In Bosnia, Perry Fails to Quell Abduction Flap

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  Secretary of Defense William J. Perry walked across the new Sava River pontoon bridge Wednesday and praised the American deployment in Bosnia, but he was unable to quell controversy over Serbian abductions of civilians near Sarajevo.

After talking with U.S. soldiers during a morale-boosting tour, Perry said he is optimistic about the long-term prospects for peace in Bosnia. But he insisted it is not the job of the NATO-led peacekeeping force to ensure that civilians can move freely about the country. Freedom of movement is a cornerstone provision of the Dayton, Ohio, peace accord.

Perry’s comments came as the Bosnian Serbs threatened to put on trial some of the 16 non-Serbs they have seized in the last 11 days and as the U.S. State Department demanded the captives’ immediate release.

“I want to be clear that IFOR [the NATO-led Implementation Force] is not ignoring this problem, but I also want to make clear that this is not a function for which IFOR is here,” Perry told reporters at the Tuzla airfield, the largest U.S. base in Bosnia.

Perry’s daylong trip to Bosnia took him first to Sarajevo, the capital, where he met with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and discussed the Serbian kidnappings, and then to the Sava River, where he walked from Croatia to Bosnia over the pontoon bridge completed Sunday by American troops.

Perry shook hands with soldiers as he crossed the bridge and, in an impromptu ceremony mid-span, reenlisted Sgt. Charles Kidwell, 33, of Springfield, Ky., for another four-year tour of duty.

“We have made far more progress than any of us thought possible, and it has gone much more smoothly than any of us had hoped,” Perry said later. “This has been a very, very successful, very effective mission.”

Arriving two weeks after the NATO-led force officially took over, Perry acknowledged such problems as the wounding of an American soldier by a land mine, delays in building the bridge and the kidnapping of civilians.

But he said all the formerly warring factions have welcomed the peacekeeping force and are attempting to fulfill the terms of the Dayton peace agreement more quickly than he had expected.

“It makes me optimistic about the future of Bosnia,” he said. “It makes me believe that the parties here are sick of war, are sick of killing, are ready to put the hatred behind them and are ready to start rebuilding the country.”

The secretary--accompanied by Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. Army Gen. George A. Joulwan, NATO supreme commander--said he was pleased by the high spirits of the troops he met in Bosnia and at bases he visited in Italy and Hungary on Tuesday.

“I guess the best way to characterize the American soldiers that I met today and yesterday is that they have true grit,” he said. “My overwhelming reaction as secretary of defense is great pride in the American military.”

Nevertheless, for the NATO-led force, the detention of the civilians is the thorniest political problem it has encountered so far. After meeting with Izetbegovic, Perry said NATO officials would soon take action to solve the problem, but he declined to elaborate.

Meanwhile, the Bosnian Serbs remained defiant. Rebuffing appeals from senior NATO commanders, they threatened to try some of the 16 Bosnian citizens who were yanked from their cars as they attempted to drive through a Serb-held Sarajevo suburb. The motorists had ventured down the main highway out of Sarajevo after NATO peace forces said they had made it safe under terms of the Bosnian peace agreement.

A full five days after first receiving reports of civilians being captured by Serbian gunmen and police, senior IFOR commanders Wednesday took a public interest in the growing controversy and pressed Bosnian Serb authorities to release the detainees.

British Lt. Gen. Michael Walker, head of IFOR ground forces in Bosnia, met with the mayor of Ilidza, the suburb where the civilians were abducted, for an hour and a half. But he received no promises that the detainees, most of whom are Muslim men, would be freed.

Instead, the mayor, Nedjeljko Prstojevic, labeled the Bosnians “spies and terrorists” and said some will be prosecuted. Several, he said, were apprehended in military uniforms, had been caught on “unauthorized” routes or had engaged in smuggling black-market gasoline.

NATO says there are no authorized or unauthorized routes. And the roadside selling of black-market gasoline is a common practice in Ilidza and elsewhere.

In contrast to public NATO statements all week, Walker appeared to concede that freedom of movement had been seriously impaired by the abductions.

“We have discussed how we can resolve this in order to prevent it [from] becoming an impediment to the peace-agreement implementation,” Walker said after emerging from his meeting with Prstojevic. “The situation is [that] the mayor quite understands freedom of movement, and that this is clearly not the case here. He knows that.”

Perry, like other American officials here, continued to argue that the detention of civilians is “fundamentally a law-enforcement problem.”

“This is a function for a police force, not a function in the first instance for the NATO force,” he said.

A 1,500-member international police force, agreed to under the Dayton accord, is “several weeks” from being set up, Perry added. In the absence of such a force, U.S. Navy Adm. Leighton W. Smith, commander of all NATO forces in Bosnia, will provide “some interim assistance” until the police force is established, Perry said.

“I don’t want to describe the action,” Perry said. “I will tell you, though, that Adm. Smith is very much in tune with the problem. He has discussed it with the Bosnian government and does have a course of action underway.”

The police force will be overseen by the Office of the High Representative, the chief administrator in charge of implementing a long list of civilian elements of the Dayton accord. But the police and the rest of the civilian agenda have lagged behind the military side, with the high representative, Carl Bildt, arriving in Sarajevo just Wednesday night.

IFOR has been shifting responsibility for the safety of civilians to Bildt’s operation, and Bildt on Wednesday night shifted responsibility to the warring parties.

The State Department, meanwhile, demanded the immediate release of the abducted civilians and said it is protesting the matter all the way to Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, who signed the peace agreement on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs.

Despite the intervention of Walker and others, IFOR spokesmen in Sarajevo continued to downplay the abductions as common crimes--even as evidence mounted that they are part of a campaign to intimidate Sarajevans, who are beginning to emerge from 43 months under siege.

Col. Vladimir Rybnikov, head of the 34-member U.N. civilian police force in Sarajevo, said a Bosnian Serb official confirmed the detention and whereabouts of 10 people, added two more to the list who were identified as Serbs loyal to the Bosnian government, and said another six were being held in undetermined locations. This would bring to 18 the total being held.

Rybnikov said the Serbian official told him that the detainees will be held for a prisoner exchange and were taken in retaliation for two incidents last year in which five Serbs were arrested, tried and convicted on espionage charges in Sarajevo.

In addition, Rybnikov said, the Serbian official claimed that three of the men were government army officers, although a government official argued that few army officers would risk taking the road through Ilidza, a bastion of hard-line Serbian nationalism that is scheduled to revert to Muslim-Croat government control under the peace agreement.

In Ilidza on Wednesday, as in days past, knots of Bosnian Serb police stood beside the road carefully eyeing the license plates of passing cars. Bosnian license plates identify whether a car comes from government-held or Serb-held territory.

The Ilidza road is seen as a sort of lifeline for the city, which was surrounded and relentlessly shelled by Bosnian Serb gunmen through much of the war.

The Serbian abductions will discourage travelers and undermine the trust that was slowly building among the people of Sarajevo, diplomats said. Past peace pacts in Bosnia have been destroyed when one side or the other tested the enforcers--who were then U.N. troops--with violations that were tolerated.

“It is not the strategic importance of the Ilidza road that is at stake,” said one Western diplomat. “What is at stake here is the perceived ability of IFOR to deal with attempts to erode freedom of movement.”

Yet veteran diplomats cautioned that the IFOR mission seemed to underestimate the broader significance of the abductions and the fear created by them.

“IFOR has a point--it can’t guarantee the security of every Bosnian who has courage enough to drive through Ilidza,” said a U.N. official with extensive experience in Bosnia. “But it is a mistake to treat this as a crime, because this is obviously condoned by the authorities.

“These are not freak incidents--this is policy. These guys are always trying to see what they can get away with.”

Paddock reported from Tuzla, Wilkinson from Sarajevo.