Bosnian Serb Eludes NATO Forces in Second Day of Raids

NATO-led peacekeepers searched remote Bosnian villages Friday in a second day of unsuccessful raids aimed at arresting Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who faces war crimes charges before a U.N. tribunal.

“First the helicopters came, and then they came on foot,” said Mitar Bozovic, 57, a farmer in the southeastern Bosnian village of Borje. “There were a lot of them. At least 20 were around my house.”

Bozovic said the soldiers searched his pigsty and a nearby river canyon but didn’t enter his home.

The soldiers’ behavior was much less aggressive than it had been in Thursday’s raid, centered on nearby Celebici, Bozovic said. In that first raid, soldiers used explosives and fired guns to break locks and enter buildings. But Bozovic predicted that despite the softer touch of Friday’s actions, the raids will backfire on international authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina by making Serbs more distrustful of them.

The peacekeeping force, known as the Stabilization Force, or SFOR, issued a statement that Friday’s multinational operation was conducted “after SFOR received additional intelligence that the indicted war criminal was still hiding in the area.”

Karadzic was indicted in 1995 on genocide and other war crimes charges during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. He has been in hiding since 1996 and now tops the tribunal’s list of most-wanted suspects.

“We’re going to keep chasing him,” SFOR spokesman Daryl Morrell said.

Residents said raids were conducted Friday in at least two villages, Borje and Hocevo, which are about two miles from Celebici. At least four helicopters were used in the search operation, which began before dawn and lasted until midmorning, residents said.

Late Friday morning, 13 armored personnel carriers descended the main road from the area, with tense-looking soldiers keeping their fingers on the triggers of machine guns. Four of the armored vehicles were marked as carrying medical personnel, an apparent indication that SFOR was prepared for casualties.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, speaking at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels after Friday’s failure to capture Karadzic, said, “NATO is closing in on him, there is no escape, there is no place to hide.”

Robertson also challenged Karadzic directly, declaring: “One day, whether it is tomorrow or next week or next month, SFOR will come for you. The only way the hunt will end is if you hand yourself in. So surrender now, with some dignity, or justice will be brought to you.”

Robertson said Karadzic and others indicted by the war crimes tribunal at The Hague will face both “high-profile and low-profile” arrest efforts “in the days and weeks ahead.”

Karadzic remains popular among Bosnian Serbs and is believed to have armed bodyguards. Fears that his arrest could be bloody or trigger anti-Western violence have often been cited to explain why SFOR hasn’t acted more aggressively to capture him.

But now, Karadzic’s continued ability to elude capture is becoming an increasingly intolerable embarrassment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, some commentators say.

There has also been speculation that as a defendant before the war crimes tribunal, Karadzic might become a valuable witness against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. The trial of Milosevic on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity began last month.

Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal, has in recent months made particularly strong demands that Karadzic be arrested.

The two raids show that “there’s been a hardening of resolve from NATO members to arrest” war crimes suspects, SFOR spokesman Morrell said. “There’s an increased readiness to go after these people to bring about reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

International authorities have said repeatedly that the arrest and trial of war crimes suspects would help heal the wounds and inter-ethnic hatreds left by the war. That in turn could make it easier to further reduce peacekeeping troops, which now number about 18,000, already down from a 1996 peak of 60,000.

The area of this week’s searches is only a few miles from Bosnia’s border with Montenegro, the smaller republic in Yugoslavia. There has been speculation that if Karadzic really has been here, he might slip across to the other side.

This stretch of border has been closed for the last three years to everyone without a special permit issued by the Yugoslav army in the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica, several residents said. The Yugoslav army also patrols the countryside along the border to prevent people from crossing, they said.

Both the top brass of the Yugoslav army and ordinary soldiers could be expected to be far more sympathetic to Karadzic than Montenegrin police, who are controlled by pro-Western Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic and are usually in charge of border crossings.

This means that Karadzic might have difficulty crossing the border but that if discovered by the Yugoslav army, he wouldn’t necessarily be captured and turned over to the war crimes tribunal. The proximity of the border also means that SFOR must be careful not to stray into Yugoslav territory while searching for Karadzic.

Residents of the raided villages expressed sharp anger Friday against SFOR.

“People hated them before, but now they hate them even more,” said Slavko Brkovic, 46, a shop owner in Celebici.

The international peacekeepers “hate the Serbs,” added his wife, Tomana. “They provoked us yesterday. I’m very bitter.”

Tomana Brkovic said that when Thursday’s raid began, she took refuge with neighbors. SFOR soldiers then broke into her home and the one where the neighbors had gathered, she said.

The soldiers shouted “Hands up!” in Serbian, she said. “That’s the only two words they said. . . . They had masks. Only their eyes were visible.”

The peacekeepers “will see that they did something not good even for themselves,” said Bozovic, the Borje resident. “They’ve violated our human rights and our dignity.”

Bozovic’s anger was focused on the Thursday raid, which included an armed search of the school attended by his 15-year-old daughter.

“Did they really think Karadzic could be hiding in a shop where people buy bread?” he said. “Did they think he was hiding in a classroom?”