NATO Forces Kill Serb Suspect, Arrest Another

NATO peacekeeping forces made their first attempt to arrest Bosnian war crimes suspects Thursday, killing one former Serbian warlord in a shootout at a quiet lakeside picnic spot and seizing another from his hospital office, NATO officials said.

The simultaneous raids, in which one British soldier was wounded, struck deep in Bosnian Serb territory with tanks and helicopters, signaling a tougher Western attitude toward the Serbs’ obstruction of the Dayton, Ohio, agreement that halted Bosnia-Herzegovina’s 44-month civil war.

“Operation Tango,” as the military actions were code-named, came a day after President Clinton and 15 other North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders meeting in Madrid insisted on compliance with the 1995 accord, which calls for arrests and trials of dozens of suspected war criminals. American officials said Clinton approved the raids, both led by British troops with U.S. logistical support.

“It was the appropriate thing to do,” Clinton said Thursday during a visit to Poland.

Under the Dayton accord, Bosnia’s rival Serbian, Croatian and Muslim enclaves were to be united in a jointly administered multiethnic state that would allow refugees and other displaced people to return to their homes. But Bosnian Serb leaders have done the most to block these efforts, international monitors say, while failing to meet arms control limits and police reforms set by the agreement.

And Serbs form the bulk of the list of 78 publicly indicted war crimes suspects that, under the agreement, were to be arrested and turned over to a special tribunal in The Hague. More than 70 are still at large throughout the former Yugoslav federation.

The two Serbs tracked down Thursday had been listed in a secret indictment issued by the court March 13. Both were accused of driving Muslims and Croats from their homes in Bosnia’s Prijedor region in 1992 and herding them into prison camps, where hundreds were tortured and killed.

Simo Drljaca, who was fatally wounded in Thursday’s shootout, was accused of leading this brutal campaign of “ethnic cleansing” as the police chief and most powerful Serb in Prijedor. A burly, muscular man, he boasted during the war that he was defending the West against Islamic fundamentalism.

He held his job until last fall, when he was ousted under pressure from NATO-led forces for threatening a unit of Czech peacekeepers by ordering his men to fire over their heads. But he remained a power behind the scenes, U.N. officials said, obstructing the return of Muslim and Croatian refugees to the Serbian enclave’s third-largest city.

Seized in Thursday’s operation was Milan Kovacevic, a physician who was the second-ranking official in the Prijedor City Hall during the war. He was arrested in his office at the city’s hospital, where he is the director, and flown to a detention center in The Hague.

The operation was apparently meant to unsettle Bosnia’s most powerful war crimes suspect, Radovan Karadzic, whose domination of affairs in the Serbian enclave is embarrassing to the West and considered a threat to peace.

Forced to resign a year ago as the Serbian enclave’s president, Karadzic lives openly but under heavy guard in Pale, the seat of its government. His moves in recent days to block decisions by his elected successor, Biljana Plavsic, who appears to be trying to comply with the Dayton accord, has focused the West’s attention on suspects still at large.

“I think all who are subject to indictment by the war crimes tribunal should be on notice that at some point in time that they will be brought to justice,” U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said Thursday.

Other officials noted that the two suspects cornered Thursday were unusually accessible targets because they apparently did not know that they were under indictment.

NATO’s peacekeeping mandate in Bosnia allows its forces to detain war crimes suspects that they encounter in the normal course of other duties, if the job can be done without undue risk.

NATO officials said British peacekeepers, who patrol the Prijedor area, had been in frequent contact with both suspects.

Operation Tango showed every sign of careful, high-level planning.

According to U.S. and British officials, the secret indictment was forwarded to London, touching off two months of British preparations to arrest the pair. Washington was asked in June to help with logistics and transportation, and the go-ahead came from both governments a week ago. U.S. officials said Clinton approved it July 4.

Tipped that Drljaca planned to go fishing, NATO intelligence agents tracked him to a house trailer parked by a small lake in this village--30 miles from Prijedor and just down the road from Omarska, the most infamous of the prison camps he allegedly ran.

According to farmers in the village, at least two helicopters buzzed over the lake Thursday morning and four tanks lumbered up a dirt path toward the trailer, which was parked by an outdoor cafe on the shore. The larger of the two copters landed and a cloud of smoke went up, they said, obscuring from view what happened next.

British sources said Drljaca was confronted alone between the trailer and the cafe and drew a sidearm. According to a NATO statement, he shot a British soldier in the leg before the British force opened fire in self-defense, killing him. U.S. forces involved in the operation flew the helicopters but did not take part in the 15-minute operation.

Late Thursday, investigators from Prijedor’s still-feared police force sealed off the lakefront with yellow tape and towed away Drljaca’s red four-door BMW.

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Kovacevic, the other suspect, put up no resistance. Bosnian Serb officials said four plainclothes agents posing as Red Cross workers on a humanitarian aid mission walked into the hospital and took him into custody.

The NATO operation stunned the nationalist Bosnian Serb leadership. Among those condemning it was Plavsic, the one leader who had appeared willing to cooperate with the West to carry out the peace accord. She called the raids “uncivilized and inhuman.”

“What we were afraid of happened: The threats from the international community materialized,” said a broadcast on Bosnian Serb television.

The Bosnian Serb news agency said Drljaca was the first victim on a secret NATO list of 40 prominent Serbs to be “liquidated.”

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Washington and Norman Kempster in Warsaw contributed to this report.