Bosnian Serb Leaders Seen as Barriers to Peace

When a U.S.-brokered peace agreement ended the war in Bosnia last year, Western mediators soothed critics who warned that leaving hard-line Bosnian Serb leaders in place was a mistake.

In time, the mediators said, men like Radovan Karadzic and army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic--both indicted on war crimes charges--would find themselves isolated and fall by the wayside.

Today, five months after the peace accord was initialed in Dayton, Ohio, and with NATO peacekeepers continuing to refuse to actively seek them out, Karadzic and Mladic remain in control of their half of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Diplomats and other civilians in charge of implementing the Dayton accord say the presence of Karadzic and Mladic is jeopardizing the peace process and could spoil upcoming elections.

“There is a consensus emerging that did not exist before,” said Michael Steiner, chief deputy in the office of High Representative Carl Bildt, who is overseeing the civilian aspects of the Dayton accord for the international community. “With Karadzic, there will be no implementation of the peace agreement.”

While the clamor to remove Karadzic and Mladic may be growing, however, no one is volunteering for the job.

The 60,000-strong peacekeeping force led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as IFOR, has handily taken care of the military side of the agreement--the three enemy armies have been returning to their barracks this month--but it has no plans to pursue war crimes suspects, regardless of any harm they may cause to the overall peace.

“It would help a lot of people’s tasks if they [Karadzic and Mladic] were gone, but I’m not authorized to do that,” the IFOR commander, U.S. Adm. Leighton W. Smith, said last week. “Hold those who signed Dayton responsible and get off IFOR’s back.”

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Neither Karadzic nor Mladic makes any secret of his whereabouts. Karadzic, especially, makes periodic public appearances.

But fearful of “mission creep” or a repeat of the Somalia experience--when U.S. soldiers were killed as they sought a Somali warlord in a mission beyond their original mandate--NATO and especially American military planners argue that mounting an operation to capture either man would cost too many lives.

NATO is also struggling to avoid being drawn into the increasingly violent attempts by frustrated refugees to return home, a right enshrined in the peace accord. All sides are blocking returns by their ethnic foes, with the Serbs--acting on Karadzic’s instructions--creating the most obstacles, according to diplomats and aid workers.

On Sunday, an important Islamic holiday, hundreds of Muslims were stopped when they tried to return to their native villages and ancestral cemeteries. Serbs armed with stones and bats forced back one group at the northern town of Teslic; 200 more Muslims were stopped by U.S. troops who allowed them to continue on foot to homes near the town of Mahala--but none could actually enter Mahala. The Serbs accuse the Muslims of being provocative.

Civilian and military peacekeepers, trying to circumvent the top Bosnian Serb leadership as a way to get things done, find themselves running up against brick walls. The Karadzic-Mladic obstruction, they say, stops everything from returning refugees to new bus service to the repair of integrated telephone systems.

Elections this fall that are supposed to validate new postwar governments for Bosnia are also in jeopardy, international officials say.

For the elections to proceed, Robert H. Frowick, the U.S. diplomat who heads the Bosnia mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, must certify that the conditions are right. These include freedom of movement and expression and access to the media for all political parties.

“If Karadzic and Mladic are around in the spring, in the summer, through the whole election campaign, they will be in a position to seriously undermine the election process,” Frowick said.

One of Karadzic’s underlings, an official named Miroslav Vjestica, announced last week that the Republika Srpska will impose its own elections rules “since we do not trust the international community.”

Bosnian Serb army commanders, though said to be more cooperative than the civilians, continue to defer to Mladic’s authority, which NATO officers are barred from recognizing.

During a recent meeting in the Bosnian Serb town of Brcko between a Bosnian Serb regional commander, Gen. Budimir Gavric, and U.S. Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, who commands the American contingent here, Nash made a golden offer: direct telephone lines to the world, something that exists almost nowhere in Serb-held Bosnia.

Thanks, but no thanks, Gavric said. Something like phone lines, he said, “has to be coordinated with the supreme commander”--Mladic.

“There’s no question it’s pretty centrally controlled,” Nash said of Bosnia’s Serbian half in a later interview, conceding that the continued deference to Mladic slows progress.

Similarly, civilian peacemakers in meetings with Bosnian Serb mayors have sought to persuade them to allow the return of Muslim and Croatian refugees to their cities. But the mayors refuse, Steiner said, citing “instructions from Pale”--Karadzic’s headquarters nine miles southeast of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

“Karadzic and Dayton are a contradiction” in terms, Steiner said. “Karadzic came to war on the theory of separation. The peace plan wants the opposite. As long as Karadzic is in power, there is no chance whatsoever that we will get the peace agreement implemented.”

Muslim and Croatian officials have also shown stubborn resistance to elements of the peace plan, diplomats say. But the recent clamor has focused on the Bosnian Serbs.

Several events in the last few weeks honed the international community’s focus on the influence of Bosnian Serb hard-liners, including:

* The Bosnian Serbs boycotted a World Bank donors’ conference in Brussels this month that raised $1.2 billion for reconstruction projects. Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Rajko Kasagic had agreed to attend, then was jerked back at the last minute by Karadzic, who didn’t want the Serbs to be part of a single Bosnia-Herzegovina delegation.

Although the Serbs did not lose specific funds, they were deprived of a captive audience eager to hear them make the case for the kinds of development projects the Republika Srpska wants. Under earlier legislation, no U.S. money will go to the Serbian side of Bosnia as long as Karadzic and Mladic remain in place.

* The IFOR mission passed its 120-day mark, the point at which Bosnia’s three armies were to be garrisoned. With that accomplishment, the military threat to NATO forces has been drastically diminished. Under these new conditions, diplomats argue, IFOR is in a position to concentrate more fully on other tasks, such as the capture of war crimes suspects.

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Sources say Bildt has lobbied NATO political masters in pursuit of a more aggressive prosecution of suspected war criminals. But no country appears willing to make what many believe would be the sacrifice of their soldiers’ lives to catch Karadzic or Mladic.

Instead, NATO officials favor applying more pressure on Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the erstwhile patron of the Bosnian Serbs who negotiated and signed the Dayton accord on their behalf.

But the Serbian leader’s posture, diplomats say, is to let the elections take care of Karadzic. Milosevic is positioning his own proxies--in the Bosnian Serb version of his Socialist Party--to win the elections. This plan, if it worked, would oust Karadzic and consolidate Milosevic’s control of a de facto Greater Serbia.

“There’s a lot of knocking on doors looking for someone to do something about Karadzic,” one Western diplomat said. “Who else can do it besides IFOR or Milosevic? . . . But neither one is inclined to remove him forcefully.”