In Bosnia, It Isn’t Exactly Open Season on Karadzic

A dozen portraits line the wall of a restaurant overlooking this mountain village. Eleven are of kings and other founders of ruling Serbian dynasties from the 9th to the 19th century. The 12th is a photograph of Radovan Karadzic--the mop-haired Bosnian Serb leader, warlord and accused practitioner of genocide.

A day after NATO peacekeeping forces made their first move against Bosnian war crimes suspects, Karadzic, the most wanted of them all, still controls the Serbian entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina--its police, broadcast facilities, and all legal and illegal commerce, according to Bosnian Serb and foreign officials.

For two weeks, however, the only visible sign of Karadzic in his stronghold here--or anywhere--has been the impish expression in the photograph, which hangs in every public office.

Karadzic’s followers in Pale, angry and fearful after NATO’s active search for war crimes suspects this week, would not discuss his whereabouts Friday. But many said they were certain that North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces will never capture him alive.

“If they try that, the Serbs will not make it easy,” said a mechanic at a car repair shop one block off Pale’s dusty, shadeless main street. “A lot of people will die on both sides.”

His partner in the tiny garage, a man named Ranko wearing blue overalls and no shirt, interjected his own scenario: “I am certain that if they were about to catch him, he would kill himself.”

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The thought of a bloody battle with Karadzic’s well-armed police has prompted NATO-led troops enforcing the 1995 peace accord in Bosnia to look the other way rather than use their mandate to arrest the warlord when they cross his path.

Until recently, their encounters were frequent. After a period of caution following the signing of the accord, Karadzic decided that NATO was not serious, and he began moving about the enclave with impunity in his gleaming dark Mercedes, followed by armed men in Jeep Cherokees.

Even after bowing to Western pressure and resigning as president a year ago, he continued to chair meetings of the ruling party and tend to his lucrative commercial ventures from a factory in the village.

But he dropped from view in late June after a power struggle with Biljana Plavsic, his elected successor, focused the West’s attention again on his obstruction of the peace accord’s aim of a multi-ethnic Bosnian state with free movement of Croats, Serbs and Muslims.

On Thursday, after NATO forces killed one of his henchmen and captured another to face charges at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, the question arose: Is Karadzic next?

“Our position is that Radovan Karadzic is the all-pervading influence that is holding back the peace process, and clearly he belongs in front of the tribunal,” said Simon Haselock, spokesman for the Office of the High Representative, which represents the United States and European peace brokers in Bosnia.

But no Western official is declaring that NATO’s “more resolute and robust approach” toward war crimes suspects, as one spokesman called it, means open season on Karadzic. Some express hope that the fear of arrest will curtail his public appearances and his influence.

“You don’t need to go after Karadzic,” argued Chris Bennett, a political analyst for the Washington-based International Crisis Group, which monitors the peace accord. “You can undermine him by going after more accessible targets. There are others who wield real power.”

Western officials said those most likely to be arrested next are wartime functionaries--Croats and Muslims as well as Serbs--listed in secret indictments. With 69 publicly accused criminals still at large, the war crimes tribunal has in recent months stopped announcing its indictments so as not to alert the new suspects.

NATO peacekeepers will move toward a more active pursuit of those suspects, guided at each step by the severity of any retaliation, Western officials said.

Thursday’s NATO operation inflamed the nationalist Bosnian Serb leadership and set off small street demonstrations. But international groups reported no retaliatory incidents.

Momcilo Krajisnik, the Serb member of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s three-member presidency, said the NATO force had “exceeded its authority” and warned that new arrests could lead to another war. He refused further meetings outside the Serbian enclave with international officials monitoring the peace accord. Krajisnik is not a war crimes suspect.

But Serbian leaders coupled the protest with a call for calm.

“What is the aim of this humiliation?” asked a statement by Karadzic’s party read Friday evening on the television station he controls. “The aim is to create hopelessness, to force us to make concessions, to push us into a unitarian Bosnia. . . . But we should not respond violently as they want us to. We should be wise as snakes and harmless as pigeons.”

The tone on TV echoed the mood in Pale, where just about every Serbian adult male is armed and angry.

Not far from the police checkpoint that separates the road to Karadzic’s one-story house from the rest of the village, three men who had fought in the war were at work in a backyard welding shop.

“There are war criminals on all sides, but only Serbs are arrested and in the most shameful way,” one of them said. It’s not just Karadzic, he added. “They want every single Serb who was defending his own land to lock himself in his home and stay there.”