Bosnia Foes Pull Back; Many POWs Still Held

Facing the first significant deadline in the U.S.-brokered Bosnia peace accord, Muslim, Serbian and Croatian forces freed some--but not all--prisoners of war and set military bunkers ablaze Friday as they withdrew behind buffer zones.

Enemy armies have pulled back behind a 2.4-mile separation zone throughout much of the country, NATO peace enforcers said, but they failed to fulfill a key peace plan requirement: the final release of all prisoners, who still number in the hundreds.

The peace accord drafted in Dayton, Ohio, formally ended nearly four years of war and laid out a scheme of demilitarization and other security measures to be enforced by a 60,000-member NATO-led Implementation Force, or IFOR, that eventually will include 20,000 U.S. troops.

In addition to the separation of forces and the release of prisoners, Friday’s deadline involved the withdrawal from Bosnia of all foreign forces, including moujahedeen Islamic fighters, and the marking or destroying of millions of land mines. These two requirements, like the prisoner release, were not expected to be fully met, NATO officials said.

Still, senior NATO officials offered an upbeat assessment as they marked the first 30 days of the Bosnia mission.

“My overall view is very optimistic,” Javier Solana, the secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said in Brussels. “A lot has been accomplished in a short period of time.”

About 225 of the listed 900 war prisoners had gained their freedom by late Friday, according to officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is handling the release.

The POW issue was thrown into chaos earlier this week when the Bosnian government refused to participate unless several thousand missing Muslim men were accounted for.

Intense U.S. pressure, including some arm-twisting by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, persuaded government officials to free some prisoners, but they still did not comply fully.

The other sides, insisting on an exchange rather than the unconditional release required by the peace agreement, similarly balked.

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“It is noncompliance if [prisoners] are not all released,” Red Cross spokesman Christophe Girod said. “They [the factions] are still in an exchange mentality, not a release process. No one is in the spirit of the peace agreement.”

Among those released were 26 Bosnian Serbs who emerged from a Sarajevo jail. While most were bused to Bosnian Serb territory, seven--including a woman who worked for the United Nations and was arrested last year on espionage charges--chose to stay in the government-held capital. They headed straight for a bar, where they toasted their freedom.

Sixty-seven Bosnian Muslims were released from the Serbs’ Kula and Lukavica prisons and taken to the presidency building in downtown Sarajevo, where they were reunited with tearful relatives.

Two elderly brothers embraced and kissed each other. “I haven’t seen him in four years!” one said.

Another gray-haired man in his 60s stood to one side, his face buried in his hands as he sobbed, “My son! My son!” His son was not among those freed.

Throughout this battered country Friday, NATO inspected and verified compliance of the deadline, clogging narrow roads with Humvees and armored personnel carriers and crisscrossing the skies with helicopters and other aircraft.

On Highway 18, the main road between Sarajevo and Tuzla, where U.S. troops are based, American patrols in Bradley fighting vehicles thundered along the recently cleared mountain route to meet Bosnian government and Bosnian Serb military officers, who escorted them along mule paths to remote front-line positions.

“We were able to verify everything,” said Capt. Samuel Shaw, emerging from the underbrush on one secluded stretch of the road with half a dozen U.S. soldiers and three Bosnian government commanders.

Thick smoke swept across the winding road, renamed Route Python by the Americans, between the small towns of Kladanj and Olovo, where front-line bunkers were set on fire by retreating forces.

“If they knock them down, then we don’t have to worry about them,” said Sgt. Willy Thomas, surveying a burning bunker. “That way we know for sure nothing is left inside and that they can’t come back.”

A kitchen pot and a poster of a naked woman were engulfed in the flames of one installation tucked in a ravine. Not far away, a small brown dog, apparently left behind by Bosnian government soldiers, wandered along abandoned trenches.

“We are happy to destroy them,” one Bosnian government soldier said of the bunkers. “We’ve been fighting here since 1992. We’re all tired of sleeping under the sky.”

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In Trnovo, a small village of red-tile roofs 10 miles south of Sarajevo and the scene of heavy fighting up to the very end of the war, blue-uniformed Serbian police dotted the main road. The peace agreement allows police to remain where soldiers cannot.

Up to 12% of Trnovo’s more than 2,100 residents were killed in the war, Mayor Savo Popovic said as he stood outside a gutted hotel. A dozen muddy soldiers’ boots were piled in the doorway.

“The international community thinks this is like a boxing match, where we can shake hands afterward,” Popovic said. “When IFOR leaves, we won’t feel safe.”

On a hill above Sarajevo’s Jewish cemetery, one of the hottest front lines, British Maj. Gen. Michael Walker, commander of NATO ground troops in Bosnia, visited deserted Bosnian bunkers, then observed the bombed shells of homes that served as Serbian sniper positions. Enemy positions were just a few yards apart.

“This is a microcosm of what is going on on the confrontation lines around all of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” he told reporters, reflecting NATO’s optimism that the sides will fully withdraw.

In the small hillside town of Osmanovici, a virtually abandoned village all but destroyed by shelling, Muslim soldiers posted a hand-lettered sign announcing the beginning of the separation zone. This town, which shifted to Serbian control during the war, will again be open to Muslims under the terms of the peace treaty.

Using sophisticated satellite tracking devices, U.S. soldiers quickly determined that the Muslim soldiers had planted their sign about 250 yards inside the zone.

After being shown the correct location down the road, Pezerovic and 20 other soldiers set up a new checkpoint, while Muslim homeowners trickled back into the destroyed town.

“It’s like a dream,” said Smasl Onerovic, 50, a builder. For the last three years, Onerovic has scaled a hillside across from the town. From there, he could spot the ruins of what had once been his home, the place where he was born.

Wilkinson reported from Sarajevo and Murphy from Tuzla. Times staff writers Elizabeth Shogren in Tuzla, Nora Zamichow in Zupanja, Croatia, and Tyler Marshall in Brussels contributed to this report.

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Deadline Passes

Under the peace deal signed last month, Friday was the deadline for key elements of the peace plan:

Jan. 19 Deadline

* All forces withdrawn behind zones of separation.

* All armed civilian groups disarmed and disbanded.

* All foreign and non-local military forces withdrawn from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

* No weapons or explosives allowed in zones of separation.

* Mines marked, destroyed or removed from zones of separation and IFOR-designatd areas.

* Release and transfer of all prisoners.

* IFOR begins to provide security in areas being transferred from control of one group to control of another (example: Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo).

Deadlines Ahead * Feb. 3: All forces withdrawn from areas to be transferred (example: All Serb forces out of Sarajevo suburbs).

* Feb. 15: 60,000-member NATO-led peacekeeping force completes entry into Bosnia.

* March 19: Assuming parties allowed to enter areas they have received in a transfer (example: Muslim forces allowed to enter formerly Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo).

* Apr. 15: Warring factions complete withdrawal of all heavy weapons and forces to barracks areas.

* June 15: Warring factions to complete negotiations on arms limits.

* Sept. 15: NATO-led forces begin gradual withdrawal.

* Dec. 15: Troops complete their withdrawal.