Sunday, February 25, 2001

By Marni McEntee
Bosnia bureau

TUZLA, Bosnia and Herzegovina — When troops settle in at the Army’s new base camp in southeast Bosnia next month, the Army plans on saving some money while reshaping its mission focus.

Troops will have different living arrangements. Soldiers will live in two-person portable, rectangular housing units, instead of the SEAhuts found on most American base camps in the country.

The quarters are from other closed bases, such as Camp Demi, and will be brought to the new base on a hill about 10 miles west of Srebrenica, according to Col. Barry Fowler, chief of staff for Multinational Division-North, the U.S. Army headquarters near Tuzla.

Beginning March 5, a company-sized task force from the Georgia National Guard's 48th Infantry Brigade will move into the new base. They will be the first soldiers to carry out the Army’s new focus on the eastern Republika Srpska, which is lagging behind other areas in the number of refugee returns and economic development, international officials have said.

Once the new base opens, the Army will no longer station troops at Camp Dobol, a camp about 10 miles southeast of the U.S. headquarters at Eagle Base. Instead, 48th Infantry Brigade soldiers will live at Camp Comanche, just outside Eagle Base.

It costs the Army about $300,000 a month to run Camp Dobol, Fowler said. He estimated that it would cost one-tenth as much to house the new troops at existing facilities at Camp Comanche and the new base camp.

Eventually, the new base — which hasn’t been named yet — will have all the comforts of most large camps in Bosnia, including a gym and a post exchange, Fowler said.

Army officials have said that Brown & Root, the company that provides most of the Army’s support in the Balkans — from food services to construction — would most likely continue to use Camp Dobol as some sort of a logistics base.

Brown & Root officials, however, said it was too early to say whether they would use the base.

"Although there is general acceptance that Camp Dobol will most likely close in the near future, it would be premature to say for sure that Brown & Root would continue to use the facilities at that location," a company spokesman said in a statement Friday.

The statement, sent by e-mail from Brown & Root’s public relations firm, said the company eventually would decide whether it would be more efficient to consolidate some of its outlying operations to Camp Dobol.

Halliburton Global Public Relations spokeswoman Cindy Viktorin refused to say how many Bosnians work for Brown & Root as cooks, custodians and administrators at Camp Dobol. Viktorin also refused to say how many local nationals would lose their jobs if the camp is closed.

"We will do as we have always done in the past and make every effort to transfer as many of our great employees as practical to vacancies throughout our operations," she said in the statement.

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