Serb Nationalism Rears a Chilling Head in Bosnia

A black-and-white portrait of Nikola Poplasen hangs beside the door to his office, a poster of himself in the uniform of the notorious Chetnik paramilitary.

He is standing in the snow near a forest, one boot resting on a fence rail, with an AK-47 assault rifle slung over one shoulder and a knife nearly as long as his forearm strapped to his belt.

Because the West’s preferred leader of the Bosnian Serb Republic, Biljana Plavsic, has already conceded defeat to the 46-year-old Poplasen, the hard-liner’s name is expected to be on the list of winners of this month’s elections when official results are announced, perhaps as early as Friday.

The thought of addressing an extreme nationalist like Poplasen as “Mr. President” is enough to send chills down the spines of Western diplomats trying to consolidate a lasting peace in Bosnia.

They should be worried by a more sinister title bestowed on Poplasen during Bosnia’s 3 1/2-year war.

It is vojvoda, which literally means duke and is the highest honor a Chetnik fighter can receive.

About 20 commanders of the Chetniks, paramilitary fighters in Bosnia who named themselves after Serbian units in previous wars, are known to have been promoted to the rank of vojvoda. They include Serbs suspected of committing some of the worst atrocities against Muslims and Croats.

Poplasen has not been indicted for any war crimes, and the former Communist Party apparatchik claims a battle record as clean as any soldier’s in Bosnia.

But the head of the Bosnian wing of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party defies the rules of order that foreign troops are imposing in Bosnia by speaking out against core principles of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, such as that of an undivided and multiethnic Bosnia.

Poplasen’s goal is “not to have ‘connections’ with Serbs in Yugoslavia but to unite with them,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “But not now. That’s not prescribed in Dayton.

“We will not dispute Bosnia-Herzegovina as a joint state. But when we talk about 20, 30 or 50 years from now, it is nothing unnatural about one nation living in one state,” he said.

In other words, the Dayton agreement, which Poplasen is bound to uphold if he wants to be the president of Republika Srpska, the Serbian republic in Bosnia, isn’t forever.

“Why did the world not oppose the unification of East and West Germany?” the former political science professor asked through an interpreter while holding one of the Lord Extra 100 cigarettes he was chain-smoking.

“It was artificially divided, and they had to unite. They lived in one state, like we Serbs, and then they were broken up in pieces,” he said.

The dream of a Greater Serbia wouldn’t violate the Dayton peace accord because Serbs could maintain close ties with their Bosnian neighbors, just as Germans do with the French in the European Union, Poplasen argued.

“It’s a trend throughout the world,” he said. “Linking from all sides is completely normal. And, of course, the most natural is to link brothers of the same blood and the same faith.

“And I don’t see this being against any other ethnic group, or against the interests of any other ethnic group, namely Muslims and Croats,” he said.

That kind of wordplay is typical of Poplasen’s performance during the election campaign and won’t be allowed to continue, insisted a Western official involved in supervising the Sept. 12-13 vote.

“We’re expecting him to lie to us,” the official said. “He’s been lying to us all along. He’s pledging to go along with Dayton, but that’s his interpretation of Dayton, not ours.

“His party, both in Republika Srpska and in Serbia, has never given up the goal of a Greater Serbia.”

Poplasen’s sudden rise to power is a troubling sign of how badly Washington’s strategy is failing in the Serb Republic, conceded a Western official based in Banja Luka.

The strategy’s leading defenders, such as U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard, insist that Poplasen’s expected victory is an aberration and that Bosnia’s other election results will show moderates are gaining ground.

Miodrag Zivanovic, a liberal Serb politician who often has a few drinks with Poplasen, is much more pessimistic.

Zivanovic now thinks that Bosnia will be formally partitioned into separate ethnic enclaves if Washington fails after “one more try of insisting on Dayton.”

In the months before the elections, foreign governments trod carefully when faced with difficult issues, such as the return of refugees, to avoid scaring away Plavsic’s supporters, said the Western official, who spoke on condition he not be identified.

An insignificant number of Muslim and Croatian refugees have returned to their homes in what is now the Serb Republic, and Poplasen will make the effort to reverse “ethnic cleansing” only more risky, this official predicted.

The Serb Republic can’t be expected to let refugees return when many Serbs aren’t ready or, in many cases, even allowed to move back to their homes in areas dominated by Muslims and Croats, Poplasen said.

“According to our opinion poll of 40,000 Serbs, 96% intend to stay in the Republika Srpska,” he added. “But they should be provided decent conditions. Those who want to go back, we are not going to block.

“But we should be understood: We cannot force our people out in the streets. That’s why this is a joint problem,” he said.

If Poplasen tried to block refugee returns or to violate other terms of the Dayton accord, Carlos Westendorp, the international community’s high representative in Bosnia, could have him removed from office with a mere phone call, Western diplomats say.

Poplasen has a short answer for what would happen then: “Civil war.” Coming from a man with his resume, that hardly sounds like an idle threat.

Officially, Poplasen served in the Chetniks on the Bihac front in northwestern Bosnia, and he was later drafted into a Serbian student brigade in the late summer of 1995 to defend Banja Luka against a Muslim-Croat offensive.

But when asked about the poster hanging outside Poplasen’s office, aides said the photograph was taken in the mountains above Sarajevo during the siege of the Bosnian capital.

His stare is chilling.

“I have received death threats, and I have no doubt they came from that corner of the political spectrum,” said the Western official living in Banja Luka.

Poplasen, he added, “will become more moderate or he will be gone.”

* KOSOVO RESOLUTION: U.N. vote on cease-fire in separatist Serbian province opens door to intervention. A12