Bosnian Serb Leader Karadzic Sidesteps West

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on Saturday again prevailed over the West’s attempts to sideline him by choosing a new hard-line prime minister who immediately advocated the national ethnic partition that peacemakers are struggling to avoid.

In an emergency session, Karadzic’s parliament ratified Gojko Klickovic, who replaces a man who had been championed by international mediators as a moderate alternative to those Bosnian Serb leaders who resist key elements of a U.S.-brokered peace accord.

Western diplomats, including the top leaders of NATO, had rallied to the defense of fired Prime Minister Rajko Kasagic and warned that if Karadzic, an indicted war crimes suspect, won this power struggle, the peace accord--which calls for refugee returns, elections and free movement throughout the fragmented country--might be doomed.

“If Karadzic prevails 100% . . . the possibilities for the implementation of the peace agreement are very bleak,” Carl Bildt, the Swede who oversees the civilian aspects of the accord, said in an interview just hours before Karadzic named Klickovic, a little-known deputy health minister, as prime minister.

The long shadow of what diplomats and U.N. officials say is Karadzic’s obstructionist influence was also in evidence Saturday when an angry Bosnian Serb crowd blocked the return of about 50 Muslims expelled from Prijedor, the northern town that was the site of some of the war’s most brutal atrocities.

Brandishing sticks, stones and metal rods, scores of Serbs who arrived on official buses marched down the road toward the Muslims’ staging site, at times chasing U.N. vehicles. Some in the crowd had police-issue truncheons.

They were stopped when NATO troops moved into position, strung barbed wire across the road and parked a British Challenger tank in the way, its 120-millimeter gun pointed just above eye level.

“We were banished from our houses, so why should the Muslims come back?” argued Drago Majkic, a Serbian metalworker who has lived with his sister since he was driven from the town of Sanski Most.

Local Bosnian Serb authorities, after days of negotiations with U.N. officials, had agreed to allow a single bus of Muslims to drive into Prijedor, tour the town and leave. The Muslims would not even get off the bus, it was agreed.

But the presence of the agitated crowd forced the visit to be scrapped, leaving the Muslims sitting aboard their bright green bus 12 miles south of Prijedor.

The episode dramatized the hatreds that are still close to the surface, especially in the northern region where Serbs expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats and put others in concentration camps, where many were killed at the start of the war. Serbs were also killed last fall when Muslim-Croat forces retook part of the area.

In fact, several of the Muslims who attempted to visit Prijedor on Saturday were as opposed to living with old enemies as the Serbian protesters were.

“Murderers and house-burners should go to Alcatraz, war criminals to The Hague. None of us will live with those kind of people,” said Sead Cirkin, a Muslim lawyer forced to leave Prijedor at the start of the war in 1992.

But beyond the hatred, the thwarted visit also showed that Karadzic continues to pull the strings from his headquarters in the southern mountain village of Pale, U.N. refugee officials said.

Both the Serbian and Muslim-Croatian factions in Bosnia have been guilty of violating aspects of the peace accord and of acting in bad faith where refugee returns are concerned.

For example, Mehmed Alagic, a former Muslim army commander and now mayor of the Muslim-Croat-held town of Sanski Most, has refused to entertain requests for Serbs to return there until the fate of 400 missing Muslim men is determined.

But Bildt, the chief coordinator of peacemaking efforts, and other international officials single out the Bosnian Serb Republic for a more systematic policy of resistance.

Now a new prime minister will take up the cause.

In his first appearance before reporters after his appointment, Klickovic voiced support for the ethnic partition that the peace accord brokered in Dayton, Ohio, was intended to avoid.

Asked if he considered the Bosnian Serb Republic to be part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Klickovic answered: “No way.”

The Dayton accord established two entities--the Bosnian Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation--within a single state, Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the hard-line Serbs continue to want a separate state and reject re-integration.

“The two entities only make a loose union until that process is over also,” said Klickovic, 40, a sociologist who is described as obedient to Karadzic.

He added that Serbs and Muslims can live “beside each other, not together.”

The ousted Kasagic--who is based here in the largest Bosnian Serb city, Banja Luka, where opposition to Karadzic is the strongest--seemed to accept his defeat.

In an interview with a Belgrade television station, he said he hopes that Klickovic will continue his policy of complying with the Dayton agreement.

That policy, of course, is what put him on a collision course with Karadzic.

With Karadzic gaining the upper hand again, Bildt dashed off to Belgrade, capital of neighboring Serbia, to step up pressure on President Slobodan Milosevic, who has been asked to help push Karadzic out of the Bosnian Serb political equation.

Under the Dayton accord, which Milosevic negotiated and signed on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs, indicted war criminals such as Karadzic are barred from public office, and Milosevic is obliged to cooperate with the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

Bildt, North Atlantic Treaty Organization political leaders and the United States have increasingly demanded that Milosevic hold up his end of the bargain.

On Friday, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Kornblum, the Clinton administration’s point man on Bosnia, threatened to revive punitive economic sanctions against Milosevic if he does not deliver Karadzic.

After the Pale assembly confirmed Karadzic’s dismissal of the prime minister, Bildt’s aides said their attention was shifting away from defending Kasagic to the removal of Karadzic.

“This is about Karadzic, this is about getting him out, this is about stopping him from interfering in internal politics,” one source close to Bildt said. “They could have named Mickey Mouse as prime minister for all we care.”

Karadzic, meanwhile, appeared on Bosnian Serb television and declared that democracy had triumphed and efforts to destabilize his government had been successfully squashed.

He added that he was ceding some of his duties to one of his vice presidents, Biljana Plavsic, who is widely considered to be even more fervently nationalist than Karadzic.