In Shift, NATO Moves to Rein In Bosnian Police

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  NATO has ordered paramilitary police forces in Bosnia, including those guarding indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, to submit to its control within a week, Western officials said Friday.

The order appears to signal a crackdown on the notorious police units that have blocked refugee returns, threatened NATO and U.N. personnel and harbored people accused of committing atrocities during Bosnia’s 3 1/2-year war. It came amid a flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at salvaging the shaky peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, underlined by the presence of U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the accords that ended the war here 20 months ago.

On Friday, Holbrooke traveled to Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, for a long dinner meeting with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Earlier in the day, he met with Biljana Plavsic, the president of the Bosnian Serb half of Bosnia, who is locked in a bitter power struggle with Karadzic.

Holbrooke and Robert Gelbard, the Clinton administration’s point man on Bosnia, were expected to demand once again that Milosevic--who was long considered the patron of the Bosnian Serbs--surrender Karadzic to the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague, which has charged him with genocide.

The new order on special police, meanwhile, will mostly affect an estimated 3,000 agents in the Bosnian Serbs’ Republika Srpska who operate as a virtual private army loyal to Karadzic. He keeps them well paid and well equipped.

The Bosnian Serbs have steadfastly refused to comply with any form of international oversight of their police despite well-documented abuses by those forces. But Western officials said the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization policy is designed to make it easier for international peacekeepers to confiscate illegal weapons from the police and restrict their movements.

“They [the Bosnian Serb special police] are a law unto their own,” said one Western official who specializes in police issues. “This should make them more accountable.”

Under the new policy, special police will be treated as combat armies and will be subject to the same relatively strict NATO-enforced regulations as a military force.

According to rules outlined by the NATO commander in Bosnia, U.S. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, all duties performed by special police must be authorized and monitored by NATO and conducted only in conjunction with regular civil police; the special police must wear uniforms and may carry side arms, but no long-barreled weapons, without NATO approval. Movements and all training outside barracks must be approved by NATO.

Special police forces will be allowed to protect VIPs, but such protection may not be provided to anyone indicted by the war crimes tribunal, Shinseki wrote.

Placing police special forces under NATO supervision plugs a loophole in the U.S.-brokered peace accords--one that many international officials believe did not have to exist.

Until now, police fell under the purview of the unarmed U.N. police-monitoring force, which could do nothing but watch, write reports and scold. In parts of Bosnia controlled by Serbian and Croatian hard-liners, the monitors were little match for the police they were supposedly observing.

The authors of the peace accords always intended that special police be regarded as a military force, but the NATO-led mission here chose a more limited interpretation of its mandate.

NATO officers, as well as several key American officials, resisted treating the police as military because of a fear of “mission creep”--dragging their troops into more complicated policing functions--according to sources familiar with the debate.

The decision to expand NATO supervision over the special police forces reflects a growing concern, especially in Washington, that the peace process is falling apart, largely because of obstructionist forces such as certain police units.

The shift may also have been encouraged by a recent spate of low-level but potentially lethal bomb and grenade attacks by Serbs angry over the arrest last month of one Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect and the killing of another by British troops when he resisted arrest. Police may have been involved in the attacks, U.N. officials say; in one Bosnian Serb city, Doboj, Bosnian Serb police were seen in the middle of the night depositing leaflets threatening Western peacekeepers with warnings that “Somalia was too gentle”--a reference to an earlier, disastrous peacekeeping mission.

NATO’s Shinseki wrote to Plavsic and Vladimir Soljic, the president of the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia, ordering them to obey the new rules for their special police forces “with immediate effect.” They were given until Aug. 15 for a representative to report to NATO’s operations commander to indicate their “readiness to comply with all letters of instructions.”

Kai Eide, the senior U.N. official in Bosnia, followed up with a notice that any police officers not certified by the U.N. will be considered illegal as of Aug. 31. To be certified, police officers must be vetted for war crimes charges and given nominal approval by U.N. monitors; thus far, Bosnian Serb authorities have refused even to reveal the names of their police officers.

It is possible the Serbs will ignore the new orders, just as they have ignored most demands from the U.N. The difference now is that they will risk punishment not by U.N. monitors but by NATO, which has the power to destroy weapons, block movements and take other actions.