ESSEN. ’Dec 11: Chancellor Helmut Kohl, signalling a cautious shift in German defence policy, has said Bonn might deploy fighter Jets over Bosnia If they were needed to help defend retreating United Na tions troops there, reports Reuter.

Kohl said on Saturday evening that an appeal for help from Germany's alites with troops In Bosnia might promote Bonn to consider Its first military engagement abroad since the end of World War II

His carefully worded answer to a ZDF television question came after Bonn went through emlMrrasstng verbal twists last Wednesday to side step a controversial NATO bid to line up

Germany’s Tornado fighter Jets for a possible mission.

Kohl's new found readiness . to consider military action emerged only after a European Union summit in the German city of Essen at which he and all other EU leaders swore that weapons could not solve -the Bosnian conflict

But it marked another small stop forward tn Bonn's gradual progress towards the greater military role that NATO allies have expected of it since Ger man unification tn 1990.

"If the soldiers of ouY friends — the French. English. Spanish or Danes who are there as UN soldiers need to be pulled out and get into a tough situation, then it would

be a new situation and we would have to ask where we could help with our planes." the Chancellor said.

Nervousness about an "hour of truth" swept through Bonn earlier this month when it became known that NATO's military command had asked If Bonn could provide up to eight Tornados to help bomb Bosnian Serb surface-to-air missiles In Bosnia.

Although Germany's Supreme Court ruled last July that Bonn could legally send troops abroad. German leaders from Kohl on down have said Yugoslavia, the scene of wartime Nazi atrocities, would not be the best place to start.