Chances of Arresting Top Bosnia Serbs No Better

U.S. officials, repeatedly stymied in the quest to expunge alleged war criminals from the Bosnian Serb leadership, said Tuesday that increased NATO patrols could improve the chances that indicted suspects such as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic will be arrested.

But in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where NATO commanders reported no significant new changes in their marching orders, those chances seemed as slim as ever.

U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns, in Berlin for a meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization foreign ministers, said that U.S. Army Gen. George A. Joulwan, NATO’s top military commander, had ordered an increase in patrols, especially around the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale, Karadzic’s mountain headquarters nine miles southeast of Sarajevo, the capital.

Another NATO official in Berlin agreed: “We have a much denser network of [NATO] patrols.”

Their comments echoed statements over the weekend by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher that seemed aimed at soothing dismay over the West’s failure to dislodge Karadzic and Mladic, the Bosnian Serbs’ political and military leaders, from power. This follows Clinton administration acknowledgment that crucial Bosnian elections will probably be held with Karadzic and Mladic in place, in direct contravention of the U.S.-brokered Dayton, Ohio, peace accord that ended Bosnia’s war late last year.

In fact, Christopher and Burns were apparently referring to a month-old operational change in NATO’s peace Implementation Force in Bosnia. With the former warring armies garrisoned as of late April, NATO patrols have moved away from the former battle lines and are spreading through the countryside with more frequency and aiding in civilian tasks.

This previously reported shift increases the possibility that a NATO patrol could come into contact with indicted war crimes suspects, NATO officials in Sarajevo said, but in no way changes NATO’s mission, which does not include hunting war criminals.

“We are not pursuing war criminals,” said a senior administration official in Washington.

Furthermore, NATO has patrolled Pale for several months, and NATO spokesmen in Sarajevo said they were unaware of any orders to step up those patrols.

Fearful of a debacle like that in Somalia, where American lives were lost in the unsuccessful effort to capture a wanted warlord, the U.S.-led NATO operation has deliberately limited its mandate.

Also Tuesday, an American patrol in a Serb-held Sarajevo suburb tried to disarm a Bosnian Serb who was carrying an automatic pistol and a grenade on his belt, in violation of the Dayton accord’s arms ban, NATO officials said. The patrol encountered an angry crowd of up to 200 people who mobilized quickly to protest the arrest. French troops arrived and dispersed the crowd.

Bosnian Serb television gave a different account. It identified the man as Slavko Aleksic, commander of a Bosnian Serb army unit, and said U.S. troops were attempting to “kidnap” him as a war criminal.

Times staff writers Art Pine in Washington and Tyler Marshall in Berlin contributed to this report.