ROME, (AFP) -President George W. Bush makes his first speech to US troops abroad Tuesday, thanking US peacekeepers in a NATO-led multinational force in Kosovo and urging allies to help hasten the day when they can go home. (Read photo caption below).
"First and foremost, the president wants to thank our troops for their service there (and) thank the command," Bush's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, told reporters Monday.
Bush sees building civilian institutions in Kosovo as a major step towards bringing US troops home and will urge leaders of all nations tied to NATO's KFOR "to do what they can to move that work along," she said.
But the US president, wrapping up a weeklong Europe trip that included his first G8 summit, in Genoa, Italy, and first meeting with Pope John Paul II, will also say "that we came in together and will go out together," she said.
Before taking office, Bush had strongly suggested he would pull all US troops from the Balkans but has since soothed those concerns and even refused to rule out deploying soldiers to neighboring strife-torn Macedonia.
He now heads to Kosovo as the first US president to visit since the ouster of former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic, against whom NATO waged a US-spearheaded air campaign to end Belgrade's repressive crackdown on Kosovo Albanians and drive the Yugoslav army out of the province.
The US president's predecessor, Bill Clinton, visited Kosovo in November 1999, five months after that campaign.
Bush was headed to Camp Bondsteel, headquarters for a multinational force that includes some 6,000 US troops, where he was to receive briefings on the situation in Kosovo and lunch with enlisted personnel in addition to addressing the forces on the sprawling facility's parade ground.
The commander of US forces there "will report that morale is very high amongst the young soldiers there," and will brief Bush on Operation Relentless Denial -- a constant patrol of the tense border with Macedonia to stop ethnic Albanian militants fighting the Skopje government from using it as a rear base.
Bush was to meet with UN Special Representative Hans Haekkerup, and the KFOR Commander, Lt. General Thorstein Skiaker, who were to detail the situation in Kosovo and efforts to counter the insurgency in Macedonia.
The United States sees three major challenges yet facing the province: dealing with widespread organized crime; convincing the Serbian minority to take part in November elections and democratic institutions; and resolving the territory's final status, said a senior administration official.
"Kosovo needs to end up like the rest of the region, as part of Europe. We don't want to make Kosovo become the 51st state of the United States," said the official, adding that an in-depth final status debate was about two years away.
The official indicated Bush would not meet his Macedonian counterpart Boris Trajkovski, even as the US State Department called for renewed political talks after two days of fighting in the northwestern Macedonian town of Tetovo, which killed a 12-year-old girl and wounded 24 people.
The flare-up was the heaviest since NATO brokered a tense truce between the two sides on July 5 to allow talks to continue between Macedonian Slav and ethnic Albanian political leaders to hammer out reforms giving the large Albanian minority greater rights.
PHOTO CAPTION:
President George W. Bush travels to Kosovo on July 24, 2001 to give a pep talk to U.S. peacekeeping troops and urge NATO partners to help ensure conditions for a timely exit for all peacekeepers, national security adviser spokeswoman Condoleezza Rice said July 23. A U.S. KFOR soldier observes area in front of an APC at the U.S. camp Bondsteel near Pristina July 22. (Hazir Reka/Reuters)
- Jul 23 10:36 PM ET