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Call to Bar SDS from Elections Catches Sarajevo by Surprise by Kurt Schork
"You're kidding! At last somebody has taken a firm, hard line," said John Fawcett, staff director of the Soros Foundation-funded International Crisis Group which is monitoring implementation of the Dayton peace plan in Bosnia. This is a good move by Frowick. There's a risk, of course, that the SDS tries to run an election on its own, but let them. It's time to turn up the heat."
Frowick, an American, made his announcement in Stockholm while addressing the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) fifth parliamentary session. Under Dayton, OSCE has the daunting task of organising Bosnia-wide elections on September 14. The peace accord bans all those indicted for war crimes from holding public office. Frowick and the U.S. government have made it clear they regard the position of party chairman as a public office, a view not shared by some other important players in Bosnia including international mediator Carl Bildt.
"What you're seeing is the resurfacing of basic tensions between the the United States and Europe," a U.N. official with long experience in Bosnia said on Monday. "Bildt and Frowick have a basic disagreement on this matter. Bildt represents the majority European position which is not to let anything jeopardise the elections. The Americans are firm that Karadzic must go."
Bildt spokesman Colum Murphy in Sarajevo on Monday said the mediator's office would have no comment on Frowick's statement. Given that the SDS are the ruling party in the Serb republic, Frowick's clear hope is that it decides to dump Karadzic rather than be excluded from elections.
Should SDS boycott the balloting, the entire election could be called into question, in effect handing nationalist Serb hardliners a veto over the Dayton process. Karadzic recently handed over his powers, but not his title, as president of that 49 per cent of Bosnia known as the Serb republic to his Vice-President, Biljana Plavsic. He was reelected chairman of the SDS, a position which enbles him to control the police, media and army and ensure that separatist Serb goals are not subsumed in the multi-ethnic democracy which Dayton set out to build in Bosnia.
Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Gojko Klickovic quoted by the Bosnian Serb newsagency SRNA, said he considered the OSCE threat to be "undemocratic." "This is further proof that the international community wants to push through something that is not envisaged in the accord, but I have to let them know that they will not succeed," it quoted him as saying.
Bosnian Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic welcomed Frowick's statement as a confirmation of the basic principles of the Dayton accord. "There is a very clear position in the Dayton agreement. There is the obligation of all participants to extradite war criminals. Radovan Karadzic should not be there," he said. "There is a moral part to this. Would any man vote in any democratic country in any elections in which Karadzic participated as the head of the party?" |
SARAJEVO, July 8 (Reuters) - Monday's pledge by the head of the OSCE's Bosnia mission to bar the leading Serb nationalist SDS party from September elections unless it removes the indicted war criminal at its head caught Sarajevo by surprise. In a city increasingly known for diplomatic equivocation, ambassador Robert Frowick's straightforward statement that the SDS would be banned so long as Radovan Karadzic remained its chairman landed like a bombshell.
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