Radovan

WASHINGTON -- As in his previous high-profile personal diplomatic initiatives, Jimmy Carter has stepped into the Bosnia conflict at a time when all the players are weak, including his president.At 4 p.m. Wednesday, while the White House was scrambling to prepare and devise a way to pay for tax cuts, the former president called Bill Clinton to say that he intended to launch a peace initiative in Bosnia, provided that the Serbs kept a series of commitments they had made to him earlier in the day.Worst of all for the Clinton administration, the Republicans were coming.

PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina - This small town, with its pocket-size Orthodox church and tatty cafes, is Karadzic country: a place where indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic has long been viewed as a native son, a savior, a saint. But even here, where the Bosnian Serb leader lived at the height of his power during his country's brutal war, there is a weariness when people talk about Karadzic - as if they love him but are almost too tired to defend him. That matters, because Pale is a place where people generally see the 1992-1995 war through an exclusively Serbian lens, one in which the Serbs are the biggest victims and not the perpetrators of "ethnic cleansing" against Bosnia's Muslims.

PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The directions to Radovan Karadzic's house are simple: Drive north from town on the road with potholes the size of Land Rovers. Pass a dusty gas station and cross a small bridge over a muddy stream. It's another mile past wandering cows and green meadows filled with buttercups before you see a narrow dirt road on your right.Look for five or six soldiers in camouflage lounging at a small booth. Karadzic's house is just up the lane, in a village of a dozen or so homes at the edge of the woods.

Radovan Karadzic agrees. To what, he'll say later. The Europeans won't go along, so let's hope the Serbs are fooled and don't call our bluff.

U.N. officials said that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Bosnia's Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, have agreed to attend new peace talks in Geneva Monday. President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban have not replied.A Canadian Hercules transport aircraft evacuated 14 badly wounded men, women and children from SARAJEVO after Serbs agreed to stop blocking the move.

AFTER THE Bosnian Serbs took Prijedor in May and June of 1992, Muslim men were herded into camps, where up to 7,000 were executed by guards.Some of the 77 suspects indicted as war criminals by the U.N. Bosnian war crimes tribunal have been living openly in Bosnia. Now, British troops have arrested one accused of the Prijedor crimes and killed another who fired at them.The raid came after President Clinton demanded a more aggressive policy of arrests. It suggests that the world community may be serious about the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.