Bosnian Presidency’s 3 Members Meet

After weeks of international wrangling to force them to sit together, the three members of this nation’s new joint presidency met here Monday for the first time since their recent election--and for the first time since war made them bitter enemies.

The presidency is one of the crucial, overarching institutions aimed at loosely joining the war-torn country’s two halves, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic.

But the difficulties in orchestrating Monday’s meeting--whose participants had disagreed on seemingly everything--foreshadow the complexity of making the future Bosnian government work.

The parties--Alija Izetbegovic, Muslim chairman of the presidency; his Serbian counterpart, Momcilo Krajisnik; and Kresimir Zubak, a Croat--met for more than three hours alone in a hotel here, international officials said. “They have started the process of setting up the common institutions,” Carl Bildt, the international official in charge of executing the U.S.-brokered Dayton, Ohio, peace agreement, told reporters afterward.

The three men shook hands and shared cold cuts, Western officials said. Reporters were barred from the meeting.

In a statement Monday night, the presidency reaffirmed its commitment to upholding the constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was seen as an achievement, however small, because the political parties of the Serbian and Croatian presidency members had waged war to partition Bosnia and form their own ethnic states.

Bildt said the fact that the meeting occurred just 24 hours after certification of the election results was significant. But it was in doubt until the last minute when, under tight security, Krajisnik, who drove nine miles from his mountain stronghold of Pale, and Zubak arrived.

Izetbegovic, who won the chairmanship after narrowly defeating his Serbian rival in the Sept. 14 general elections, arrived an hour after the meeting was scheduled to begin. By then, Western diplomats said, Krajisnik and Zubak, frustrated and peeved, were getting ready to leave the heavily guarded hotel.

The Muslim president had been in talks with international officials, who had spent the last two weeks in frustrating efforts to get the three parties to agree on an agenda and venue.

Izetbegovic was persuaded to attend the meeting only after an hour of personal diplomacy by German Ambassador Michael Steiner, Bildt’s deputy. Izetbegovic had wanted the meeting in central Sarajevo. He feared that compromise over its venue--at the city’s outskirts--caved in to the Bosnian Serbs’ refusal to recognize Sarajevo as Bosnia’s capital.

Krajisnik, citing personal safety fears, objected to coming to downtown Sarajevo, a city to which Bosnian Serbs had laid fearsome siege. But he was spared the sight of burned-out buildings when the meeting was moved to the city’s outskirts.

Krajisnik--right-hand man to former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who has been indicted on war crimes charges by the U.N. tribunal--had sought a meeting in parts of Sarajevo under Serbian control.