http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/...e-usa-aid.html

July 1, 2003
U.S. Bans Military Aid to Almost 50 Countries
By REUTERS


Filed at 1:27 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday declared almost 50
countries ineligible for military aid, including Colombia and six nations
seeking NATO membership, because they back the International Criminal Court
and have not exempted Americans from possible prosecution.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said 35 of those countries had
been receiving U.S. military aid this year and, in some cases, all the
money
was already spent. But the ban could still be in effect when a new fiscal
year starts in October.

As the deadline passed for governments to sign exemption agreements or face
the suspension of military aid, President Bush issued waivers for 22
countries.

But those 22 did not include Colombia and the eastern European countries of
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Colombia, where the government is fighting leftist guerrillas and drug
traffickers, has been one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid,
with $98 million this year.

Boucher said all but $5 million of the Colombia military aid has already
been spent. The $5 million is now frozen.

Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human
Rights Watch, said the suspension of aid worked against some of the Bush
administration's other policy goals, such as intercepting drugs in the
Caribbean and expanding NATO into eastern Europe.

Of the seven eastern European countries expected to join NATO in May, only
Romania has signed a deal with Washington on the ICC.

``This campaign has brought resentment and bitterness from some of the U.S.
government's closest allies and comes at an extraordinary high price,''
Dicker told Reuters.

Other major countries liable to the suspension of military aid are Brazil,
Cambodia, Serbia and South Africa.

TRAINING AND WEAPONS

A U.S. official said that if countries had ratified the treaty setting up
the international court and had not received a waiver, the ban on military
aid would come into effect.

But the threat, enshrined in the American Service Members Protection Act of
2002, does not apply to the 19 NATO members and to nine ``major non-NATO
allies.''

The suspension covers international military education and training funds,
or IMET, which mainly pay the cost of educating foreign officers at U.S.
institutions, and foreign military funding, which pays for U.S. weapons and
other aid.

IMET funds usually amount to less than $1 million per country a year, but
foreign military funding can run into the hundreds of millions.

Congress passed the law out of disapproval of the International Criminal
Court, set up to try war crimes and acts of genocide. The United States
says
it feared politically motivated prosecutions of civilian or military
leaders.

The United States had hoped that the threat to withdraw aid would lead to a
last-minute rush to sign Article 98 agreements exempting U.S. personnel
from
transfer to the court.

Altogether 44 governments have publicly acknowledged signing the agreement
and at least seven others have signed secret agreements, U.S. officials
say.

The pace of signatures does appear to have picked up a little. About 25
governments have signed in the last four months, about half of those in the
last three weeks.



Copyright 2003 Reuters Ltd.