Bosnia Police Units Put Under Nato Control Order Will Aid Implementation Of Peace Accord Provisions
NATO has ordered paramilitary police forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including those standing guard for war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, to submit to its control within one 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 United Nations personnel and harbored people accused of wartime atrocities. It comes amid a flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at salvaging peace in Bosnia, underlined by the presence of U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, patron of the accords that ended the war here 20 months ago.
Holbrooke on Friday traveled to Belgrade, where he began a long dinner meeting with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Earlier in the day he met with Biljana Plavsic, 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, are expected to demand once again that Milosevic 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 most effect an estimated 3,000 agents in the Bosnian Serb Republic 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 accept any form of international scrutiny of their police despite well-documented abuse by those forces. But Western officials said the new NATO policy is designed to make it easier for international peacekeepers to confiscate illegal weapons from the police and to 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 subjected 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 K. Shinseki, all duties by special police must be authorized and monitored by NATO and conducted only with regular civil police; the special police must wear uniforms, and may carry sidearms but no long-barrel weapons without NATO approval. Movements and all training outside of barracks must be approved by NATO.
Special police will be allowed to protect VIPs, but such protection may not be provided to persons indicted by the war crimes tribunal, Shinseki wrote.
Placing police special forces under the supervision of NATO plugs a loophole in the U.S.-brokered peace accords - one many international officials believe did not have to exist.
Until now, police fell under the purview of the unarmed U.N. police-monitoring force who could do nothing but watch, write reports and scold. In parts of Bosnia controlled by Serb and Croat hard-liners, the monitors were little match for the police they were supposedly observing.