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Bosnia aid donors to raise $1 billion

BRUSSELS: A senior European diplomat said on Friday he was confident aid donors from 55 countries meeting in Brussels on Friday and Saturday would raise up to $1 billion to help rebuild Bosnia, shattered by 43 months of war.

The donors conference kicked off on Friday without the Bosnian Serbs who boycotted the conference and Carl Bildt, the international community's High Representative, said this would hurt their cause.

"We are expecting to raise more than $1 billion, but that is an idealistic estimate as far as only the reconstruction funds are concerned," the diplomat said.

The senior diplomat explained that some of the funds from that sum would be allocated for other purposes like financing of police forces.

"The United States has pledged $200 million but of that sum $145 million will be allocated to reconstruction funds," he said.

He said the same applied to Japan which has pledged $130 million of which only up to $90 million is earmarked for reconstruction funding.

"Only the European money is purely earmarked for our purposes," he said.

"Ideally we will be able to get some $900 million to start rebuilding," he said.

The start of the conference was marred by the absence of Bosnian Serbs who were ordered by their hardline leaders, locked in a power struggle, to stay away.

"This will hurt the Bosnian Serb cause and could mean they will get less money," Bildt, charged with coordinating the civilian side of the Dayton agreement, told Swedish radio on Friday.

One United States official said that most Western European countries would refuse to fund reconstruction projects in Bosnian Serb territory until the Serbs had complied with the Dayton peace deal and handed over all indicted war criminals.

The Commission and the World Bank have estimated that a total of $5.1 billion will be needed to reconstruct Bosnia over the next four years -- of which $3.7 billion should go to the Moslem-Croat Federation and $1.4 billion to the Republika Srpska.-Reuter