Bosnian Serb Battles Wily Foe: Her Predecessor

A month ago, she was sought after by American officials for a rare one-on-one meeting with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Today, Biljana Plavsic, president of the Bosnian Serbs’ republic, is fighting for her political life against the war crimes suspect whose domination of Bosnian affairs is an embarrassment to the West and a threat to peace.

Plavsic, elected last fall as president of the Bosnian Serb half of Bosnia-Herzegovina, known as Republika Srpska, faced attempts Friday by the Bosnian Serb parliament to vote her out of office. She, in turn, had tried to get rid of parliament by signing a decree the night before to dissolve it.

Parliament ignored her decree and met anyway, into the wee hours of this morning, at a ski resort hotel in Jahorina, near the Bosnian Serb capital of Pale. Like Bosnian Serb television and radio and the well-armed police force, the legislative body is controlled by hard-liners loyal to Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president.

Karadzic, charged by an international tribunal headquartered at The Hague with genocide and other war crimes, is technically barred from public office but has continued to control a lucrative smuggling business and politics from behind the scenes.

Events in Republika Srpska appear to be shaping up as a Karadzic-orchestrated coup against Plavsic--the one Bosnian Serb politician singled out by U.S. and European officials, despite her own wartime record, as having the pragmatic sense to cooperate with enforcers of the U.S.-backed Bosnian peace accords, reached in Dayton, Ohio.

The question now, as NATO helicopters patrol southern Bosnia and Karadzic’s police step up patrols, is to what lengths will Western powers go to shore up Plavsic?

“How can we abandon her?” asked one Western diplomat involved in monitoring Bosnia. “We tell her to run for office, to go along with Dayton; she does all the right things. Abandon her now?”

Publicly, the international community in charge of executing the peace accords voiced its support for Plavsic on Friday. Senior mediators who work in Bosnia defended Plavsic as being within her constitutional rights to dissolve a parliament that is scheming to dump her. But privately, there appeared to be disagreement between U.S. and European representatives on how to support Plavsic, according to diplomatic sources. Some of these officials went so far as to blame Plavsic for escalating the tensions.

Forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have surrounded Plavsic’s office in the northern city of Banja Luka to protect Plavsic from the Bosnian Serb special police loyal to Karadzic. But NATO spokesmen remained reticent about going beyond what they see as their original, narrow mandate.

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Western support has been known to backfire in the isolationist Republika Srpska. Bosnian Serb television portrayed Plavsic as an overly compliant pro-West leader and claimed that she had agreed with NATO on a new order allowing Karadzic to be arrested on sight. NATO officials immediately branded that report false.

But some U.S. officials are known to be advocating Karadzic’s arrest, having concluded that leaving him in place is more damaging to the peace process than the inevitable fallout that would come with his arrest.

Plavsic’s troubles began when she tried to suspend Interior Minister Dragan Kijac, a Karadzic loyalist who oversees the police and who is known for his deliberate and consistent refusal to comply with the terms of the peace accords that ended the Bosnian war in December 1995.

She accused Kijac of working with Karadzic and Momcilo Krajisnik, the Bosnian Serb member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency, in a network of wildly lucrative black-market businesses.

While in the airport in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, recently, en route home from a London trip, Plavsic was arrested, held for questioning and then deported overland to the next-door Republika Srpska, in an episode that appears to confirm renewed cooperation between Karadzic and Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

Exactly why Plavsic acted now to denounce Karadzic is unclear. Sources in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, indicated she may have felt that Karadzic and Krajisnik were about to move against her.

“Your activities have no credibility,” Krajisnik wrote Plavsic when she tried to dissolve parliament. “This could be fatal for the Republika Srpska--and for you personally.”

Hers is a difficult cause to defend. During the war, Plavsic was an enthusiastic champion of “ethnic cleansing’--the practice of using threats and violence to force non-Serbs from villages and cities to create a nationalistic Serbian state--and worked closely with Karadzic and other indicted war crimes suspects. She is remembered for planting a huge kiss on the cheek of the notorious “Arkan,” a ruthless paramilitary leader whose real name is Zeljko Raznjatovic, moments after he drove Muslims from the northeastern Bosnian city of Bijeljina.

In recent days, Plavsic has appeared nervous and uneasy, and her statements on television have appeared rambling and distracted.

Despite her past, international mediators regard her as less extreme now. If Karadzic succeeds in removing her, he would have defied the West once again and removed someone whom Western officials have found at least moderately cooperative.

But her cooperation has been inspired by economic incentive: She agreed to some peace process demands not out of a shared vision of Bosnia’s future but an awareness that isolation would destroy Republika Srpska.

Plavsic has no instruments of power at her disposal besides a small and increasingly disgruntled army. But analysts noted that ousting her, in a way, would remove little more than a straw man behind whom Karadzic, his obstructionist behavior and his henchmen flourish.

“I’m sorry this had to happen, but the crime has to stop,” she said Friday night in a statement that also praised the goals of Karadzic’s ruling Serbian Democratic Party. “This party has the best program of all. But they betrayed it and thought they could use it to steal. . . . Seventeen thousand lives did not fall simply to create a state of thieves.”

Times special correspondent Zoran Cirjakovic in Jahorina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, contributed to this report.