US President George W. Bush arrived at this US military base Tuesday for a brief morale-boosting visit to American troops serving in the multinational peacekeeping force in Kosovo.
Bush, accompanied by his wife Laura, flew to the base in a helicopter from the Yugoslav provincial capital of Pristina where he had arrived earlier aboard a US Air Force Gulf Stream G3 plane from Rome.
Bush's mission is "first and foremost ... to thank our troops for their service there (and) thank the command," his national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said earlier.
On arrival, he was scheduled to go into a closed-door meeting with UN and KFOR commanders and then address US troops before departing for Washington in mid-afternoon.
The sprawling Camp Bonsteel is about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Pristina. Some 4,500 GIs are based in Kosovo and a further 500 provide logistical backup in neighbouring Macedonia.
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," Rice told journalists ahead of the visit.
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.
Then president Bill Clinton briefly visited Kosovo last year but this is the first time an American president has been to the province since Yugoslavia's hardline former president Slobodan Milosevic fell from power last autumn.
Milosevic is currently in custody in The Hague awaiting trial before an international tribunal on war crimes charges in connecton with his forces' activities in Kosovo.
Bush had no meetings scheduled with local Kosovo leaders, either ethnic Albanian or Serbian.
But he is to have talks with UN special representative Hans Haekkerup and the commander of the KFOR multinational peacekeeping force, General Thorstein Skiaker.
The commander of US forces "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, a senior administration official said.
Bush planned to lunch with enlisted personnel before addressing the troops.
Kosovo's population is mainly ethnic Albanian with a Serbian minority. It was action by Milosevic's forces against rebellious ethnic Albanians that led to NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 in a bid to force the Yugoslav withdrawal.
Bush, who was in Italy for the July 20-22 Group of Eight summit in Genoa after which he flew to Rome for talks Monday with Italian political leaders and Pope John Paul II at his summer residence Castelgandolfo, returns to Rome later in the day before flying back to Washington -- CAMP BONSTEEL, Yugoslavia (AFP)
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