Bosnian Serb Army Officers Disrupting TV

In an escalating power struggle, mutinous Bosnian Serb army officers loyal to indicted war crimes suspect Gen. Ratko Mladic have disrupted television broadcasts for days after seizing a key transmitter, rival civilian officials said Sunday.

The reported army action blocked broadcasts to most of the Serb-run Republika Srpska in a part of the world where television is an important tool of propaganda and control.

Mladic, believed to be holed up in his headquarters near Han Pijesak in central Bosnia-Herzegovina, is fighting efforts by Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic to fire him and most of his general staff.

The dispute “threatens to escalate into a real civil war,” Mladic’s deputy, Gen. Manojlo Milovanovic, told the Belgrade newspaper Dnevni Telegraf.

But the ability of the Bosnian Serb army to mount a coup is limited by the presence in Bosnia of more than 50,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led troops, who have required all of Bosnia’s military factions to warehouse most of their weaponry. Furthermore, the Bosnian Serb police are now probably better equipped than the army and are loyal to Plavsic and her mentor, Radovan Karadzic.

Still, the continued instability makes diplomats and international mediators nervous about Bosnia’s fragile peace process.

Last week, the Serbian police seized the army’s Krajina radio station and issued an arrest warrant for its director, a vocal aide to Mladic highly critical of civilian authorities. The government and the army have accused each other of dozens of kidnappings.

In a statement read on Bosnian Serb television--and monitored in one of the few places where the transmission could be picked up--the Bosnian Serb government said officers loyal to Mladic had seized a main transmitter on Mt. Zep and “disabled” it. The government would not resort to force, the statement said, but was considering taking Mladic and his men to court.

It added that three station technicians were taken hostage and that one remains missing. The attack on the transmission tower occurred last week but was not denounced by Bosnian Serb television until now.

Commanders of the NATO force in Bosnia said they are monitoring the power struggle closely. They dismantled an illegal Bosnian Serb police checkpoint erected near Mladic’s headquarters and confiscated long-barreled weapons that are proscribed under the peace treaty NATO is enforcing here.

Discussing that NATO mission Sunday, Defense Secretary William J. Perry, frustrated by mounting skepticism of President Clinton’s decision to announce an 18-month extension of the U.S. troop presence in Bosnia just days after the presidential election, said he is tired of “carping” by critics on the issue.

On NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” Perry insisted that, when Clinton committed troops to Bosnia a year ago, the White House and the Pentagon believed that the mission could be completed in 12 months.

Times staff writer James Risen in Washington contributed to this report.