Bosnia Cancels POW Exchange, Wants Answers

In a new threat to Bosnia’s U.S.-backed peace process, the final release of Bosnian prisoners of war was abruptly canceled Monday when the Muslim-led government refused to participate unless thousands of missing Muslims are accounted for.

If the government does not agree to release its mostly Serbian prisoners by Friday--and it has indicated that it will not--it will be in violation of a principal provision of the peace accord that last month formally ended nearly four years of savage war.

“I am quite disappointed,” said Christophe Girod, representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which oversees prisoner exchanges. The release was seen as an important “confidence-building” measure that would help ease tensions and establish peace.

The government in Sarajevo had said for a week that its cooperation would depend upon an accounting of the whereabouts of more than 3,000 Muslims who disappeared after the fall of the eastern enclave of Srebrenica in the summer.

“We will not agree with any release of prisoners unless those who are still alive and civilians who are forced to work [in Serb-run labor camps] are all included,” Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey reiterated Monday night on state-run television.

But the ICRC apparently believed it could proceed with the exchange anyway and summoned the parties, and dozens of journalists, to a remote cease-fire line near the Bocac Dam in north-central Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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Frustrated Red Cross officials, along with officers from the NATO-led peace force deployed in Bosnia, paced up and down a frigid, wind-swept stretch of road on the banks of the Vrbas River for hours Monday, waiting for the release to take place and negotiating with participants. A British tank purred beside the road.

Bosnian Croat forces also waited, having brought about 220 of their Bosnian Serb prisoners. But after the government balked, Serbs who were supposed to release Muslim and Croatian captives issued new demands and refused to produce prisoners, and the entire operation fell apart, Girod said.

Five empty buses from the Serbian bastion of Banja Luka, about 18 miles north of this site, arrived, turned around and left, still empty. The Croats also left, taking their prisoners with them, back to jail.

“To bring 220 prisoners all the way to this crossing point, then take them back, is . . . outrageous,” Girod said.

Nearly 1,000 prisoners from Bosnia’s three-way war were to be released Monday and today. A handful were released at other sites Monday, but Red Cross officials said the entire swap was now in doubt.

The government defended its position by saying it had a moral obligation to fight for information on the fates of the Srebrenica victims, as well as those of another 1,000 men who disappeared from Serb-held territory during a final government offensive in September.

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Under the peace accord drafted in Dayton, Ohio, and formally signed Dec. 14 in Paris, Muslims, Serbs and Croats are required to release all civilians and combatants in custody. The Dayton agreement obliges the warring parties to accept the ICRC as the go-between.

But government officials said the prisoner lists provided by the Serbs and verified by the Red Cross were ridiculously short. The officials said the Serbs were offering to free fewer than 200 people, when there is what the officials called credible evidence that several thousand Muslims remain in labor camps or are otherwise detained.

Even if it means being held in violation of the peace accord, the government will not go along with the ICRC exchange plan, a spokesman said.

“We fear that by signing an all-for-all [exchange], we are signing their death sentence,” government spokesman Mirza Hajric said of the missing. “One of the big reasons we went along with the Dayton agreement was that these 3,000 people would be saved, and now it seems like they don’t exist.”

The government is making a distinction between an estimated 21,000 missing from brutal “ethnic cleansing” campaigns in northern and eastern Bosnia and the Srebrenica victims, who were registered by the U.N. or other agencies before eventually being taken away by Bosnian Serb gunmen who overran the so-called safe area. Because records exist on these people, they should be found before the case is closed on prisoner releases, Hajric argued.

Red Cross sources said they believe that the missing Srebrenica victims are most likely dead.

“You cannot jeopardize the release of some 1,000 prisoners for the issue of the missing,” said one Red Cross official. “Tracing and reconstructing the cases of all those people will take years.”

The government’s insistence on the point may be designed to force a public admission from the Serbs that the Muslims were killed, evidence the government would then hope to use in war crimes prosecutions of key Bosnian Serb leaders.

Amor Masovic, the Bosnian government’s representative for prisoner exchanges, criticized the ICRC for failing to incorporate Sarajevo’s concerns in drafting the exchange plan. He said he intended to continue to work on bilateral exchanges.

But critics say bilateral exchanges, without international supervision, open the door to corruption. Influence and money often determine who gets released and who stays in prison.

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Bosnia’s factions have until Friday to release their prisoners under the terms of the peace agreement. Up to now, violations of the accord, including the recent firing of an antitank rocket on a crowded Sarajevo streetcar, have been blamed primarily on the Bosnian Serbs.

By Friday, the factions’ armies also have to withdraw from a 2 1/2-mile buffer zone that will separate enemy forces along a 600-mile confrontation line.

In addition, all foreign fighters not affiliated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--particularly the Islamic warriors who have been fighting alongside the Bosnian government--must leave the country.