The women of Srebrenica were out in force last week. Demonstrating in Tuzla, near the headquarters of U.S. troops in Bosnia, they demanded to know the fate of their men and boys. For once, they could not be ignored. Suddenly the issue of alleged Serbian war crimes threatened to stall the entire Bosnian peace process.
Last month Bosnia’s Muslim-dominated government arrested 10 Serb soldiers, claiming they were suspected of war crimes. The international war-crimes tribunal in The Hague said it would investigate the two senior soldiers, a general and a colonel, and might indict them. In an effort to get the men released, the military commander of the Bosnian Serbs, Gen. Ratko Mladic, ordered his forces to cut off all contacts with the NATO units implementing the Dayton peace agreement. If it holds, the boycott could prevent the parties from resolving crucial remaining issues, including postwar political arrangements. That, in turn, could even delay the withdrawal of some U.S. forces from Bosnia.
Until now, the military implementation of the peace agreement has been going well. NEWSWEEK has learned that Adm. Leighton Smith, the NATO commander in Bosnia, told U.S. officials it may be possible to withdraw some American units as early as next May. But not if the Dayton accord is in shreds. So last week the chief negotiator of that agreement, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, who plans to leave the Clinton administration soon, was sent once more into the Bosnian breach.
He wasn’t the only major player to suddenly reappear on the stage. Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic had been lying low since Dayton. Like Mladic, he was under indictment for war crimes and on the outs with Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, the principal patron of the Bosnian Serbs. Under the terms of the Dayton accord, NATO troops were supposed to arrest Karadzic on sight. But last week, apparently hoping to show he was still in charge, he drove out in an ostentatious motorcade, breezing past American and other NATO troops. He denied any involvement in war crimes (box). Later he and other Bosnian Serb political leaders said they would resume contacts with NATO, but it wasn’t known if Mladic would agree.
NATO commanders in Bosnia weren’t eager to arrest either Serb leader. They worried that Justice Richard Goldstone, the head of the war-crimes tribunal, wanted to expand their mission into dangerous territory, sending them on the Bosnian equivalent of a hunt for Somali warlords. It is one of the internal contradictions of the Dayton agreement that, in order to separate the warring parties, NATO forces have to work cooperatively with Serb authorities and, at the same time, arrest their top leaders for war crimes. Adding new names to the list didn’t help, and the pressure wasn’t eased much late in the week when the Bosnian government released four of the detained officers, but not the general and the colonel. A NATO officer complained that the tribunal’s ““moral crusade is premature and very damaging to the peace process. It is making things very difficult for us,’’ he said.
But the Clinton administration wasn’t going to let up on war criminals, perhaps in part because it felt a bit guilty about Dayton’s de facto partition of Bosnia. John Shattuck, the assistant secretary of state for human rights, persuaded Milosevic to get him a look at some of the massacre sites around Srebrenica. He came away horrified – and convinced from the scope of the killings that they could not have been random acts of violence by individual soldiers. A European diplomat says the resources commanded by the Serb execution teams suggests ““complicity going right to the top.''
Holbrooke’s job, on perhaps his last mission to Bosnia, was to make sure that the search for war criminals doesn’t derail other parts of a complex peace plan. ““We are not going to tolerate any challenges to the success of the Dayton agreements,’’ he said after Secretary of State Warren Christopher sent him back to the Balkans. In the past, Holbrooke succeeded by focusing on Milosevic, who has leverage on the Bosnian Serbs and is eager to escape the ruinous economic sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia. As a signer in Dayton, Milosevic is also obligated to arrest Karadzic and Mladic if they venture onto his territory, as they seem to have done recently. Sources said the United States and its allies would warn Milosevic that if he wanted to shed his status as an international pariah, he would have to join in the hot pursuit of war criminals. It may be asking a lot of him to hand over his former henchmen, but at least he could stop giving them sanctuary.
