U.S. Backs NATO Shield for Bosnian Serb Chief

The United States would support the use of NATO troops to defend the president of Bosnia’s Serb republic, Biljana Plavsic, if Bosnian Serb hard-liners try to topple her by force, senior officials said Thursday.

“If there’s an attempt to overthrow her, NATO forces are there and will not allow it to happen,” special envoy Richard Holbrooke said in an interview.

Another official said: “SFOR [the NATO-led peacekeeping force] has broad authority to protect the peace process . . . and preventing a coup would seem to come under that. If the circumstances warrant, SFOR might find itself in that position.”

U.S. officials said the NATO allies have been fully in accord with the U.S. policy of backing Plavsic over her Bosnian Serb rivals, and one said the Clinton administration did not anticipate any European objections to using NATO troops to defend her against a coup.

Officials added that any decision to send North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops into a confrontation between the two Bosnian Serb factions would be made by commanders on the ground and would depend on the risks involved.

But the unusual signal of U.S. willingness to use military force in the struggle among Bosnian Serb leaders was a clear indication that the administration is fully committed to its new strategy of supporting Plavsic and reducing the power of her rival, war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic.

NATO troops will continue to aid efforts to transfer the control of police forces, broadcast media and other levers of power in Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to Plavsic’s government, the officials said.

The struggle over control of police stations in several northern Bosnian towns led Thursday to a violent confrontation between NATO troops and hard-line Bosnian Serb demonstrators in the crossroads city of Brcko, and at least two U.S. soldiers were injured.

“There is a serious risk of violence in this process, and today’s episodes were a foretaste of that,” a White House official said Thursday. “But the risk of letting the Pale [hard-line] faction remain entrenched . . . is far greater.”

Administration officials described the growing split between Bosnian Serb factions as “a moment of truth” in a U.S.-led effort to enforce the 1995 Dayton, Ohio, peace accord, which called on Serbs, Croats and Muslims to live together in a loosely federated Bosnia.

“We think the peace train is leaving the station in the Serb republic,” said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin. “An increasing number of Serbs are getting on by supporting Mrs. Plavsic. It’s only the corrupt [former] regime of Karadzic that is being left behind.”

“Karadzic and his cronies are still ensconced in [the Bosnian town of] Pale and are still fighting for their ability to operate,” he said. “But he is kind of like a Mafia don who is losing his allies and finding that his area of control is shrinking day by day.”

Under those circumstances, U.S. officials said they harbor serious fears that Karadzic and his allies might try to eliminate Plavsic--through a coup or by assassination.

A coup appears increasingly difficult to pull off, one senior official said. The Bosnian Serb military is “bottled up” by NATO troops on the ground, some police units loyal to Karadzic have been disarmed, and peacekeeping forces have “a heavy presence in Banja Luka,” Plavsic’s headquarters, he noted.

“One assassin’s bullet, of course, could change the whole complexion of things,” he added. NATO forces are not providing personal protection for Plavsic, officials said; her bodyguard is drawn from police units loyal to her.

Until recently, the U.S. kept its distance from Plavsic, who was an ally of Karadzic during Bosnia’s civil war and actively promoted “ethnic cleansing,” the violent campaign to force Muslims and Croats out of Serb areas.

But as the influential Karadzic continued to operate from Pale, nine miles east of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, officials apparently decided to encourage a split among the Bosnian Serbs.

At a meeting in Banja Luka earlier this month, Holbrooke, acting as a special envoy from President Clinton, asked Plavsic a key question: Would she support the Dayton agreement’s principle that Bosnia should remain united or would she try to secede from Bosnia and join Serbia instead?

“I am a democrat and a nationalist, but I am not a separatist,” Plavsic replied, according to one official.

“Mrs. Plavsic is no saint,” Holbrooke said. “But as far as we can tell, she has cast her lot with Dayton and NATO. She has crossed the Rubicon.”

As for Karadzic, U.S. officials have concluded that it is probably impractical to try to arrest him for alleged war crimes any time soon. But by supporting Plavsic in her struggle against him, they said, they are serving the main U.S. goal of promoting real peace in Bosnia.

If Karadzic can be “marginalized” and limited to Pale, a senior official said, the U.S. and its allies could ignore him--”unless, of course, he fell into our laps,” he added.