Leader Gives In to Division of War-Torn Bosnia

In the face of growing Serbian militancy, the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina gave in Tuesday to pressures to permit the division of his war-torn republic, while federal Yugoslav authorities backed away from a confrontation with police of the Serbian republic.

At Yugoslav peace talks in Geneva, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic appeared to abandon hopes of preserving a united and integrated republic when he agreed with Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic to a partitioning of Bosnia into autonomous zones.

But it was unclear whether the agreements between Izetbegovic and Cosic would be adhered to by militants who have been emboldened by Serbian territorial gains, particularly Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb warlord Radovan Karadzic.

Reversing recent assurances to mediators that Bosnian Serbs want only peace and security, Karadzic was quoted by the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug as saying his supporters demand the right to secede.

“We can exist as an independent state or unite with others of the former Yugoslavia,” Karadzic told Tanjug.

Izetbegovic opposes division along ethnic lines, but his poorly armed republic forces have been powerless to stop the de facto partitioning by rebel Serbs who now control 70% of the republic. They have driven out most non-Serbs in a practice they call “ethnic cleansing.”

The Bosnian president, a Muslim, probably softened his position in Geneva in hopes of ending the siege of Sarajevo and other embattled cities soon enough to avert mass starvation and freezing as winter sets in throughout the republic, where six months of war have left 2 million homeless and blocked most supply routes.

Izetbegovic has insisted that ethnic division is neither necessary nor wanted by most of the 4.4 million people who inhabited his multiethnic republic. But his resolve to continue battling Serbian extremists bent on carving up Bosnia was dealt a blow last week when Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic failed to win U.S. support for lifting a U.N. arms embargo against the republic.

Acting U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger said he is still not convinced that Western countries should allow the Bosnian government to arm itself against the Serbian onslaught, even though Washington has repeatedly identified Serbian forces as the aggressors and lamented the arms imbalance that has given the attackers an insurmountable advantage.

In Belgrade, one day after heavily armed Serbian police seized the federal Interior Ministry in the downtown of the joint Yugoslav and Serbian capital, the ministry’s top officials moved to another government building, at least temporarily abandoning the security headquarters to its occupiers.

Federal security troops, who are grossly outnumbered by republic police and reservists loyal to Milosevic, will operate out of the main government headquarters until courts determine whether the building belongs to the federal or Serbian government, Tanjug said.

Dispute over ownership has been cited by both Yugoslav and Serbian officials as the reason gunmen infiltrated the key ministry and have prevented federal workers from entering the building.

However, that version of events is widely seen as a fig leaf for Milosevic’s direct challenge to the authority of federal Prime Minister Milan Panic.