The EU should set up a conflict prevention service, or Cops, with tasks ranging from mine-clearing and firefighting to the provision of legal and medical services, a leading security thinktank proposes today. The need for a rapid reaction corps combining paramilitary police and civilian roles has been dramatically exposed in Kosovo. It has also been highlighted by Javier Solana, the EU's security supremo, and Chris Patten, the European foreign relations commissioner.
"The end of the US-Soviet confrontation has altered the basic purposes of Nato, ended superpower competition in conflicts around the world and changed the strategic dynamic for states along the old east-west fault line in Europe," the British American Security Information Council (Basic) says today.
"Current threats to international security," it says, "include ethnic conflict within states, mass migration, economic and social upheaval, and natural disasters... A major task is to rapidly coordinate and deploy available human, financial and materiel resources to best effect."
Basic proposes a Cops force of 15,000, set up by 2005, able within 24 hours to deploy fully operational units backed up by effective communications and intelligence support.
The Kosovo crisis showed up the weaknesses of the international community in conflict prevention, peacekeeping and enforcing.
Keith Vaz, Britain's minister for Europe, in a letter to Dan Plesch, director of Basic, acknowledged flaws in the international community's "crisis response capability". But he added that Basic's proposals went further than what the EU envisaged.
EU countries have agreed in principle to contribute up to 5,000 personnel for international civilian policing operations by 2003.
