May 24, 1996

U.S. Calls Effort to Oust Top Serbs a Failure

By CHRIS HEDGES

ARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The United States and its NATO allies have failed in an effort to remove from power the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders who have been indicted for war crimes.

While insisting that the West would continue to press for the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, several senior Western officials said they would probably end up accepting an arrangement under which both continued to wield power in Bosnia.

Allowing the two men to retain power would violate a central tenet of the Bosnia peace plan brokered last year by the United States, and would threaten Bosnia's elections, scheduled for September. The Bosnian government said this week that without the arrest of the two men, it would not agree to go forward with elections and the chief U.N. prosecutor of war crimes said the failure to arrest them threatened the fragile peace in Bosnia.

In talks on Wednesday in Belgrade, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia proposed an arrangement under which Karadzic would shed his formal duties, disappear from public view, cease making public statements, and stay away from government and parliament meetings. Mladic has essentially been operating under the same rules, with some recent exceptions such as his attendence at a funeral in Belgrade this week.

Milosevic told the Western officials that Karadzic had accepted the plan.

The American envoy attending the meeting, John Kornblum, who has been selected to be the next assistant secretary of state for European affairs, flatly rejected this proposal, senior Clinton administration officials in Washington said. And they said they were skeptical about whether Karadzic would comply even with its limited terms.

But Carl Bildt, the top civilian administrator of the peace accord and an influential figure among European countries, expressed more interest in the concept, according to Western officials.

"There is absolutely no deal," a senior administration official in Washington said on Thursday. "Kornblum told him this is not enough, that we want to see Karadzic gone and tried as a war criminal."

Kornblum said at a press conference on Thursday that the United States remains committed to the original goals of the peace accord it brokered last year in Dayton, Ohio. That agreement calls for all sides to remove indicted war criminals from power and turn them over to the Hague tribunal for trial. "The Republic of Srbska," he said, "must understand that they are required to follow the Dayton agreement."

But several Western officials familiar with the meeting in Belgrade said that Kornblum and Bildt were privately pessimistic about getting more than the deal Milosovic proposed.

The Clinton administration, which plays a dominant role in NATO planning, has adamantly refused to use military force to back up that sentiment. NATO forces have not been dispatched to arrest accused war criminals, American officials say, out of fears this would provoke combat with Bosnian Serb forces and risk American soldiers' lives.

At the meeting on Wednesday with Milosevic, Bildt turned down an offer from the speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament, Momcilo Krajisnik to have the arrangement put in writing, fearing that it would appear that the officials who made the arrangement were compromising on the Western alliance's stated aim of seeing Karadzic arrested and brought to justice.

"We can never be certain that any of this will be implemented," said Bildt in an interview, who has pressed for the arrangement in the last few days.

The arrangement proposed by Milosevic would not require Karadzic to give up power publicly. And American and European officials said that he could use the phone and hold informal meetings to retain control. Indeed, these officials concede that in recent days Karadzic promoted loyal lieutenants -- whom a senior western official called "stooges" -- with no standing within the party, the police or the military, the three pillars of power in the Serbian republic within Bosnia.

Even so, Western diplomats said a resolution roughly along these outlines may be the only formula left that would allow the Sept. 14 Bosnian elections to take place. They said failure to hold elections would mean the collapse of the Dayton peace agreement. And, faced with a choice between collapse, and holding elections while Karadzic and Mladic still exercised control, the officials chose the later.

"It has been distasteful," said a senior western diplomat, "but the only choice left."

The elections are important because they are intended to create joint executive and legislative structures that will eventually, if the peace agreement works, unify Bosnia under a single government. The failure to establish such joint structures will mean that the current partition lines will become permanent, something many here contend will lead to another round of fighting.

"Our criteria now is to hold free and fair elections," Kornblum added, "not establish a fully functioning liberal democracy before the elections are held."

He went on to say that the elections were "the starting point of the process, not the end point."

Such a deal would clearly be a defeat for the countries that have worked to arrange a Bosnian peace.

American and western officials mounted a vigorous campaign to force Karadzic and Mladic from office in recent weeks, making numerous trips to Belgrade to ask Milosevic for help and handing out pictures of indicted war criminals to soldiers who might run across the Bosnian Serb leaders.

"Now," said a European diplomat, "everyone seems to have given up. They recognize that Karadzic and Mladic are probably here to stay, so they have accepted to live with them."

Maldic, who sends faxes and messages, and even calls NATO commanders several times a week, maintains a firm grip on the army, although he rarely appears in public.

This week, however, he was in Belgrade to attend the funeral of a Bosnian Serb general, and was shown on Serbian television at the grave site. When American officials protested to Milosevic they were told by the Serbian president that "funerals are very important to Serbs," said diplomats present at the meeting.

These officials said that Milosevic, clearly reluctant to actually confront Karadzic and oust him from power, has shown no interest in taking on Mladic. Mladic, they said, could probably spell out in detail Milosevic's role in fomenting and directing the war against the Muslims and the Croats in Bosnia. And such information, if given to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, would make it hard not to indict Milosevic as a war criminal as well, they said.

Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Walker, the commander of all ground forces in Bosnia, said he was permitted, under the Dayton accord, to speak with Mladic over the phone, "because we do not speak directly with him but through an interpreter."

He added that nearly all messages concerning cooperation with the NATO-led force and communiques from the Bosnian Serb army were signed by Mladic.