[NYTr] Fractured Bosnia Struggles to Form Police Force for All

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Washington Post - Sep 16, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/15/AR2007091500895_pf.html


Fractured Bosnia Struggles to Form Police Force for All

Serb Sector's Hunt for Wartime Fugitives Falls Short, 
Bringing Calls for Change

By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service

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 pursue 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," Raffi Gregorian, deputy high representative of
foreign parties to the Dayton accords, said 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 both 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 members of the Srpska force
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 E.U. 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."

The Srpska government earned praise from international officials this
summer for cooperating with efforts to suspend 35 Srpska policemen
while an investigation is conducted into their possible role in the
Srebrenica massacre. "They came to us with a list, and we complied,"
said Milosevic, the chief police investigator. "But it is my strong
belief that all of these men will be exonerated."

Hunting down the remaining war criminals, international officials here
said, would help the Srpska police demonstrate that they have the good
of the country in mind, rather than merely the interests of the Serb
population.

Karadzic and Mladic are widely believed to enjoy protection from
officials in both 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 Elvis-type sightings continue. One
report had Karadzic in Russia; the Russian Embassy in Sarajevo quickly
denied it.

Gregorian said that 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."

A spokesman for the Serbian government declined to respond to
Gregorian's remarks. Supporters of the men in Serbia, however, say the
fugitives are farther afield. "As far as I know, both of the
most-wanted men are not in the Balkans, perhaps in one of the former
Soviet republics," said Kosta Cavoski, a law professor at Belgrade
University and head of an organization called the Committee for the
Truth about Radovan Karadzic, which argues that the fugitives should
not be prosecuted.

The Srpska police say they conduct regular operations to find the
fugitives and people who harbor and support them, and are starting to
turn up pressure on their families to provide information. The main
force carrying out such operations is the Special Police Unit, based on
a guarded campus west of Banja Luka. Srpska flags, but no Bosnian
national flags, fly throughout the facility.

With more resources than ordinary police -- including frogmen, trained
mountain climbers, armored vehicles and a helicopter -- the 111-member
unit carries out raids based on intelligence gathered by Bosnian and
international agencies.

Twice in January 2006, the force deployed more than 40 officers after
receiving intelligence on where Mladic might be hiding, staking out and
raiding homes in Bratunac and Zepa. Both times the police came up
empty. In another operation, they sent four surveillance specialists to
a monastery in Petrovo but found no evidence Mladic had ever been
there. Another tip resulted in a team scaling a rock face to search
caves. Again, nothing.

"There is sometimes bad information, but anyone who says we are not
looking is not paying attention," said Krajnovic Pedgrag, the special
police unit's commander. "If there is ever a chance to arrest someone
for war crimes, this unit will do its job."

Milosevic, of the investigative branch, said the most fruitful tactic
recently has been pressuring the fugitives' relatives.

"There is a law that treats family members as helpers in the crimes,"
Milosevic said. "Every day we are at their doorstep, pressing them,
taking them to police stations to be interrogated, searching their
homes, their friends and acquaintances. We can make their lives
miserable. We can block their accounts, seize their property."

Cavoski, the law professor, said that he visits regularly with
Karadzic's family and that they are "in terrible condition."

"Only two out of nine are working because they are so harassed," he
said.

The most recent step against family members, Milosevic said, was the
seizure of a gas station owned by the family of Stojan Zupljanin, who
has been charged with genocide for his role as operational commander of
the Srpska police during the war.

"We are very close to him and closing in," Milosevic said. "We have
information that he is living like a beast in the countryside or like a
peasant in the fields. He is here, and his connections to Serbia have
been cut. Even his family is against him. It is certain he will be
arrested soon."

© 2007 The Washington Post