Enclaves struggle for policing agreement in Bosnia

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia — The tip was vague but promising, like so many other recent leads that had failed to pan out.

"One of the accused could be attempting to cross the border near the village of Bratunac," was the message relayed to Dragan Milosevic, chief police investigator in Republika Srpska, the Serb-governed sector of Bosnia. "The accused," Milosevic recalled in an interview, could have referred only to five Bosnian Serb fugitives charged with committing crimes against humanity during their country's 1992-95 ethnic civil war.

Milosevic and two dozen of his officers proceeded to the small farming village, where they came upon a sickly-looking man in a baseball cap, walking alone on a dirt road. They recognized him as Zdravko Tolimir, a former Bosnian Serb commander who had allegedly helped lead the massacre of as many as 8,000 Muslim prisoners at Srebrenica in July 1995.

"We asked, 'Are you the one we're looking for?' " Milosevic recalled in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska. "He didn't resist. He said, 'I am the general, but don't expect me to talk to any of you. You are my enemies, the collaborators.' He still lives in the war and thinks of us as traitors. It looked like he'd been abandoned there."

The May 31 arrest of Tolimir, who is accused of genocide and other crimes and will stand trial at a U.N. tribunal in the Hague, was hailed by international officials and Bosnia's Srpska government as a breakthrough in the hunt for wartime fugitives.

But critics of the Srpska police force continue to accuse it of failing to hunt war criminals aggressively, perhaps at the behest of Serbia, the ethnic homeland next door. Some Bosnian Muslim politicians say Serbia is seeking to run out the clock on the tribunal, whose mandate for commencing new trials expires next year, though it could be renewed.

Twelve years after the end of the war, four key Bosnian Serb fugitives remain at large, including the two most-wanted: Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader, and his army's commander, Ratko Mladic.

The 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war divided the country into two ethnic enclaves and gave each the right to police itself. Now, creation of a single multiethnic police force has become the biggest stumbling block in Bosnia's quest to join the European Union. Talks among Bosnia's factions resumed this month in advance of an upcoming deadline to produce a policing agreement that can be presented to European officials this year.

"I am not optimistic," said Raffi Gregorian, deputy high representative of foreign parties to the Dayton accords, when asked about the prospects for an agreement. "And that means we're on hold another year before we get the process going again."

A compromise proposal that Gregorian's office has put forward in recent weeks has been criticized by Muslim and Serb leaders. The Muslims, who control an ethnic zone known as the Federation and play a primary role in Bosnia's national government because Muslims are the country's largest ethnic group, would like to abolish the Srpska police in favor of a more nationalized force. They say many of the Srpska force's members are war criminals.

"Keeping the Srpska police intact is like allowing the Gestapo to police Holocaust victims," said Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim representative in the country's three-pronged presidency. "We need a multiethnic police force because such forces do not commit massacres."

Bosnian Serbs say their minority status leaves them vulnerable and in need of their own security force. Their leaders say they would rather forgo a place in the European Union than their 7,000-member police contingent. While they have rejected calls to change the name of the force, Republika Srpska Police, they have agreed to swap its wartime eagle logo for one with no connotations, which would leave many officers without their trademark hats while the switch is completed.

"We believe we have already given a lot of concessions on these security issues that are not required under Dayton," said Srpska's prime minister, Milorad Dodik, referring to the formation of a national army and intelligence service. "We have survived 15 deadlines for agreements, and if we do not meet this one, we'll survive as well."

Karadzic and Mladic are widely believed to enjoy protection from officials in Serbia and Srpska. For years, they flaunted their lack of concern about arrest by appearing in public. More recently, they have kept a lower profile, but sightings continue. One report had Karadzic in Russia; the Russian Embassy in Sarajevo quickly denied it.

Gregorian said Srpska police have cooperated more in recent years with international efforts to track the two men. The force is "currently helping shut down their support networks inside Bosnia," he said in a recent interview. "Could they do more? Yes. But the real problem is Serbia. Mladic is generally believed to be in Serbia, and Karadzic's last known location was Belgrade. If they wanted to find these guys, all it would take was a phone call or two."