Belgrade Blasts Fellow Serbs in Bid to Ease U.N. Sanctions

Tabloid journals and regime rumormongers have quickly spread a story that Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic lost $200,000 in a single night at a Belgrade casino while his hapless followers suffered the privations of war.

Media loyal to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic have also shockingly compared Bosnian Serb biologist Biljana Plavsic, a nationalist hard-liner, with Nazi death doctor Josef Mengele.

For the past few days, ever since Milosevic began publicly washing his hands of the faltering drive for a Greater Serbia, the Belgrade propaganda machine has thoroughly transformed the Serbs in Bosnia from beleaguered ethnic brothers valiantly battling an evil conspiracy into ungrateful freeloaders impoverishing their fellow Serbs.

In what appears to be a desperate bid to get sanctions lifted from his own country and to avert threatened Western air strikes, Milosevic has turned on his Bosnian allies and taken the first steps toward the long-feared Balkan end game that could pit Serb against Serb.

Leaders in Belgrade have summoned their proxies from Montenegro and Serb-held areas of Croatia for a pan-Serbian political gathering here today expected to pressure Karadzic to move his forces behind a Western peace plan.

Only the Bosnian Serbs have refused to sign the plan drafted by U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance and Lord Owen of the European Community. It would carve up Bosnia into 10 ethnic provinces and give rebel Serbs control of more than half of the land they have conquered, but at the price of renouncing their long-held dream of uniting with all Balkan Serbs into a Greater Serbia.

While Milosevic came to power four years ago by whipping up nationalist fervor for Serbian unity, the campaign is losing its appeal among the people of Serbia suffering harsh U.N. sanctions imposed in punishment of their government’s instigation of nationalist violence in former Yugoslav republics.

Milosevic made a dramatic appeal to Bosnian Serb lawmakers to support the Vance-Owen settlement last week but was decisively rebuffed by the deputies, who would have nothing to show for a year of destructive warfare if they dashed the people’s hopes for eventual union with Serbia.

Since that public defiance of Milosevic, his loyal propagandists have launched a full-scale smear campaign against Bosnian Serb leaders in an apparent attempt to weaken popular support for the renegade Karadzic regime.

The federal daily newspaper Borba carried an extensive report Monday detailing purported incidents of arrogance and excess by the Bosnian Serbs. It quoted a Yugoslav army helicopter pilot as recalling how Karadzic’s teen-age son insisted on taking the family’s pet dog on a flight between Belgrade and the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale, taking up precious space needed for a wounded fighter.

The article’s reference to the casino losses of Karadzic, reputed to be an avid gambler as well as a heavy drinker, appeared aimed at outraging both Bosnian Serbs living in squalor while their leaders frolic and the Serbs of Serbia increasingly conscious of the decline in their own lifestyles brought on by their bankrolling of the Bosnian war.

Milosevic, in a Belgrade newspaper interview this week, complained that “certain leaders comfortably and immodestly live in Belgrade while the people of the (Bosnian) Serb Republic are offered only bleak sacrifice and darkness.”

Karadzic spends much of his time in a suite at Belgrade’s InterContinental Hotel, which the newspaper said costs his Serbian patrons $275 per night.

One of the most severe moves to discredit Bosnian Serb leaders was a commentary in the nationalist weekly Duga (Rainbow) accusing Plavsic of being a Serbian Mengele, contending that her inflexible opposition to the Vance-Owen peace plan threatens the very survival of all Serbs.

Today’s pan-Serb gathering was announced with the assertion that the fate of the proposed Balkan peace proposal is of vital importance to all Serbs, not just the Bosnian rebels who appear intent on once more rejecting it in a referendum to be held in Serb-occupied areas of Bosnia this weekend.

If the delegates, all Milosevic supporters, endorse the Vance-Owen plan, that decision, coupled with the political tainting of the Bosnian Serb leadership, could be presented to Western mediators as the more credible voice of the Serbian people.

Once Serbs are seen to have endorsed the peace settlement, the international community would be compelled to follow through on promises to enforce it with deployment of as many as 70,000 U.N. troops on a mission that many diplomats here believe to be fraught with danger and resistance.

Some Western envoys contend that under such a scenario, Milosevic will have won, since the West would have no legitimate reason to continue sanctions and most Balkan territory where Serbs live would remain under Serbian rule.

The prospect for a quiet sacrifice of the Karadzic regime for the sake of Serbs in Serbia is threatened only by nationalist radicals like Vojislav Seselj, leader of a Belgrade paramilitary force and the second-most-powerful political party after Milosevic’s former Communists.

Seselj, whom the U.S. government has identified as a possible war crimes suspect, threatened to undermine the Belgrade leadership if it turns its back on brother Serbs.

“If they continue to wash their hands of our brothers on the other side of the Drina (River), they will not get our support,” Seselj told supporters at a rally Thursday in the town of Loznica on the river that forms the Serbia-Bosnia border.

An open clash between Milosevic and Seselj would divide both the Serbian public and the heavily armed security forces, plunging volatile Serbia into an internecine war.