Fortunes Split For Serbian Rivals Karadzic Camp Looks Desperate In Face Of Plavsic’s U.S. Support

The Serb half of Bosnia has split in two, with the West seeking to use the division to oust and possibly arrest No. 1 war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic.

Pressure is building on the Karadzic camp, and especially on his top aide Momcilo Krajisnik, either to comply with the Dayton peace accords or be shunted aside.

With NATO-led peace troops weighing in on the side of Karadzic’s rival, Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, her position in the western half of the Bosnian Serb Republic seems relatively secure.

She has only some of the Serb police, army, media and politicians behind her. But she has the United States, which shares and bolsters her aim of seeing Karadzic - who has been banned from office but still pulls strings - absolutely stripped of power.

The peace force has intervened twice so far to prevent what NATO officials have called attempted coups against Plavsic. Each time, the NATO-led force has used the crisis to seize part of the vast arsenal of weapons and other equipment that has helped protect Karadzic from arrest and kept his clique in power.

On Monday, the peace force helped foil what Karadzic’s supporters said was a rally, but actually was an attempt to oust Plavsic.

The power struggle is increasingly desperate: Karadzic’s camp sent men with guns, knives and false identity papers to his rival’s stronghold, backed by thousands of paid supporters on buses; Plavsic’s men held top Karadzic aides in a hotel, cutting electricity, telephone and water and scouring it for weapons.

Although Karadzic firmly holds the eastern and southern portions of the Serbs’ horseshoe-shaped half of Bosnia, he has lost the west and much of the north - the most populous and prosperous part of the Serb holdings, including their largest city in Bosnia, Plavsic’s stronghold of Banja Luka.

Leafy and relatively elegant, Banja Luka historically had looked more to Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, than to Bosnia’s Sarajevo or Serbia’s distant Belgrade.

Most territory that Plavsic controls borders directly on Croatia to the north or Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat Federation to the west and south.

If she revives ties with those territories, she can offer her people some future - access to Europe through Croatia, as well as foreign aid that has been denied to Bosnia’s Serbs because of Karadzic’s refusal to keep to the Dayton peace accords.

Last weekend, Plavsic reportedly expressed a desire to get U.S. aid to equip and train her part of the army.

No wonder that her rival, Karadzic chief aide Momcilo Krajisnik, the Serb member of Bosnia’s dysfunctional joint presidency, sounded desperate when addressing the few hundred supporters who did make it to Monday’s rally in Banja Luka.

“Don’t allow the isolation of Banja Luka; don’t allow it to become part of the Federation,” he pleaded. “God is on our side.”

Patriotism cuts little ice with the frustrated young of Banja Luka, or its many refugees from Serb-held Croatia. All they want is a life.

Krajisnik himself is under increasing pressure to toe the West’s line. He stopped attending meetings of the presidency with his Croat and Muslim counterparts, after British troops killed one Serb war crimes suspect and arrested another in July.

Neither had been publicly indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal. Nor has Krajisnik. But he played a major role in running the Serbs’ war effort and says he fears being seized if he went to presidency sessions in Muslim-dominated Sarajevo.

Now, top international envoys have warned Krajisnik that he will forfeit his position if he does not show at the presidency this week.