Seeing the Bosnia Beyond Sarajevo
VISEGRAD, Bosnia, May 8 (AP) — NATO’s latest foray deep into Serb-held regions of Bosnia is a high-tech command center, high on a hill overlooking one of the country’s most notorious former killing fields. With most of the strictly military terms of the Dayton peace agreement met, NATO commanders have temporarily moved from their Sarajevo headquarters to focus on more remote areas of Bosnia.Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Walker, the commander of the nearly 60,000 ground troops of the NATO-led peace force, has made Visegrad, 50 miles east of the Bosnian capital, his base for five days. In this deceptively sleepy town, deep in Serb-held territory and just west of the border with Serbia, a 170-person corps of officers and support staff has established Walker’s command center in an abandoned camper park. The main headquarters of the NATO-led force remains in Sarajevo, but Walker hopes the trip to Visegrad lessens the emphasis that the military, international agencies and reporters place on Sarajevo.
There “is the tendency for the world to see everything we do, and everything that needs to be done, through a Sarajevo lens or filter,” Walker said. “We’ve worked very hard to counter that tendency.” He dismissed speculation that the move and the recent relocation of the 12,000-member British-led force to the Serb-held town of Banja Luka were in any way connected. But there are clear signs that the British, by moving their headquarters, are seeking to sample local Serb opinion about their future, including the fate of political leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic, both indicted for war crimes by the U.N. court in The Hague.
Under the Dayton peace accord, peacekeepers are not mandated to search for the two, but are supposed to arrest them if they come across them. In a similar attempt at shifting the focus from Sarajevo, Carl Bildt, the official in charge of the civilian aspects of the Bosnian peace, opened an office in Banja Luka on Monday.
From Visegrad, Walker commands soldiers from the 33 nations contributing to the international peace force in Bosnia. In the town, an elegant Ottoman bridge spans the Drina river, which was immortalized in the Nobel Prize-winning author Ivo Andric’s novel, “Bridge over the Drina.” Hundreds of Muslim men were cut down in Visegrad in early 1992 when the Serbs took over the town, in one of the early massacres of the nearly four-year war. Today, the Arabic script of the bridge, where some of the killing took place, has been daubed with the Serbs’ Cyrillic graffiti.
The NATO unit has stayed clear of the volatile issue of the Muslims’ return to the now Serb-held town.
Apart from random bursts of automatic fire and one smoke grenade hurled at British and Portuguese troops, NATO officials say they have had smooth relations with the local people. Walker’s British-dominated multinational unit — made up of soldiers from the United States, Germany, France, Australia, Portugal, Belgium and Greece — planned to dismantle the temporary base Wednesday, five days after setting up the command post. After returning to Sarajevo, the base will be moved later this month to an as-yet undisclosed location.
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