Bosnian Political Leaders Thwarting a Lasting Peace

For 18 months, the two Bosnian Serbs were secret inmates, hidden away in Pavilion No. 5 of the military prison here.

Every time outsiders visited the prison, guards quietly moved the two men deeper into invisible corners where they could not be found.

Once, one of the prisoners made a break for it, trying to reach a delegation of foreign inspectors. But the guards caught and beat him. As punishment, both men remained handcuffed for weeks.

Nenad Skrbic, 31, and Dusan Skrebic, 32, were finally freed last summer in a tense operation by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations. International officials are convinced that complicity in the illegal imprisonment of the two men reaches the top levels of the Muslim-dominated Bosnian government. Despite complaints from mediators decrying secret detentions, however, no Bosnian officials have been punished and no fruitful investigation has been undertaken.

In this case, the Bosnian leader implicated is a senior Defense Ministry official who once commanded foreign Islamic fighters and who now works closely with U.S. officials. He oversees a multimillion-dollar program of military assistance from Washington.

As thousands of U.S.-led civilian and military peacekeepers try to rebuild this war-wrecked country and its crippled institutions, their toughest resistance comes from many of Bosnia’s political leaders from all ethnic groups, international officials say. It is often these politicians who break the rules, commit the crimes, ignore the will of their people and violate international peace treaties, all without punishment or accountability, the officials say.

Most of these leaders have emerged from the same cliques of ethnocentric nationalists who led Bosnia-Herzegovina to and through a 3 1/2-year war that claimed 200,000 lives and displaced 2 million people. U.S.-brokered peace accords that ended the war in December 1995 allowed them to remain in power, and, with a few recent exceptions, they remain the greatest obstacle to lasting peace and stability, mediators say.

“It is depressing for me to say that the fundamental attitudes of the political leaders have not changed” since the war stopped, Kai Eide, a Norwegian diplomat, said as he stepped down last month as head of the U.N. mission in Bosnia.

Among senior Muslim officials, those who escape accountability owe their impunity to their close relationship with Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim member of Bosnia’s three-member presidency and president of Bosnia during the war. Because of the role these officials played on behalf of the Muslim cause and in bolstering Izetbegovic’s nationalist political party, they are rewarded and protected.

Such impunity crosses all ethnic lines. Those involved in Bosnia’s postwar recovery say the kind of political, judicial and police reform that would make leaders accountable will require at least three to five years to carry out because an entire culture has to be changed.

“This is a country where individuals have so much power because institutions like courts and police are not where they should be,” said a Western official with extensive experience in Bosnia. “An individual is often the judge, jury and policymaker. If you have an official who is a problem, it can be difficult to get anything done.”

Nenad Skrbic and Dusan Skrebic, who are not related despite the similarity of their last names, were officers with the Bosnian Serb army fighting Muslim-Croat forces in northern Bosnia during the war. They and 14 of their men were captured in one of the last offensives of the war, in September 1995.

Their captors were the 3rd Corps of the Bosnian army, a division known for its units of moujahedeen--foreign Islamic soldiers who came to Bosnia to fight for the Muslim cause. Bosnian army Gen. Sakib Mahmuljin commanded the 3rd Corps.

Three months after their capture, the war ended. Under the peace agreement signed by Muslim, Serbian and Croatian officials, all prisoners of war were to be released in January 1996.

Their men were freed; Skrbic, a captain, and Skrebic, a lieutenant, were not. Instead, they were secretly transported to an interior cell, measuring 6 feet by 6 feet, in Pavilion No. 5 on the military side of Zenica’s prison compound, a collection of gray-green and reddish buildings surrounded by a high wall. They were held for the most part in solitary confinement, occasionally beaten and sometimes fed poorly, they told investigators. They were never charged with a crime.

Skrbic and Skrebic were told by prison officials that they were being held on Mahmuljin’s orders. The 3rd Corps commander, they were told, hoped to use them as bargaining chips to locate two of his brothers, who had disappeared at the start of the war.

During the year and a half that followed the men’s capture, Bosnian officials routinely denied that they were continuing to hold war prisoners. International officials, first alerted by freed prisoners to the fact that Skrbic and Skrebic were alive, made specific inquiries about the two men. The Bosnian government stonewalled, recalled a senior official involved in the search.

Month after month, Dusan’s brother Slavko, his young wife and Nenad’s parents implored the International Committee of the Red Cross, the U.N., NATO and other agencies to find the two men.

U.N. police monitors made several trips to the prison, but inspections never turned up anything. There was suspicion that someone was tipping off the jailers. It would later emerge, in addition, that Muslim officers moved Skrbic and Skrebic, dressed by then in Bosnian army uniforms, not Bosnian Serb uniforms, whenever U.N., Red Cross or other outsiders visited.

Finally, armed with a crude sketch of the prison compound provided by an inside source, a team of U.N. police surprised the prison guards last Aug. 3 and found the two men locked in their small cell, located next to the warden’s office.

An angry warden then burst onto the scene, followed by a discombobulated military judge. They insisted that the men were prisoners of war who could not be released. U.N. officials demanded to see the paperwork. A tense standoff continued until the next day, when, after hours of negotiation and the arrival of well-armed NATO troops threatening to use force, Skrbic and Skrebic were freed.

A NATO helicopter whisked the two pale and gaunt men to safety in the Bosnian Serb city of Banja Luka. One official who was present remembers the Rip Van Winkle reactions of the pair, who were not sure whether to believe the war was really over and were disoriented by the changes and relative prosperity already visible in that largest of Bosnian Serb cities.

The two men have since declined repeated requests to discuss their case at length. Most of the information in this story is based on internal reports and on interviews with witnesses, investigators and relatives. Both men appear bitter about their treatment and remain worried about reprisals from Muslim radicals, even though they are living in the Bosnian Serb half of the country.

Their fears are probably worsened by the alleged role of someone as important as Mahmuljin.

Mahmuljin is believed to have planned to exchange the two Serbs for his two brothers, or for their bodies, Western officials say. The brothers disappeared in 1992 near the Serb-held city of Prijedor, where thousands of Muslims were rounded up and expelled or killed.

Ten months after Skrbic and Skrebic were hidden away, and eight months before they were freed, Mahmuljin was promoted to the post of deputy defense minister of the Muslim-Croat Federation, which governs half the country.

In a recent interview, he denied being responsible for the illegal detention of the two Serbs.

“I personally have nothing to do with it,” Mahmuljin said, adding that the Defense Ministry is investigating the matter.

But Western officials say it is clear that the detention of two prisoners in the restrictive military prison for a full year and a half after the war ended could not have been carried out without high-level knowledge, planning and approval.

Mahmuljin was named to the Defense Ministry post in November 1996 to replace Hasan Cengic, who was removed at the insistence of U.S. officials unnerved by Cengic’s close ties to Iran at a time when Washington was beginning to supply Bosnia with tons of military equipment.

Reducing the influence of Iran and fundamentalist Islamic forces in Bosnia has been a central goal of U.S. policy in the Balkans, one that has not been fully achieved.

Mahmuljin, ironically, had maintained ties similar to Cengic’s through his supervision of the moujahedeen units as 3rd Corps commander. One Islamic unit under his command routinely decapitated its slain enemies, according to Bosnian intelligence sources--a practice that fueled Bosnian Serb terror of Muslim forces in general.

At the battlefield where Skrbic and Skrebic were captured, the recent exhumation of a grave of Bosnian Serb soldiers yielded 17 headless corpses.

According to intelligence sources, Mahmuljin and other senior Bosnian officials continue to protect up to several hundred foreign nationals who came to Bosnia as moujahedeen and remained after the war, despite U.S. demands that they be expelled and the Bosnian government’s assurance that it had done so.

But U.S. officials defend Mahmuljin as a marked improvement over Cengic. Replacing Cengic with Mahmuljin freed up the first shipment of U.S. weapons in a $400-million program to equip and train Muslim-Croat forces in an effort to put them on par with the Bosnian Serb army.

In the months after Skrbic and Skrebic were rescued, two Bosnian investigations were launched, one by the Defense Ministry and one by the public prosecutor on orders of the justice minister. Neither has produced any results, and international monitors say they are losing patience.

“This kind of crime cannot go unpunished,” said one Western official who monitors the Bosnian military.

Col. Werner Schumm, deputy commissioner for the U.N. police task force that rescued Skrbic and Skrebic, said he believes that a number of people may still be hidden in prisons. U.N. monitors have stepped up surprise inspections as a result of this case but continue to find resistance at the highest levels.

“We regularly encounter a wartime [way of] thinking,” Schumm said. “Leaders believe the others are criminals, and that leads police to act without looking at the law. We want them to start thinking about the law, not politics.”