Bosnian Serbs

PARIS -- The Bosnian Serbs have agreed to withdraw their heavy guns out of firing range of Sarajevo, ending at least temporarily NATO's two-week bombing campaign against the Serbs, allied officials announced yesterday.The agreement, signed by the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic, gives the Serbs six days to withdraw the approximately 300 guns that have consistently bombarded Sarajevo since April 6, 1992, the officials said.In return, NATO will suspend its bombing for three days, with a promise to refrain for a further three days if convinced the Serbian guns are being moved.

Serbia, acquitted last week of the charge of genocide, has been handed a unique opportunity. If Serbia was not complicit in the effort to exterminate Bosnian Muslims in the first half of the 1990s - as the International Court of Justice ruled Monday - Serbia should have no reason to keep on protecting the two Bosnian Serb leaders who did have genocide in mind: Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. If Serbia's hands are clean, it should turn these two men over to the international tribunal in The Hague.

WASHINGTON -- Faced with a new NATO ultimatum to silence their guns or face immediate air attack, the Bosnian Serbs agreed last night to a cease-fire around Gorazde, starting today.With more than 100 alliance warplanes -- more than half of them U.S. attack jets -- now on hair-trigger to quell any further Serbian shelling of the beleaguered Muslim enclave or five other U.N.-declared "safe areas," President Clinton told reporters, "The Bosnian Serbs should not doubt NATO's willingness to act."

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro -- Rumors swirled late yesterday that Gen. Ratko Mladic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb commander accused of orchestrating Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II, had been captured and was being transferred to an international court in the Netherlands to be tried on war crimes charges. Serbian officials quickly denied the reports, and a spokesman for the court in The Hague said the panel had no information that an arrest had been made. People close to the Serbian government and Western sources indicated that intense negotiations are under way between the government and Mladic to persuade him to surrender.

PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- As NATO warplanes wheeled and turned above the houses and military sites strung along this mountain valley where Bosnian Serbs have made their capital, Savica Kovac simply continued to prepare coffee for her husband.When what appeared to be a surface-to-air missile rose to attack the jets yesterday, Mrs. Kovac smiled and clenched her hand into a fist.While the planes escaped, many in this small town seemed eager to resist the demands made by Western powers and perplexed about why the rest of the world wants to impose its will on the Bosnian Serbs.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The Bosnian Serb army has complied with a NATO ultimatum for the withdrawal of its heavy weapons beyond 20 kilometers from Gorazde, a United Nations spokesman said early Wednesday.Cmdr. Eric Chaperon added that the "logical conclusion" was that there would be no NATO air strikes. These had been threatened by NATO in the event that Serbian heavy weapons remained within 20 kilometers, or 12.4 miles, of Gorazde's city center at 2:01 a.m. today (8:01 p.m. Tuesday, EDT)

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Bosnian Serbs and the Muslim-led government hunkered down for a long standoff yesterday when the rebels violated a second promise to withdraw all their armed forces from Gorazde and the government reaffirmed that it would boycott further peace talks in protest.The rebel army's chief of staff, Gen. Manojlo Milovanovic, had signed an agreement with the United Nations Protection Force here over the weekend pledging that all gun-toting Serbs, in army uniforms or otherwise, would be out of Gorazde by 6 p.m. Sunday.

BELGRADE -- A plan by Yugoslav leaders for a pan-Serbian parliamentary session to consider the Bosnian peace plan was rejected by Bosnian Serbs yesterday hours after it was put forward.The Yugoslav leaders proposed the unusual session as a substitute for a weekend referendum of Bosnian Serbs to decide whether to accept the plan.The meeting was called for Friday in Belgrade and would have included include the parliaments of Serbia and Montenegro, which make up the rump state of Yugoslavia, and the parliaments of the self-styled Serbian republics in Bosnia and Krajina, a Serbian enclave in Croatia.

WASHINGTON -- As the United States and its allies weig possible military action against the Bosnian Serbs, the Pentagon has begun intensifying its efforts to marshal allied intelligence data to help plot possible targets and tactics, analysts here say.Led by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military is gathering a wide array of information, ranging from photographs taken by U.S. spy satellites to firsthand reports from allied troops on duty in Bosnia-Herzegovina...

WASHINGTON -- Two French pilots whose Mirage warplane was shot down by Bosnian Serbs on Aug. 30 have been killed by their Bosnian Serb captors, U.S. intelligence sources say.The source of the latest intelligence reports was not disclosed, but previous information about the pilots has come from U.S. communications intercepts.Capt. Frederic Chiffot and Lt. Jose Souvignet ejected from their plane near the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale after being hit by anti-aircraft fire during a NATO raid on military installations near the town.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, the first Balkan political leader to plead guilty to war crimes charges, faced justice, history and her country's collective denial in yesterday's opening of her extraordinary three-day sentencing hearing. An academic and politician who incited ethnic hatred, consorted with warlords and earned the nickname the Iron Lady of the Balkans, Plavsic was a key public figure during the violent unraveling of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

LONDON - NATO gave notice yesterday to the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the most wanted man in the Balkans: His life on the run is about to become ever more perilous. For the first time yesterday, NATO-led peacekeepers conducted an intensive and public operation directed at rooting out Karadzic, who has lived for years apparently just out of sight of international forces. The troops set off explosives, lifted carpets and even searched behind a church altar, but failed to find him. Wearing black masks and armed with assault rifles, they swept through a hamlet near Celebici in a remote corner of eastern Bosnia, seizing three caches of weapons.

THE SMART thing for a pundit to say on television or in the press is, that the NATO strategy in Yugoslavia is a disaster and that the Clinton administration should have foreseen the bloody mass deportation now under way. But where were we self-styled experts when we were needed -- before NATO's bombing unleashed a killing and cleansing spree of Balkan proportions? The answer is: nowhere. In the weeks before March 24, reporters, human rights monitors, congressmen and analysts examined just about every issue except the fate of the ethnic Albanians on whose ostensible behalf NATO would intervene.

WASHINGTON -- At the end of the air war over Yugoslavia, President Clinton and America's European allies may be forced to accept what none of them now publicly acknowledges: a partition of Kosovo that offers a protected enclave to ethnic Albanians and gives the rest to Serbia.This may offer the only way to avoid three tougher choices, analysts say.One is a ground war requiring tens of thousands of NATO troops to drive President Slobodan Milosevic's forces out of Kosovo.Another is an all-out bombing campaign that hits Yugoslavia's most sensitive targets and Serbia's electrical supply, regardless of the consequences to civilians.

WASHINGTON -- After spending more than two years and tens of millions of dollars preparing missions, training commandos and gathering intelligence, the United States has dropped its secret plans to arrest Bosnia's two most wanted men accused of war crimes, senior administration officials say.Plans for clandestine missions to seize the men -- Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the wartime political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs -- have been...

BRCKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Four months ago, this disputed flash point -- which had been seized by Serbs and rid of its Muslims -- was taken over by a U.S. administrator. U.S. troops patrol the edges of the strategic town. An unusually large contingent of U.S.-led United Nations police officers keeps watch.And now, under U.S. supervision, a rare return of Muslim refugees to Bosnian Serb-held territory, in Brcko's suburbs, is beginning."The Americans are the sheriffs here," said a none-too-pleased Mladen Bosic, local head of the ruling Serbian Democratic Party, the powerful hard-line nationalist organization that takes its orders from indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic.

BELGRADE -- The rebel Bosnian Serbs are holding yet another referendum this weekend on yet another peace plan advanced by the international community. There is little doubt that their answer will be a resounding rejection.Just how many Bosnian Serbs will take part in the balloting remains uncertain, but Serbian news reports relayed by Reuters said that some 50 percent of the population had cast their votes by midafternoon yesterday. Almost a third of their 1.9 million population is said to be in Serbia -- as refugees or temporary residents.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- A triumphant Bosnian Ser assembly officially pronounced a United Nations-backed peace plan "dead" and began pressing ideas yesterday for securing the separate state they have sought in Bosnia-Herzegovina's 13-month civil war.The self-proclaimed legislature, gathering in its de facto capital -- the beautiful Sarajevo ski resort of Pale -- said Bosnian Serbs rejected the peace plan by a 96 percent "no" vote in last weekend's referendum.On...

WASHINGTON -- A worried Clinton administration is beginning a major campaign to shore up Bosnia's fragile peace and prevent a renewed crisis once NATO peacekeepers pull out next year.Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright plans to "read the riot act" to leaders of the former Yugoslavia next week during meetings in Portugal and the Balkans, a senior official said.The rebuke is aimed particularly at Serbs and Croats, who, officials charge, have fallen down on pledges made at the 1995 U.S.-brokered peace conference in Dayton, Ohio, that ended Europe's bloodiest war in a generation.

WASHINGTON -- International donors have pumped an estimated $3 million in reconstruction aid into a Bosnian Serb town run by a rogues' gallery of war crimes suspects, conferring a semblance of respectability on town leaders and undercutting investigations by the United Nations war crimes tribunal, a watchdog group says.In a 70-page report, Human Rights Watch says the mayor, deputy mayor, police chief, hospital director and director of a local organization claiming to be the Red Cross were all deeply implicated in "ethnic cleansing" in Prijedor, a town in northwest Bosnia.