Karadzic Gives Up Serb Presidency, but Influence Expected to Persist

Bowing to extraordinary U.S. pressure, Radovan Karadzic on Friday “relinquished the office” of president of Republika Srpska and of his hard-line political party, but he again dodged efforts to deliver him to justice.

American special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke--brought out of retirement especially to accomplish the task of sidelining Karadzic--and other international officials congratulated themselves on the deal and declared that Bosnia’s crucial elections can now go ahead.

Clearing the way for elections will in turn permit NATO troops to leave Bosnia on schedule. And the Clinton administration, in a show of its commitment to salvaging the Dayton, Ohio, peace accord, can point to a diplomatic victory that seems to reduce Karadzic’s public defiance.

But is Karadzic, once and for all, out of the picture?

An indicted war crimes suspect, Karadzic has persistently ignored demands that he step aside, making him an embarrassing symbol of the West’s impotence in enforcing the accord it brokered last year to end Bosnia’s devastating war. While Friday’s agreement appeared to give all parties a way to save face, his influence is expected to continue.

“The jury’s still out on what happens next,” Holbrooke said in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, after a 10-hour negotiating session with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Even the normally confident Holbrooke cautioned that Friday’s agreement was “just a piece of paper” signed by a crafty political survivor who has repeatedly reneged on promises. And Holbrooke conceded that he failed to force Karadzic to leave Bosnia-Herzegovina, where his presence is widely blamed for thwarting the peace pact. There has, however, been speculation that Karadzic will be allowed to fade away to a third country where he could avoid prosecution.

“This is a long process that does not stop here,” said Michael Steiner, one of the chief diplomats in charge of overseeing the peace accord. “This is an important step on the road that needs to lead to The Hague.”

The international war crimes tribunal based at The Hague, where Karadzic stands accused of genocide and other crimes, issued arrest warrants earlier this month for Karadzic and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic. But no government--the Americans included--has shown great willingness to carry out an arrest, despite the presence in Bosnia of 60,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops.

Facing growing political pressure, Karadzic in May agreed to withdraw from public political life--he didn’t--then last month agreed to turn his duties over to a hard-line aide, Biljana Plavsic. But in both cases, international monitors said, he clearly remained in charge, continued to run the ruling Serbian Democratic Party and flirted with a presidential candidacy in direct violation of the Dayton peace accord.

This time, Karadzic signed a statement saying he “relinquished the office of president of the Republika Srpska and has relinquished all powers associated therewith,” with Plavsic becoming acting president effective Friday until the elections, which are scheduled for Sept. 14.

In addition, Karadzic agreed to withdraw “immediately and permanently from all political activities” and to not “appear in public, or on radio or television or other media or means of communication, or participate in any way in the elections.”

Karadzic also stepped down from the party’s presidency.

A critical difference between the document produced Friday and earlier pledges is the signature of Milosevic, onetime patron of the Serbs and the most powerful Serb in the Balkans. Milosevic dispatched his security chief, Jovica Stanisic, to Karadzic’s village headquarters at Pale to extract Karadzic’s signature. The signed statement was faxed to Belgrade just before midnight.

Holbrooke, dining on lamb with Milosevic and later holed up in the U.S. Embassy making calls to Washington, did not see the statement until about 1:30, according to sources. He met for another hour with Stanisic and Milosevic, receiving assurances that the signatures were authentic.

Diplomats close to the negotiations credited the double threat of renewed economic sanctions on Serbia and disqualification of the Bosnian Serbs’ ruling political party for apparently convincing Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb leaders that they had to sacrifice Karadzic.

“Out of office, out of country--that has been the mantra all along,” one diplomat said. “The thinking was, if we couldn’t get the whole banana, we would at least get what we got. Now we have to watch what they do, not what they say.”

In Washington, the State Department hailed Karadzic’s decision to surrender his powers. Spokesman Nicholas Burns said Holbrooke’s successful negotiations mean that Karadzic’s political career is effectively over and that the administration wants Karadzic out of Bosnia altogether.

Leaders of Bosnia’s Muslim-led government in Sarajevo praised the deal but said it does not go far enough. In Pale on Friday, the mood was glum. Campaign posters bearing Karadzic’s image hung from pillar to post, with the slogan, “We have survived; we will continue.”

But focusing on Karadzic has often obscured the fact that he heads a well-entrenched political machine in which some of the cogs are even more dedicated to ethnic segregation than Karadzic. The removal of the person does not necessarily change the policy, diplomats warned.

Indeed, U.N. officials said Friday that Bosnian Serb authorities have been denying humanitarian aid to Bosnian Serb refugees unless they register to vote in Republika Srpska and not in their hometowns in Muslim-Croat territory. Forcing them to vote in the Serb half of Bosnia helps cement the ethnic division that is the goal of Bosnian Serb hard-liners.

“There is no doubt that Plavsic and [others] are as bad as or worse than Karadzic,” said a diplomat close to this week’s negotiations. “It’s a question of whether you ban the whole Nazi party or just its head.”

Holbrooke and others gave special credit to the decision by Robert Frowick, the American diplomat overseeing Bosnia’s elections, to disenfranchise Karadzic’s party if he remained at its helm.

A statement issued late Friday by the party revealed its fear of being barred from the election. “President Karadzic,” the party said, was leaving the leadership to prevent “puppet authorities and Muslim parties” from using September’s ballot to take over Republika Srpska.

“The country is ours, and we will inherit it,” the party said. “As to our enemies, we will soon see their backs.”