ratko Mladic, both indicted for genocide by a UN tribunal, were still at large, in part because Nato had not hunted them down.
Commanders of Nato's 53,000 strong peace Implementation Force say they are ready to seize Dr Karadzic, Gen Mladic or 66 other people indicted for ethnic atrocities in Bosnia's war and still at liberty, but have no brief to actively pursue them.
I-for officers have expressed private concern that manhunts could cause casualties among their troops, which could also pose big political problems for their home governments.
But those governments are getting worried that Dr Karadzic's continued hold on power in the half of Bosnia controlled by the Serbs will undercut elections due to be held in September under the 1995 Dayton peace accord to help to reunify the country.
"We hope the Security Council, the supreme authority on intervention in Bosnia, will assume its responsibility," said Mr Millon who visited French I-for troops on France's national holiday.
He said the exhumation by UN war crimes investigators of the first of several mass graves containing Muslims killed when Serb forces overran Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia a year ago was all the more reason to move in on war criminals.
Mr Antonio Cassese, president of the UN war crimes tribunal, said on Friday that unless the international community acted against Dr Karadzic it would signal to rogue leaders worldwide that they were free to "maim, torture and commit acts of genocide".
The former US envoy to Bosnia, Mr Richard Holbrooke, will travel to the region this week for meetings with the leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and mediator Mr Carl Bildt, to assess implementation of the Dayton peace accords, the State Department said yesterday.
Meanwhile, Bosnia's Muslim led central government is hinting at a possible boycott of post war elections in September if Dr Karadzic stays in power.
"I think it is beyond the dignity of the Bosnian people to vote in the presence of Karadzic as leader of the major party in elections including the Serb entity," the Bosnian Prime Minister, Mr Hasan Muratovic, said.
. Italian and French forces seized two Bosnian Serb guns found outside an approved storage site in violation of the Dayton peace treaty and took them to a Nato depot, the alliance said yesterday. The 130 mm guns were confiscated on Friday at Zljebovi, near Sarajevo.