Push to Oust Karadzic Increases Serbs’ Resolve

Frenzied efforts during the last several days to remove Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic from power appear to have backfired, leaving a government in place that is likely to be more hostile than ever toward the U.S.-brokered peace accord that ended Bosnia’s savage war, analysts and diplomats said Monday.

The new configuration of the Bosnian Serb leadership--with one of its most radical members now designated as liaison to the West--raises serious questions about whether its policies and level of peacetime cooperation will significantly improve if Karadzic actually exits the public political scene.

At least in the short term, High Representative Carl Bildt, the mediator in charge of making the peace agreement work, failed in his gamble to promote a politician he viewed as a moderate alternative to Karadzic.

Karadzic swiftly dumped the man, Prime Minister Rajko Kasagic, and named a hard-line replacement. After purportedly giving Bildt assurances he would remove himself from public life, Karadzic designated one of his most staunchly nationalist associates to represent the Bosnian Serbs before the international community. And all the while, Bosnian Serb leaders insisted Karadzic was still their president.

On Monday, Bildt’s office backed down from its proclamation that it would not accept the appointments of an indicted war crimes suspect and recognized Karadzic’s new prime minister.

Has Karadzic once again hoodwinked the West, outmaneuvering those who struggle to get rid of him? Or was real progress made in nudging Karadzic, however slightly, down the road to less visibility?

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Analysts and veteran U.N. officials who have dealt with the Bosnian Serbs for the last four years are skeptical. Even removing Karadzic only exposes the fact that he is supported by a deeply entrenched political machine, backed by a loyal police force, that will continue the same separatist policies that Karadzic used as a basis for war, they said.

“We are in a much tougher position now than last week,” said one U.N. official who is in regular negotiations with Bosnia’s formerly warring factions. “We essentially have no one [among the Bosnian Serb leadership] to talk to. The changes reinforce the elements least friendly to the Dayton accord as an attempt to re-create a multiethnic Bosnia.”

Bildt said on Sunday that he had received a verbal assurance from three senior Bosnian Serb officials that Karadzic is willing to remove himself from public life. But the Serbs so far have refused Bildt’s request that they put it in writing.

Bildt’s aides gave subdued assessments Monday of what they had achieved. In the long term, they said, Bildt is hoping that waning influence from Karadzic will make it easier to manipulate the people who replace him, as hard-line as they may be.

“We don’t think the game is won, but we don’t think it’s over,” Bildt spokesman Colum Murphy said. “On the one hand, we haven’t moved as far forward as we had hoped, but on the other hand, we aren’t empty-handed.”

Whatever Karadzic, who is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague on genocide charges, does in the next several days, most analysts believe he will continue to exert considerable influence. The best that can be hoped for, they said, is that fewer television appearances by Karadzic would lower his profile before elections.

“Bildt is trying to salvage the best deal he can, when the position of [NATO] is that they won’t arrest Karadzic and when [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic is reluctant to do more,” a Western diplomat said. “It’s a no-win situation for him.”

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Karadzic’s new prime minister, Gojko Klickovic, has already announced that, contrary to the peace accord, he advocates the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina along ethnic lines and is opposed to early returns of refugees to the homes they were forced to abandon by the war. Most of Bosnia’s more than 2 million displaced people are Muslims driven from areas now controlled by the Serbs.

According to U.N. refugee agency spokesman Kris Janowski, Klickovic organized the exodus earlier this year of Serbs from Serb-held parts of Sarajevo, a violent and sad withdrawal that further eroded the onetime multiethnic character of the Bosnian capital.

And the woman appointed to represent the Bosnian Serb government to the West, Biljana Plavsic, is well known for her extreme nationalist positions. One U.N. official described her as one of the chief theoreticians behind the policy of pursuing “ethnic purity.”

The pro-government Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje recalled in a front-page editorial Monday an infamous incident in which Plavsic greeted the notorious Serbian paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznjatovic, known as Arkan, with a kiss shortly after he led the “ethnic cleansing” of the town of Bijeljina in April 1992.

Plavsic, emphasizing that Karadzic is still president, told reporters Monday that she is committed to implementing the Dayton, Ohio, accord but also the policies of her government.

“Those who want to derive from the agreement something that would damage the Serb people will not succeed,” she said.