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"We'll try to work out the impasse at the United Nations. But one thing we're not going to do is sign on to the International Criminal Court," Bush said during a brief visit here to tout his domestic agenda. Washington on Sunday vetoed renewal of the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia to highlight its concerns that the court could be used to pursue US forces or officials with politically motivated prosecution. The Bush administration later backed off, granting the mission a 72-hour reprieve that lapses at midnight Wednesday (0400 GMT Thursday). On Monday, the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal officially opened its doors in The Hague with a mandate to bring to justice perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity. Bush said he would not submit the treaty creating the court to the US Senate for ratification because "as the United States works to bring peace around the world, our diplomats and our soldiers could be drug into this court, and that's very troubling to me." Democrat Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Tuesday that Europe must "be more sensitive" to the need to spare US troops from "frivolous prosecution" but said the veto was a ham-handed approach. "It jeopardizes the continuation of vital peacekeeping and police training missions in Bosnia - and UN operations elsewhere. And that undermines our fundamental goal of bringing permanent security to the Balkans and other troubled areas of the world," he said in a statement. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters traveling with the president that the United States was "absolutely not" using the flap as a pretext for curtailing its international peacekeeping commitments. "The President thinks the ICC is fundamentally flawed because it puts American servicemen and women at fundamental risk of being tried by an entity that is beyond America's reach, beyond America's laws, and can subject American civilian and military to arbitrary standards of justice," he said. That's why the court "is a threat to America's involvement to be peace keepers and to help around the world," said Fleischer, who declined to predict the result of consultations with the United Nations. "These are difficult talks, and it's impossible to predict what their outcome will be," he said. In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell was making a series of calls to a variety of his foreign colleagues in an effort to secure a last minute deal, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "We're in the middle of the last minute," he told reporters, noting that Powell had spoken twice on Tuesday with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw whose country is now president of the UN Security Council. "We're continuing to work on these issues, because it
is our desire to work it out in a way that allows us to continue
this very important mission without being exposed to further
risk from the International Criminal Court," he said. |