U.S. Trouble-Shooter Elicits Promises in Balkans

In the latest American attempt to salvage the Bosnian peace accords, trouble-shooter Richard Holbrooke on Wednesday secured new promises from two Balkan presidents to live up to their end of the bargain.

Holbrooke, the architect of the plan that ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Robert Gelbard, President Clinton’s special Bosnia coordinator, extracted the promises in more than eight hours of negotiations at a seaside villa in this Adriatic port. Nearly all of the pledges have been made before--and not kept.

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic agreed to a timetable of deadlines on some refugee returns, border posts, civil aviation and other hurdles that have dogged Muslim-Croat relations for months.

“It’s a step forward, but we’re not going to pretend this will end the problems,” Holbrooke said of a 10-point agreement that emerged from the talks. “Will we have the games we’ve had in the past? We’ll see.”

Pulling Holbrooke out of diplomatic retirement to resuscitate the accords that he brokered in the fall of 1995 reflected mounting alarm in Washington over slow progress in Bosnia. U.S. officials have been expressing displeasure that basic tenets of the peace plan, including the return of refugees and the prosecution of suspected war criminals, have not been carried out.

U.S. officials are clearly aware that what they had considered a foreign policy success--peace in Bosnia--could swiftly deteriorate into an embarrassing and violent failure. The more than 8,000 U.S. troops who form part of a NATO-led peacekeeping force are scheduled to begin withdrawing from Bosnia next year.

Holbrooke began a four-day swing through the Balkans with Wednesday’s meeting here in Croatia. On Friday he will face the main target of his mission: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

U.S. officials say they are taking a more vigorous approach with the Balkan leaders, who routinely flout elements of the peace accords. Last month, troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the first time moved against war crimes suspects, arresting one and killing another, and the United States and a dozen European countries this week froze diplomatic ties with Sarajevo as punishment for Bosnia’s failure to name postwar ambassadors.

Asked why deadlines that have been repeatedly ignored in the past might be respected now, one senior U.S. official said that Washington, with new support from its British and German allies, was now prepared to use “every bit of conditionality, every bit of leverage we have.”

Croatia, for example, has been told that $70 million in loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will be blocked until it agrees to hand over war crimes suspects.

“If they don’t carry out [their pledges], there will be penalties--we’ve made that very clear,” Gelbard said. “None of the parties can afford to miss the benchmarks anymore.”

Whether real cooperation will follow remains to be seen. Izetbegovic, speaking to reporters, said the Americans may have “overestimated” the speed with which refugee returns and other divisive issues can be resolved.

Tudjman and Izetbegovic apparently hoped to preempt the American delegation by issuing their own weak joint statement before Holbrooke and Gelbard arrived in Split. It vowed to “accelerate” execution of the peace accords but contained nothing concrete. Holbrooke and Gelbard, seeing the statement upon arrival, insisted on a host of specifics.

Conspicuously absent from the original statement was any mention of Jajce, a city in the Croat-controlled portion of Bosnia, where hundreds of returning Muslims were violently driven from their homes this week by angry, drunken Bosnian Croat mobs, as Bosnian Croat police watched. One Muslim was killed.

And last week, Muslims attacked a small group of Serbs attempting to visit their prewar homes in the Sarajevo suburb of Vogosca.

In the statement drafted by Holbrooke and Gelbard, the two Balkan presidents condemned the violence in Jajce and Vogosca and agreed to investigations by Aug. 17.

The later statement also contained a pledge by Tudjman, once again, to “do his utmost” to surrender Croatian war crimes suspects “on an urgent basis.” He has so far refused to hand over the most prominent indictee, Dario Kordic, wanted in the massacre of Muslims in central Bosnia, despite the fact that his whereabouts are known.

Holbrooke’s mission has riled other international officials working on peace in Bosnia--especially after a senior Clinton administration official took the unusual step of issuing a pointed criticism of Carlos Westendorp, a Spanish diplomat who recently replaced Carl Bildt as the international community’s chief peace coordinator in Bosnia.

The American official complained that Westendorp is not spending enough time in Bosnia and is moving too slowly. Aides to Westendorp, who was on vacation this week, countered that the Americans, divided in their own resolve toward Bosnia, were attempting to claim credit for flashy but empty agreements. Authentic progress, they said, is achieved only after painstaking work by international officials on the ground.

For Holbrooke, however, the main target is Milosevic, whom U.S. officials accuse of reneging on numerous elements of the peace accords that he signed on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs. They hope to pressure Milosevic into surrendering Radovan Karadzic, former Bosnian Serb leader and the Serbs’ most prominent war crimes suspect, and into giving more overt support to Biljana Plavsic, president of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity, who is challenging Karadzic.

Under the peace accords, Bosnia is divided into a Serbian half and a Muslim-Croat half joined loosely in a single state that still has no functioning shared institutions or trappings, such as a common currency or passports. Tudjman, as president of neighboring Croatia, holds enormous influence over the Bosnian Croats. Izetbegovic, a Muslim, chairs Bosnia’s three-man presidency.