Defiant Serbs Hand Over Sarajevo Suburb

As the largest of Sarajevo’s Serb-held suburbs switched to Muslim-Croat control Monday, drunken Serbian police careened through the district’s streets, firing guns into the air and at Muslim police and hurling grenades in farewell defiance.

Nearby, the departing Serbian mayor of Ilidza solemnly prayed over a painting of St. George slaying a dragon and handed the keys to the town hall to an interim Serbian civic leader and a French NATO peacekeeper. St. George was loaded onto a bus. The mayor gathered up his red-white-and-blue Bosnian Serb flags and shared a final bottle of plum brandy with his associates before leaving for Bosnian Serb territory.

“At this tragic and historic moment for the Serbian people . . . we hope that the Serb nation will be protected and this ethnic Serbian land will be preserved,” Mayor Nedjeljko Prstojevic told a small, teary crowd. “The injustice of the [Bosnian peace accord] has caused the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of this area, but I hope for only a short time and that our leaders will have the political and diplomatic wisdom to fight for the rights of the Serbs.”

Even as he spoke, Serbian gangs trying to drive out all Serbs who dared to consider staying continued to set arson fires--torching homes, factories, a train station and the Ilidza courthouse.

The outgoing police took care of the police station they were forced to abandon--or at least tried to, kicking out the windows and then setting the building on fire before North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led troops intervened. Then, in a drive-by shooting, the Serbian police fired on a group of Muslim police officers on the edge of government-controlled territory. Bullets hit a patrol car and pierced the hat of one of the Muslim officers; nobody was injured.

Overall, the botched reunification of the Bosnian capital lurched forward, with serious questions laid bare about the ability of NATO to enforce last year’s Dayton, Ohio, peace accord.

Spokesmen for the NATO force charged with implementing the U.S.-brokered agreement have repeatedly turned aside calls that they take more robust action to stop the looting, arson and terrorism that have gripped the five Sarajevo suburbs reverting to government rule during a 45-day period that began Feb. 3.

Fearful of “mission creep,” NATO officers have insisted that their mandate does not include basic law and order. They defer to the U.N. police force created under the peace accord; that force, however, is unarmed and was not granted arrest powers, rendering it toothless.

Reeling from bitter criticism that it has allowed orchestrated anarchy to reign, the NATO peacekeeping mission stepped up patrols Monday in this suburb west of Sarajevo and the district of Grbavica, which will be the last to revert to government control.

NATO still refused to arrest arsonists--that would be a police function for which they are not authorized, officers said--but it escorted into Ilidza Muslim firefighters who extinguished several blazes. Many of the firefighters had been expelled from Ilidza by the Serbs at the start of the war four years ago, and Monday they were saving Serbian property in one of the many ironic twists of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s absurd conflict.

“They destroyed my home; they took everything,” said Muslim Fire Chief Nevzen Kolasinac, 36, whose 4-year-old son was killed in a Bosnian Serb artillery attack on the day he was driven out of Ilidza in 1992. “But as of tomorrow, we are coming back to stay, for good.”

Ilidza survived the war relatively unscathed. But after the last several days of Serbian destruction under the nose of NATO, which is based in the suburb, it now looks nearly as bad as some of the most battle-damaged sections of Sarajevo.

NATO officers insisted that they did not have the legal authority to detain arsonists or impose tougher measures, such as a curfew, to stop the rampant crime. Such inaction, veteran humanitarian workers in Bosnia argued, only encouraged the destruction--a poor record for the world’s strongest military alliance in its largest mission.

“Since they [gangs] can drive around and light fires with impunity, why not do it?” one U.N. official said. “You can’t stop this by putting out the odd fire.”

The exodus of Serbs, which has been both voluntary and forced by hard-line Bosnian Serb leaders, has helped erode the concept of a multiethnic Sarajevo. With the ideal fading by the day, Ilidza will be the last test of whether Serbs, Muslims and Croats can work, live and govern together. In contrast to other suburbs, where Bosnian Serb civilian authorities fled alongside the police, a few dedicated Serbs in Ilidza are trying to make a go of it by remaining and assuming political responsibility.

Among them is Dusan Sehovac, who received the town hall keys from Prstojevic. He will serve as interim mayor until the suburb’s transition is finished March 19 and will work with Muslim officials in hopes of being included in a future government to represent Bosnian Serb interests.

But the question of whether there still is a chance for a multiethnic Sarajevo brought tears to his eyes. “It’s enough if only three of us want to live in a multiethnic society,” he said optimistically. “That is the source of my hope.”

In a sign of the wider implications of the chaos in the suburbs, the international organization in charge of Bosnia’s postwar elections--scheduled to be held in the fall and considered crucial to a lasting peace--said the process now is jeopardized.

“It is the assessment of [our] monitors . . . that the situation is one of widespread lawlessness, in which citizens of the areas are being terrorized by thugs,” the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said in a statement.

“The OSCE deplores the actions by those political leaders who have encouraged the exodus from the suburbs and have condoned or even actively supported pressures against their own people. . . . The [Muslim-Croat-Serb] parties are far from living up to the assurances they made to ensure the stable and democratic political and social conditions necessary for the holding of elections.”