Police Crackdown Taints Moderates in Bosnia Election

As villagers strolled by Sunday on their way to vote, Serbian police commander Srdjan Knezevic’s squarish face smiled eerily at them from an obituary photograph hung in the window of the bar named for his White Wolf wartime battalion.

In the Serb-ruled half of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the gangland-style shooting of Knezevic last month has overshadowed countrywide elections. It triggered a police crackdown by a more moderate faction that broke the waning paramilitary might of the Serbs’ ultranationalist wartime leadership, which operated from Pale.

The United States and its Western allies at first welcomed the crackdown as a promising step toward fulfilling Bosnia’s stalled 1995 peace accords. But instead of solving one problem, it merely created another and might end up helping the ultranationalists.

Western officials say police loyal to Biljana Plavsic, the Serbian entity’s postwar president, botched the search for Knezevic’s killers and have been caught torturing prisoners.

Their actions have raised the question whether there’s really much difference between her “good cops” and the “bad cops” they got rid of. Also dashed was a euphoric expectation in the Plavsic camp that voters would associate the crime with her hard-line opponents. “The whole thing backfired,” said a foreigner tracking the case.

Instead, voters casting ballots for both sides said they were baffled by the killing, for which seven former police officers have been arrested and charged; by countercharges that the crime was staged as a pretext to sweep away the hard-liners; and by two separate investigations of the investigation itself.

“I know I didn’t kill Knezevic, but I can’t be sure of anything else,” said Nikola Cerovic, a 52-year-old engineer. “There are so many theories but no official data. It’s a guessing game.”

The violent backdrop to the campaign was a sharp contrast with Saturday’s and Sunday’s voting, which international monitors called the least troubled of Bosnia’s five postwar elections.

Plavsic, riding a U.S. aid windfall since she broke with Serbian wartime leader and fugitive war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, is expected to win reelection when returns are announced this week.

But her ally running for the Serbian seat on Bosnia’s three-member presidency--which also represents Croats and Muslims--had a more difficult race against incumbent Momcilo Krajisnik, the most powerful Karadzic associate still in office and one of the Serbian region’s richest men.

Krajisnik nearly dropped out of the race after Plavsic’s interior minister accused him--without formal charges--of masterminding the hit on Knezevic, who was ambushed by a masked man and shot 15 times outside his home on Aug. 7. But Krajisnik rebounded and closed strongly, outdrawing Plavsic in the final rallies in her own stronghold, Banja Luka.

Western officials acknowledge that even a sweep by Plavsic’s Unity coalition will not necessarily save the peace accords that Krajisnik resists and Plavsic claims to support. The accords, signed at Dayton, Ohio, envision reunifying Bosnia as a self-governing, multiethnic state and sending home the 35,000 NATO-led troops that enforce a costly truce.

Since winning control of the Serbian region’s assembly in January, Plavsic and her prime minister, Milorad Dodik, have broken up smuggling rackets and other corrupt schemes that sustained the hard-line faction, boosted tax collection and begun paying wages and pensions on time.

But they balk at allowing Croatian and Muslim refugees to come home to communities “cleansed” by Serbian forces during the 1992-95 war--a step most Serbian voters would not tolerate. Serbian leaders also are inhibited by similar resistance from hard-line ethnic nationalists in Bosnia’s other entity, the Muslim-Croat Federation, who are expected to retain most of their power in the elections.

“We’ve given Dodik and Plavsic an easy ride,” said Jacques Paul Klein, a U.S. diplomat who is the deputy high representative of Western powers in Bosnia. “After the election, I’d say to them: ‘Look, you’ve had time, you control the police now . . . it’s time to move ahead on refugee returns.’ ”

Other critics of Plavsic say, however, that she also is inhibited by the very strongmen recruited to lead her revamped police force. Some are wartime commanders who killed or drove non-Serbian civilians from their homes and are not eager to have them back.

One such leader was Knezevic, who defected from the hard-line party early this year to become deputy police commander in Pale and suburban Sarajevo. Another key figure is Ljubica Savic, who goes by the nickname Mauser and was named commander of all uniformed Serbian police a few months ago.

Other officers since have switched sides, quitting a parallel militia loyal to the hard-line leaders and joining Plavsic’s force. The shifting Serbian allegiances are part of an underground struggle that’s often as fierce, if not as bloody, as the inter-ethnic war itself.

Pale, largely unscathed by the war, has felt the brunt of the Serbian infighting, which one local magazine called the “biggest commotion here” since the ski resort village helped nearby Sarajevo stage the 1984 Winter Olympic Games.

Knezevic’s White Wolf bar, an upscale watering hole with polished brass rails and slot machines, was the scene of at least two shootouts between Serbian factions. The police commander was killed two days after arresting a former director of Centrex, the company through which hard-liners sold contraband coffee, tobacco, alcohol and fuel.

Krajisnik, the most powerful hard-liner, arranged to get the ex-director out of jail and is reported to have warned that the police commander would be killed “like a dog” in revenge. Krajisnik denies saying that or having anything to do with the killing.

But his faction’s parallel police force, several hundred strong, was soon overwhelmed and lost control of Pale.

Mauser, who survived a car bomb in July, sent hundreds of police officers here, ostensibly to investigate the killing. They began arresting members of the parallel force, which quickly scattered and left town. Krajisnik lost his special police protection.

U.N. police monitors, who are training the government force, soon realized things had gone too far. On Aug. 18 they stumbled across seven detainees from the parallel force--a different group from the murder suspects--handcuffed to radiators in an abandoned factory.

Mauser’s interrogators, who had held the group nine days, had extracted a tooth from one of the cops, shot another with an electric stun gun and burned them all with cigarette butts, a Western official said.

The unarmed U.N. monitors, with Italian troops nearby, freed the detainees and began an investigation of Mauser’s investigation. Plavsic’s Interior Ministry has ordered Mauser off the case and begun its own review of his work. Plavsic could face pressure to fire him.

Krajisnik and his allies on the campaign trail seized the opportunity to claim a frame-up. “Their monstrous plan created a backlash,” the candidate said after voting here Saturday. “I believe they helped me gain 10% more votes.”

Whether that’s true, many Serbian voters said they were embarrassed by the infighting at a time when they’re trying to put violence behind them, restore ties to Europe and overcome their wartime poverty.

“Everyone is hopelessly divided here--about everything,” said Vladimir Saraba, a 24-year-old technician for Serbian state radio. “Both sides are abusing this case for their own political ends. I wish it wouldn’t have happened. It’s damaging all of us.”