Rivalry Delays Decision on Bosnia Town

Political and ethnic tensions in the northern Bosnia town of Brcko--which nearly derailed peace talks in 1995--remain so intractable that a decision about who will ultimately control the town has been put off for another year, international officials announced here Friday.

In the meantime, Brcko will continue to be governed by the Bosnian Serbs--but a new international supervisor, probably an American, will oversee the disputed town. The supervisor will be appointed by Carl Bildt, the civilian administrator of the Dayton, Ohio, peace accord.

“The rivalry between the two sides for the possession of Brcko has made the town a political symbol of great psychological importance,” said Roberts Owen, a U.S. lawyer who heads the Brcko arbitration panel set up under the Dayton accord.

“In a sense, it has become a political football, and each party is asking the tribunal to declare it the winner,” he said. “Well, no winner is being announced today.”

Owen said the new international supervisor is meant to play a vital role in integrating the Brcko area, which remains sharply divided along ethnic lines. The official’s tasks will include coordinating local elections so that a “multiethnic administration” is in place before March 1998, as well as helping Muslims and Croats return to homes they fled nearly five years ago.

The Dayton agreement already guarantees refugees the right to return home, but the provision has been largely ignored. Owen, who refused to accept questions about the ruling, did not make clear how the international supervisor will succeed in accomplishing in Brcko what Bildt has been unable to deliver almost everywhere else in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“No one should underestimate the difficulties,” Bildt said, describing Brcko as “the mother of all difficulties” in Bosnia.

Owen’s long-awaited decision was so unpopular with the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat Federation that neither side signed the 43-page judgment even though each had a representative on the arbitration panel.

Serbian and Muslim leaders had said an unfavorable ruling would provoke another war, but the middle-ground finding--apparently equally unpalatable to everyone--was not expected to spark serious violence. Troops with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led force in Bosnia were on high alert, but no problems were reported.

The location of Friday’s announcement was moved at the eleventh hour to neutral ground in Rome after participants were unable to agree on a location in Bosnia.

Even so, both sides boycotted the event, leaving Owen, Bildt and members of the Contact Group on the former Yugoslav federation--Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States--standing alone in a marble hall of the Italian Foreign Ministry.

U.S. and European officials said they were disappointed but not surprised by the strong reaction, given the deep emotions that Brcko has evoked ever since the war in Bosnia began in 1992.

“Brcko was the issue at Dayton,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Kornblum said. “I was the person on the night of the 20th of November, 1995, who went to [Bosnian President Alija] Izetbegovic and told him we are closing down the negotiations over this. It was only then that they came up with the arbitration.”

After the Rome announcement, Bildt and the Contact Group members flew to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, and Pale, where the Bosnian Serb government meets, to press for compliance with the decision.

Both sides agreed in Dayton to accept an arbiter’s ruling, but such cooperation is not taken for granted.

“We are going to . . . talk to the leaders to make clear to them--not that they should agree or disagree with the decision, but that we are determined to implement it,” Kornblum said.

Brcko, Bosnia’s busiest river port before the war, was among the first towns to be overrun by the Serbs and its predominantly Muslim and Croat population expelled through the practice of “ethnic cleansing.” Thousands of captives--mostly Muslims--were killed or tortured in crude concentration camps set up in warehouses on the Sava River during the worst of the fighting.

Strategically situated on the border with Croatia, Brcko has for centuries been a key transportation crossroads between central Bosnia and the rest of Europe. But since the war, the railroads and shipping lines have been shut down, and local industries--including a meat-processing plant and shoe factory--remain mostly idle.

The Serbs continue to control the town itself, but its outlying southern suburbs remain Muslim and Croat. The Muslim-Croat Federation insists that the entire metropolitan area of 87,000 people should be awarded to the federation. To do otherwise, federation officials say, would not only condone the well-documented Serbian atrocities in Brcko but deprive the economically struggling federation of a key trade and transportation link to Croatia and beyond.

The Serbs have equally urgent demands. Brcko lies in a narrow strip of the Sava River Valley that forms a vulnerable, 3-mile-wide bridge between two large swaths of Bosnian Serb territory. The so-called Posavina Corridor also serves as a vital east-west route linking Serb-held western Bosnia with Serbia proper, and it was a chief war aim of the Bosnian Serbs.

When the issue is considered again next year, Owen said, the only solution may be to create a permanent special district of Bosnia-Herzegovina that belongs neither to the Bosnian Serb Republic nor the Muslim-Croat Federation. “Rather like Washington D.C.,” he said.