March 26, 1996
As Carl Bildt Sees Things, Bosnia Has a Shaky Future
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
ARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- "You want to see my graph of the future?" asks Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden who is in charge of carrying out all provisions of the peace agreement in Bosnia-Herzegovina except for the work of the 60,000 NATO peacekeepers who keep the belligerents apart.
His graph is a time line, five arrows beginning with NATO's arrival on Dec. 14 and pointing toward a huge question mark for the period after NATO is to leave at the end of this year.
The future is a shaky one, compared with the vision painted in the Dayton accords of a peaceful Bosnia with ethnically integrated cities, awash in international donations to rebuild what war has torn down, and equipped to conduct the free elections that are vital to its survival.
"The popular perception is that after the elections, we go home because it's all over," said Bildt.
But on the civilian side, work has barely begun on the hardest tasks -- organizing elections, rebuilding shattered homes, roads, and power lines, and organizing the return of 2.2 million refugees. And unless there are signs of success soon, all the billions of dollars that went into the NATO achievement could be money down the drain.
"We need money," he said. "We don't have the money. The election is not funded. Refugee returns are not funded. There are an estimated 3 million uncleared land mines scattered all across the country. More than 60 percent of all housing units are damaged, and 18 percent are destroyed.
"All of these problems will take many years and a lot of money to solve, and I don't see where it's coming from," Bildt said.
The World Bank and other international agencies estimated last year that $5.1 billion in foreign aid would be needed over the next three to four years to get recovery started, $1.8 billion of it this year alone.
But, according to Bildt, other countries have actually contributed only about $358 million of the $550 million they have pledged, including $84.9 million for "quick-impact" relief from the United States and $45 million from the World Bank for emergency recovery projects.
Even the $1.8-billion goal for this year does not include the cost of getting refugees to at least begin returning to their home towns, or of housing them. And also seems like very little money to begin rebuilding roads and bridges and getting a national economy that is flat on its back beginning to function again.
NATO military authorities and critics in the United States blame some of the problems on what they see as Bildt's slowness off the mark at the beginning of the year. European officials, particularly in France, say that the Americans gutted his job of any real authority by excluding him from the NATO chain of command, to avoid a repetition of the civilian-military disagreements that often paralyzed U.N. peacekeepers during the war.
Yet even as he insists that securing lasting peace will take years of effort, and probably a residual NATO military presence beyond the projected pullout date, Bildt, 46, says that he intends to leave his post of civilian high representative in Bosnia at the end of the year.
He has not looked for an apartment here, but instead, has a $165-a-night room at the Hotel Bosnia. His operation, of about 50 people, is squeezed into a single bullet-pocked office floor in downtown Sarajevo.
"I see this as a one-year thing," he said. "The local authorities have to take their own responsibilities."
What happens then depends on whether other countries are prepared to put as much time, effort, and resources into encouraging the former belligerents into getting together as NATO has put into keeping the cease-fire alive.
So far, it does not seem that they are.
"I think the military side is going to be okay," Adm. Leighton W. Smith Jr., the American commander of the NATO force, told reporters recently. "But if the civilian side goes belly-up, the possibility of peace in here diminishes dramatically."
Local authorities on all sides of the conflict have complied with the military provisions but brazenly ignored many of the civilian ones, with no effective sanctions from Bildt or Smith.
Bosnian Serb authorities coerced tens of thousands of Serbs in Sarajevo and its suburbs into leaving when their Serbian-held neighborhoods were turned over to the Bosnian government in recent weeks. The government did little to persuade them to stay.
Both Bosnian Serb and Muslim gangs ravaged what was left of the areas after the exodus, leaving parts of the formerly cosmopolitan capital in smoldering chaos. Instead of the ethnic mix of residents, protected and policed by forces carefully composed to reflect the ethnic breakdown of the original population of neighborhoods, Sarajevo is largely a Muslim city now, with little prospect of Serbian refugees returning soon.
Police of all sides have brazenly violated the peace agreement by keeping police checkpoints on roads that members of all Bosnian nationalities are supposed to be able to travel through freely. Muslims and Croats, supposedly members of one federation recognized in the peace agreement, have clashed openly in Mostar, and many Croats in western Bosnia consider that a part of Croatia.
A new high-level conference of donors is scheduled to take place in Brussels on April 12-13, with a goal of raising $1.2 to $1.3 billion for reconstruction this year.
(Foreign ministers of five countries closely monitoring compliance with the peace agreements threatened on Saturday to cancel the conference unless 219 prisoners of war held by all parties in violation of the Jan. 14 deadline in the accords were released quickly.)
Hasan Muratovic, the Bosnian prime minister, told a group of prospective donors here last week that just the physical destruction done by the war would cost $80 billion to repair, with $16 billion in foreign aid needed to get private money flowing.
"You might be prepared to ask: Why the world? Because nothing had been done to prevent this hell, to which you are all now witnesses, from happening," he said. "Therefore we believe that the world has an obligation to help us."
Muratovic is a Muslim, and his remarks make it doubtful that he was referring to the need to help repair the devastation in Serbian-controlled areas. But in any case, according to an American official at the conference, his remarks had the effect of alienating many of those in his audience.
NATO forces have done some repair work to the infrastructure despite their American commanders' fear of "mission creep."
American military engineers and Hungarian contractors will complete a bridge to Croatian territory over the Sava River near Brcko by the end of this month, and German army engineering units were repairing blown-up bridges on the road between Sarajevo and Tuzla.
But Sarajevo is still a national capital without a civilian airport.
Less than six months from the elections prescribed by the peace agreement, expected to take place around Sept. 1, the pre-war census list that is to be used for voter registration has not yet been found, according to officials here. Nor has funding yet been provided for the hundreds or even thousands of international monitors needed to insure that the elections are free and fair, under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
"The peace agreement provides for refugees to have the right to vote for candidates in the districts they lived in before the war, but they are scattered all over Europe," one of Bildt's aides said. "The lists will have to be distributed to them and they have to register to vote either there or in other districts. All of this work hasn't even been started and it will all have to be completed very soon."
The elections will establish a national parliament divided among members of Bosnia's three main ethnic groups, a rotating national presidency, and separate parliaments for the Croat-Muslim federation and the Bosnian Serb republic within Bosnia.
But to many diplomats here, it is beginning to look as if real power will be held by nationalists determined to keep Muslims, Croats, and Serbs living separately.
"If things keep going the way they are," one international civil servant warned, "it will be impossible for refugees to return to areas not controlled by their own ethnic group."
All these problems -- displaced people and demobilized soldiers with no jobs, and political tensions simmering just below the boiling point -- could mean a return to limited war next year if the NATO peacekeepers all leave before civilian implementation takes hold, Bildt and other officials warn.
Making peace among themselves is primarily a task of the parties, Bildt tells them during the frequent meetings between them that he presides over. But the level of mistrust is still so great that NATO peacekeepers had to escort Bosnian Serb delegates into Sarajevo when they last met here on March 16.
A day earlier, Bildt got a taste of the mistrust himself when he went for a stroll in the Sarajevo district of Grbavica just before it was turned over to the government.
Blond and over six feet tall, he was recognized instantly in his green L.L. Bean sweater.
"Look at this identity card," said a man who had come from Serbia, handing it to Bildt at a Bosnian Serb police checkpoint. The man had been told that the government probably wouldn't let him cross the street into their territory. "Can I visit my relatives on the other side with this card?" he asked.
"Yes," Bildt answered.
"Who will guarantee it?" the man pressed.
"That's a good question," was all Bildt could answer.
The international police force is supposed to help, but less than half the 1,721 officers provided for in the peace accords are on the ground. Some of them, from Ghana, were in Grbavica, but mostly just standing around while Bosnian Serb gangs set fire to the few houses not already abandoned last week.
What was even worse, as Bildt saw it, was that the few Serbs who had had the courage to stay on in Ilidza when it was handed over a few weeks earlier had been bullied by Muslim gangs after the government took over, and government police initially did nothing to stop them.
"We are very disappointed in the behavior of the federal authorities and the federal police in Ilidza," he said, referring to the Muslim-Croat federation that now controls Sarajevo and half of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Muhammad Sacirbey, the Bosnian ambassador to the U.N., said that such criticism was unfair. "Mr. Bildt, in trying to be impartial, has become neutral to the crimes and atrocities that have been committed," he said.
For Bildt and others, the focus is on what is to come, particularly the danger of resumed fighting. The north of Bosnia is an important area of concern because of a territorial dispute between the federation and Bosnian Serbs around Brcko. The Bosnian Serbs regard a corridor south of the Sava River as an absolute necessity to link the eastern and western Serbian territories in Bosnia, but the government wants federation territory to cut through to the river. Each side is to propose a mediator apiece by June 14 and agree on a third, or accept an appointed one, soon afterward and resolve the dispute by Dec. 14, when the peacekeepers leave.
"In Brcko, all the issues that originated the conflict come together," Bildt said. "It was 52 percent Muslim before the war, but ethnic cleansing was brutal. It's nowhere near sorted out."
"If fighting does start up again after the end of this year, Brcko could easily be the place where it happens," one aide said.
