Roadblocks to Peace Keep Cropping Up in Bosnia

For the third time in less than a week, the most senior international officials in charge of peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina were struggling to force the Bosnian Serbs to dismantle illegal police checkpoints.

As the meeting dragged on, Bosnian Serb Interior Minister Dragan Kijac refused. And no one, not even the American general in charge of 32,000 NATO-led troops, could change Kijac’s mind.

They agreed to meet the next day for further negotiation. But that night, Bosnian Serb radio declared that the illegal roadblocks would not be removed.

In many ways, that meeting last week in Banja Luka was a metaphor for the 18-month-old peace process in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“For every step forward, we seem to go eight backward,” one international peacekeeper said.

As U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright begins a trip to the region this weekend, obstructionism from all sides is preventing agreement on any of the major actions necessary to rebuild and reunite this country after 3 1/2 years of war. And international mediators are increasingly stymied and ineffective.

Bosnian leaders still cannot agree on a central bank, a single currency or a national telephone system. Key ambassadorial posts sit empty. There is no single Bosnian passport. Scarcely any of the “joint institutions,” in which Muslim, Serbian and Croatian members are supposed to govern together, are working.

“Without these institutions,” said Carl Bildt, the civilian administrator of the Bosnia peace accords, “there is a risk that the partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina could become permanent, thus endangering peace and stability in the country and in the region in the years ahead.”

Bildt blames “creeping secession” by Bosnian Serb and Croat nationalists who run their portions of Bosnia like private, ethnically pure fiefdoms.

Undermining efforts to unite the country, the Bosnian Serb half of Bosnia recently signed a “special parallel relationship” agreement with neighboring Yugoslavia.

Bosnian Croats have a similar deal with Croatia.

The Muslims too are coming under increasing criticism; Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim co-chair of the joint Council of Ministers, has repeatedly refused to sign legislation that would get the government moving. Diplomats say the Muslims are loath to share the little power they have.

The U.S.-brokered peace agreement, drafted amid much fanfare in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, formally ended the war a month later and ushered in the largest-ever military undertaking by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Scaled down a year ago, the military mission today includes about 8,500 U.S. troops, who make up a fourth of the NATO-led force.

Although the fighting ended, all other elements of the peace agreement have faltered.

Worried about the possible collapse of what they regard as a foreign-policy triumph, Clinton administration officials last week announced a campaign to breathe life into the peace plan. Albright travels to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, and other Balkan cities this weekend.

But the American announcements contained nothing concrete that was new. Furthermore, the staggering process could receive a fatal blow when former Swedish Prime Minister Bildt and his highly regarded deputy, Michael Steiner of Germany, are replaced next month.

The two envoys, who are the senior civilians in charge of executing the peace plan, are to be replaced by diplomats of lesser political clout and with little knowledge of Bosnia, diplomatic sources say.

While frustration is breeding apathy among world powers, it is giving rise to increasingly open talk of a new war.

The frustration runs particularly deep on the Muslim side, where many people believe that they have given up the most to gain the least.

Under the Dayton agreement, the Bosnian Serbs won much of what they most wanted--their own ministate. The goals sought by the Muslims, such as justice and the return home of refugees, remain far out of reach.

The Muslim-Croat army is being trained and equipped by the United States and a group of Islamic nations, and it may become more powerful than the weakened Bosnian Serb army.

Headlines in Sarajevo newspapers announce “Funeral for Dayton.” Callers to a recent phone-in program on the popular Zid radio station spoke of betrayal and chastised international mediators for failing to execute the peace agreement.

“If there isn’t any movement soon,” said Mirza Hajric, senior advisor to Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, “there is a serious danger of the frustration growing ugly.”

The checkpoint meeting last week in Banja Luka illustrated another fundamental problem.

The hard-line and especially recalcitrant Interior Minister Kijac, according to Western sources, reports directly to Radovan Karadzic, an indicted war crimes suspect who continues to run the Bosnian Serb republic despite U.S. efforts to sideline him.

At the meeting, Kijac was openly dismissive of the Bosnian Serb republic’s nominal president, Biljana Plavsic. Kijac has also threatened to double the Bosnian Serb police force to up to 50,000 men, and he refused to submit his police to the vetting required by U.N. monitors in the contested, volatile city of Brcko.

Despite new pledges by Clinton administration officials to crack down on war criminals, Karadzic and almost 70 other indicted suspects live openly in freedom.