NATO’s Image Among Bosnian Serbs Darkens

The sudden extradition of two Bosnian Serb military commanders to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague threatened Tuesday to worsen strained relations between the Bosnian Serbs and NATO-led peacekeepers, just a day after U.S. diplomats reported progress in patching up differences.

Bosnian Serb Gen. Djordje Djukic and Col. Aleksa Krsmanovic--who were arrested by the Bosnian government last month when they strayed from a Serbian suburb of the capital, Sarajevo--were flown to The Hague late Monday by North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops.

It was the first time NATO peacekeepers, known collectively as IFOR, have become directly involved in the handling of suspected war criminals, a development that some Bosnian Serb leaders characterized Tuesday as a dangerous--and one-sided--expansion of the peacekeeping mission.

“Those soldiers were driven to the airport like real criminals,” said Dragan Bozanic, who heads the Bosnian Serb information ministry. “They . . . are our heroes of the war. If you see them treated as criminals, it is very difficult to control the [reaction of the Bosnian Serb] people.”

All but seven of the 52 people indicted by the Hague tribunal on war crimes charges are Serbs, including the top military and political leaders of the wartime rebels. The Bosnian Serbs, as well as their patrons in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, have refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the U.N. court, saying it has been anti-Serb since its creation in 1993.

“After POWs we now have POPs--prisoners of the peace,” Bozanic said. “Are we going to implement the peace agreement, or are we going to promote a new kind of war?”

NATO officials said they transferred the two military commanders at the request of Richard Goldstone, the tribunal prosecutor, and were not passing judgment on their guilt or innocence. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, who on Monday brokered a deal that was supposed to end the crisis over the detained Bosnian Serbs, defended the decision to move them to The Hague.

“All this was done in an appropriate manner, and I am very pleased to say in an efficient way,” Holbrooke said in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where he met with Croatian President Franjo Tudjman on the last day of a Balkan tour.

Bosnian Serb officials were still weighing Tuesday night how to formally react to the extradition. An emergency meeting of the government in Pale, the Bosnian Serb headquarters near Sarajevo, was being contemplated; and a letter sent to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, said Bosnian Serb representatives would not attend arms reduction talks scheduled to be held in Vienna this week.

An OSCE representative said the Bosnian Serbs also did not show up Tuesday for a planning meeting in Sarajevo for countrywide elections mandated by the Dayton, Ohio, peace accord. It was the second such meeting missed by the Bosnian Serbs in as many weeks, the organization said.

“They no longer feel comfortable with IFOR escorts,” said a senior official from an international organization in Sarajevo. “They no longer feel safe anywhere, and IFOR escorts now make them feel even more unsafe.”

The Bosnian Serb news agency SRNA reported that Nikola Koljevic, so-called vice president of the Bosnian Serb republic, demanded the release of the two commanders and warned that their extradition could endanger the peace agreement. Koljevic, speaking in Banja Luka, said “an appropriate response will be found,” but he did not elaborate.

In a letter to Carl Bildt, the U.N. high representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, another top Bosnian Serb official, “foreign minister” Aleksa Buha, said growing tensions and “unprincipled policy” toward Bosnian Serbs “can lead us to a new tragedy.”

A spokesman for the U.N. tribunal said Djukic and Krsmanovic are being investigated for unspecified war crimes and may be questioned as witnesses in other alleged crimes.

A decision on whether to indict the men will be made “within weeks,” tribunal spokesman Christian Chartier said in The Hague. On Tuesday, he said, the men were obtaining lawyers.

Meanwhile, in Washington, U.S. officials said that Turkey has agreed to host an international meeting in March at which potential donor countries will be asked to make pledges of weapons and equipment as part of a U.S.-led effort to arm and train Bosnia’s Muslim-led government army.

The “pledging conference,” expected to be held in Ankara, will be organized similarly to a meeting held in London in December to solicit aid for economic reconstruction.

Turkey’s decision to host the conference came after a visit last week by a U.S. delegation headed by James Pardew, the former Pentagon official who has become the State Department’s chief coordinator for the program.

The Clinton administration has said it wants to see “military balance” restored to the region within 10 months to prevent the better-armed Bosnian Serbs from renewing their attacks on government forces after IFOR leaves.

However, to avoid the appearance that U.S. peacekeeping troops are taking sides in the issue, the administration has said it will handle the job primarily by leading an effort to have other countries contribute the arms.

Turkey has also agreed to supply some military training for the Bosnian government army.

Times staff writer Art Pine in Washington contributed to this report.