EUROPE : Bosnian City of Brcko: Bridge to Stability or Barrier to Peace?

Bosnian Serb Gen. Budimir Gavric strolled the span of an American-built Sava River bridge the other day and, had he tried, could have touched Croatia.

It would be perfectly normal, he said, to open the bridge here to international commercial traffic “between two countries that border each other”: Croatia and Republika Srpska.

The Muslims, he allowed, could use the bridge. But only as tourists or in transit.

And therein lies the struggle over this strategic Serb-held city, the last piece of territory left unresolved in the U.S.-brokered agreement that ended Bosnia’s war and divvied up most of the country.

Brcko, sitting like a three-mile knot in the Posavina Corridor, is vital to the Bosnian Serbs because it is the only thing connecting their eastern and western holdings. The Muslim-led Sarajevo government, however, needs Brcko for the trade and transport routes that access to the Sava and Croatia would provide.

In addition, Muslim and Croat refugees who were expelled from the majority-Muslim city at the start of the war in 1992 have begun to step up pressure through a series of large demonstrations demanding they be allowed to return home.

Arbitration called for in the peace accord and aimed at deciding Brcko’s fate is to start in a few weeks.

“We need an exit, they need to cross,” Bosnian acting President Ejup Ganic said at a large rally earlier this month, held in a muddy field at the town of Brka, in Muslim-Croat territory south of Brcko. “Without a Brcko solution, Bosnia will not be stable.”

About 5,000 people attended that demonstration. They waved signs, some of which were pointedly lettered in English for the benefit of Cable News Network: “We want our homes”; “Brcko is ours.”

The rally was peaceful, but American troops stationed in the area went on high alert, anticipating violence. About 50 Serb men also went on alert, gathering near the entrance to Brcko in case the Muslims tried to enter.

The Muslims stayed away, this time.

But as pressure mounts, a showdown seems inevitable.

Brcko, which saw a particularly brutal wave of ethnic cleansing and intense fighting at the start of the war, may soon become a test case for displaced people trying to force their way home.

The Dayton, Ohio, peace accord gives refugees the right to return home, but local authorities on all sides are so far refusing to permit returns. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not enforcing the right to return, although its troops are increasingly getting drawn in to control rowdy crowds attempting to enter disputed areas. U.N. refugee officials, meanwhile, are urging patience and “orderly” returns to avoid bloodshed.

“Everything I have is in Brcko--my youth, my work, my life,” said Elmasa Preljevic, 52, a nurse who was expelled in 1992 and has lived as a refugee in a single room in a nearby village ever since. Dressed in a red-and-black checked wool coat, she was attending the muddy rally in Brka. “They killed my husband, my son. . . . I wait for the day to go back.”

But if Gavric is any indication, the sides are worlds apart, even as arbitration looms.

He says there is no room for those people to return. Their homes have now been taken by Bosnian Serb refugees, including a recent wave of several thousand from the formerly Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo.

“They [the Muslims] simply don’t have a place to return to,” he said, speaking to a reporter on a U.S.-built base after a meeting with U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, commander of U.S. troops in Bosnia. “After this war that has caused so many casualties, the best thing is for everyone to live in their own territory, in their own state.”