Karadzic

In addition to creating more than 100,000 Serb refugees, the Croatian victory in Krajina and Bihac returned to Croatia most of the territory seized by Serb forces in 1991, broke the siege of Bihac and exacerbated power struggles inside the ruling elites of the states of former Yugoslavia. These have been so complex it takes a score card to follow them. Here is a rudimentary guide.Milosevic vs. Karadzic:The split widens between Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the fanatical psychiatrist who created a Bosnian-Serb ''parliament'' and rump government based in Pale from which he has mounted a political as well as military challenge to the government of Bosnia-Herzegovenia, headed by Alija Izetbegovic.

PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Serbian nationalists who have seized 70 percent of the country, has said that his forces consider the war in Bosnia to be over and has promised that his troops will not renew their attacks on Sarajevo and other strongholds of the Muslim-led government.Mr. Karadzic said in an interview Friday night that the ethnic Serbian leadership planned to turn its efforts instead to rebuilding the shattered economy of the parts of Bosnia they control and mending relations with Bosnian Muslims.

PARIS -- The NATO Intervention Force in Bosnia has from the start considered the Hague International Tribunal and its war-crimes prosecutions a troublemaking element in its mission to implement the Dayton accords.NATO and its chiefly American commanders are to blame, but so are the policy people in Washington, who blundered in thinking that leaving Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic loose in Bosnia would cause less trouble than arresting them and sending them to The Hague for trial.Now the blunder is home to roost.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia -- Like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, some of the most contentious elements in Bosnian peacemaking are starting to fall into place.The seating of a new, apparently cooperative Bosnian Serb government and a move by international mediators to impose decisions when no one agrees have given impetus to a 2-year-old peace process stalled frequently by separatist bickering.Yesterday, Western mediators unveiled a common currency that they have ordered Muslims, Serbs and Croats to accept.

You are Mohamed Farah Aidid, or Kim Il Sung, or Raoul Cedras, or Radovan Karadzic. All the world regards you as a tyrant, a bloody-minded aggressor, an international pariah. Standing governments shun you, denounce you, refuse to grant you legitimacy. You are isolated, hemmed in, threatened with catastrophe. So what do you do? You pick up the phone and call Jimmy Carter.Three times since President Clinton took office he has stumbled into crises only to be rescued by the rather humiliating intervention of his fellow Southerner.

Saber-rattling in Washington brought the first restraint by Serbs in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic signed a cease-fire in Athens. Guns around Sarajevo sputtered. U.N. convoys were let through to beleaguered Muslims. So far, so good. Nothing the United States can say communicates so clearly, to a certain class of statesman, as pizza delivered to the Pentagon at midnight.But President Clinton is right to keep the focus on what Serbs do, not what they say. Dr. Karadzic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic have signed pieces of paper before.

GENEVA -- Hours after he seemed to have torpedoed an international plan for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the leader of Bosnia's ethnic Serbs reversed himself last night and said he accepted the proposed accord.Much work needs to be done before any agreement is completed, and many previous accords have unraveled.But the mediators viewed the endorsement by the Bosnian Serbs' leader, Dr. Radovan Karadzic, as a critically important step.Dr. Karadzic told reporters last night that he needed "a few days" to gain approval of the plan from the Parliament of the self-declared Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but that he was sure that, "We are going to approve it in our assembly."

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Bosnian Serbs delivered a humiliating snub to the world's most prominent diplomat yesterday, refusing to meet U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the airport here and sounding a death knell on their tolerance of foreign efforts to protect Bosnian Muslims.Mr. Boutros-Ghali flew into the artillery-encircled Bosnian capital on an urgent mission to secure assurances from Serbian rebel leader Radovan Karadzic that his nationalist gunmen would halt attacks on the U.N.-designated "safe area" of Bihac and stop harassing U.N. forces.

PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- In the fading afternoon light, a group of former soldiers sat at a table in a bar along the rutted street that runs through the center of this Bosnian Serb stronghold."

PARIS -- American policy on Bosnia has taken on that rationality and political realism Europeans claimed in the past for themselves.The West Europeans persist in a sentimentalism about peace, war and war settlements, which caused them to fail in Yugoslavia. They object that the Dayton agreement on Bosnia was signed under American duress, and ratifies ethnic cleansing and national expansion by both Serbia and Croatia.The Bosnian government gained the nominally united Bosnia-Herzegovina it wanted, but the Bosnian Serbs object, and the Sarajevo authorities must expect trouble from their Croatian partners in the Bosno-Croatian federation that Washington invented and, for their own good, has forced upon both.