June 15, 1996

Where Bosnian Serbs Loosed Terror, Fear Still Rules

By MIKE O'CONNOR

ESLIC, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- At 9:30 Friday morning, just as the U.S. ambassador to Bosnia was setting out on a five-hour round trip to this Bosnian Serb town for the sole purpose of meeting him, Rade Pavlovic told his secretary that he had been called to Serbia on an emergency and would return next week.

Many in this town consider Pavlovic the bravest of the moderate Bosnian Serbs for his persistent defense of the few remaining Croats and Muslims here, and his public calls for a democratic political system to replace the government of Dr. Radovan Karadzic. But Pavlovic did not mention to his secretary the appointment he had with the ambassador, John Menzies.

On his way out of the state-owned factory, where he is the director, he told the guard at the front desk he was only going to a restaurant and would be right back. Instead, he drove home.

He told his wife he had been hit with a sudden painful headache and was going to a doctor in a town nearby.

With that, Pavlovic slipped from sight Friday.

It was precisely because of Pavlovic's record as a defender of what the United States says it is trying to assist in Bosnia that Menzies said he was making the trip to meet him. "We want to help the people who have the courage to build a multicultural democracy," he said.

It was thought that by meeting him there would be a sort of mantle of protection and some encouragement for Pavlovic and others like him here, because people in Teslic say that opposing the authorities can be dangerous and lonely.

In the U.S. delegation was also the director of U.S. aid projects in Bosnia who had come to discuss what could be done to help Pavlovic's factory, as well as other projects he might suggest.

But Pavlovic's apparent fear of meeting the ambassador shows the depth of the problem that confronts Bosnia's many moderate Serbs, highlighting the inadequacy of the attempts to insure peace by fostering an open society.

This town had become a special case for the international organizations in Bosnia. It was here last month that Muslims were terrorized into fleeing their homes, for the first time anywhere in Bosnia since the war stopped.

It was here, according to U.N. officials and diplomats sent to oversee the Dayton peace agreement, that efforts would be redoubled to insure that people felt safe, and the political climate would be fair for elections expected in the fall.

Despite the attention, Croats as well as Muslims are now being dismissed from their jobs in state-owned factories, and the effort to terrorize Muslims into leaving continues, according to U.N. reports and frightened leaders of minority groups here.

Now, even moderate Serbs who are critical of officials are targets. The vice president of a the local branch of an opposition party said Friday that he would talk about anything except politics. "Politics has brought me too much trouble lately," he said.

Reciting a list of beatings and assaults on homes with hand grenades and gunfire, the head of the local Red Cross office, a Bosnian Serb, said: "The first targets were the minorities. Now anyone who opposes an extremist ideology is the enemy."

The response to the intimidation has been inadequate, diplomats and international aid officials acknowledge.

"The same sort of terror could be occurring in many other places too, but we could easily not know," said an official in the office that oversees civilian aspects of the Dayton agreement. The official said it was only through press reports that the problems here became public.