July 1, 1996
Bosnian Serb Offers Puzzle: Is He Out or In?
By CHRIS HEDGES
OSTAR, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The senior civilian administrator for the Bosnia peace accord announced Sunday that Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had resigned.
But the statement was denied by Bosnian Serbs, leaving open the possibility of renewed international sanctions against Serbia.
The administrator, Carl Bildt, said he had received a letter of resignation from Karadzic, who has been indicted for war crimes by the international tribunal in The Hague. But Western diplomats who saw the letter said it was vague and did not include a firm commitment to relinquish power.
This was the second time in two months that Bildt's office announced that it had secured a promise by Karadzic to step down.
A senior Western diplomat called the episode embarrassing.
"As usual the Bosnian Serbs are playing around, promising one thing and doing another," the diplomat said. "This has been the pattern of the Bosnian Serb leadership throughout the war. We should have learned by now."
Bildt said Karadzic had turned over power to his deputy, Biljana Plavsic.
But Mrs. Plavsic told reporters Sunday in Pale, the Bosnian Serb headquarters, that Karadzic would remain in office until the Bosnian national elections are held on Sept. 14.
Under the peace agreement, reached in Dayton, Ohio, late last year, Karadzic is not permitted to hold office, and international mediators have called for him to be removed from power, or at least pushed into the shadows, during the election campaign.
Bildt's office in Sarajevo, which said it was disappointed by the Bosnian Serb reaction, said Saturday that Karadzic had been presented with a deadline of July 1 to resign.
Bildt, who also said in May that he had secured Karadzic's resignation, has the authority under the Dayton accord to recommend the reimposition of U.N. sanctions against Serbia; he and many others say Serbia has not cooperated in trying to oust Karadzic.
After the May reversal, Bildt refused to maintain ties with Mrs. Plavsic, who had just been appointed the Bosnian Serbs' negotiator with the international community. He said she lacked independence from Karadzic.
Saturday, Karadzic was re-elected president of the dominant Bosnian Serb political party, a signal of continued defiance. As party president, he wields enormous influence, even if he resigns as president of the Bosnian Serb republic.
As the row simmered over the future of the Bosnian Serb leader, the divided city of Mostar held municipal elections under the auspices of the European Union, the first free elections in Bosnia since the Dayton accord. Some 2,500 French and Spanish troops and hundreds of local police officers and international monitors lined the streets and surrounded the 77 polling stations to prevent incidents.
Muslims, Croats and Serbs filed back to old neighborhoods -- many for the first time since they were forced out by the war -- to cast ballots for a City Council that is intended to reunify the city.
And although the voting passed without major incidents, it appeared that the nationalist Croats, who control western Mostar, and the nationalist Muslims, who control eastern Mostar, would remain in power. Final results are to be announced Tuesday.
Sirens pealed through the city late Saturday night after a group of toughs in eastern Mostar beat two middle-aged Serbs as they got off a bus that had brought them from Serbia for the election, police said. A television cameraman filming the attack was knocked down and beaten.
Sunday some Serbs and Muslims were greeted in western Mostar with jeers and insults, others with icy silence and a few with warm greetings from old neighbors.
At 7 a.m. Sunday, Vinko Martinovic, an ethnic Croat, arrived at his tavern in time for the opening of a polling station across the street. He waited until the first busload of Muslims climbed out to stand in line along the sidewalk, and then he began to play, at high volume, a song called "Here Comes the Dawn, Here Comes the Day," which glorifies the fascist regime that ruled Croatia during World War II.
"They have the east and we have the west," he shouted above the music, "and this election is not going to change that. They should all go home."
One Muslim, Hazira Habul, 56, clutched the hand of her 2-year-old granddaughter as she walked past the tavern, her eyes damp with tears.
"This was our home," she said, glancing towards an apartment block, "but we are too scared to enter. We will vote and go back to the east side. This will be two cities for a long time."
