The Hague Tribunal in Banja Luka?

AIM Banja Luka, January 3, 2001

The president elect of Republika Srpska, Mirko Sarovic, had barely entered his office in Banski Dvor, when he got his first public reprimand from the international community's High Representative in Bosnia. This happened because the otherwise extremely cautious Sarovic had made a slip-up, unwisely saying that Republika Srpska needed a bill to regulate cooperation with The Hague Tribunal. True, such a bill was mentioned several times by Milorad Dodik and his former and current justice minister, but what Dodik is allowed to say, Sarovic is not. Both the RS president and the Serb Democratic Party seem to have quickly understood and taken seriously Petritsch's message indicating that Sarovic could easily follow in the footsteps of one of his predecessors, Nikola Poplasen.

Petritsch's response to Sarovic's statement has again revived a slippery political issue which in the past had been swept under the carpet of the Dodik cabinet: cooperation between the RS authorities and the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The public was given a fine opportunity for amusement with the statements made by the Tribunal's spokesman, the RS justice minister, and representatives of political parties in Republika Srpska that followed.

Jim Landale, the Tribunal's spokesman, said quite openly and clearly that there was no cooperation with Republika Srpska whatsoever and that it could start only when the authorities of the Serb entity fulfilled their obligations from the Dayton agreement and began to arrest and hand over war crimes suspects indicted by the court. That the arrests are an obligation of RS was even admitted by the RS justice minister, Cedo Vrzina, who added quite frankly that acting on such commitments would equal a political catastrophe.

Hasty to avoid placing themselves in a position to have to bite their tongues because of rash statements, like minister Vrzina, officials of the Serb Democratic Party and the Democratic People's Party made no comments whatsoever. Negotiations with Ivanic's Party of Democratic Progress being in full swing, of course, silence appeared to them as being the wisest of solutions.

Meanwhile, an ostensibly benign piece of information has arrived saying that the Serb Democrats have signed a document with international representatives vowing, among other things, to cooperate with The Hague court. The public was left in the dark as far as the actual contents of the paper was concerned, but Mladen Ivanic has said that with this signature "the issue of cooperation with the ICTY will once and for all be removed from the agenda."

Have the Serb Democratic Party officials, in exchange for the international community's limited support, accepted to ship their first president, Radovan Karadzic, to Sheveningen? Was this the manner in which "the issue of cooperation with The Hague" was finally removed from the agenda? Allegedly, the initial version of the document submitted to the Serb Democrats for signature contained the obligation "to arrest and extradite war crimes suspects." According to well-informed sources, at the request of a party representative this provision was omitted, but it was agreed that "cooperation with the tribunal" would imply such a course of action.

The sources claim that by accepting such a commitment, the first step in reaching a compromise between the will of the people in Republika Srpska and the will of the U.S. and other, rather powerful sponsors of Bosnia-Herzegovina, has been made. Cynics might say that the Serb Democratic Party has sold out Karadzic for a handful of ministerial portfolios, but more realistic politicians are aware that cabinet portfolios are not all that is at stake here. If this time around it again failed to enter the government, the party would have to put up with serious, long-term political consequences.

All those who don't suffer from amnesia recall quite well that the Serb Democrats have many times promised various things to international factors, failing each time to make good on them. This is what Ivanic probably had in mind when he conditioned the forming of the cabinet with the Serb Democratic Party with his Party of Democratic Progress being given control of the portfolios of finance and the interior. Be it as it may, Ivanic said several months ago that the issue of cooperation with The Hague Tribunal should not be dealt with emotionally, but realistically. It turned out that the candidate for premier designate truly meant what he said. In line with his "Real Politik" approach he sent the ball to the Serb Democrats' half of the court, and made a bargain of an insoluble enigma.

Precisely on the issue of the Hague Tribunal he convinced the Serb Democratic Party that it had no other choice, and the Americans that he was capable, even when the Serb Democrats were in question, to form a cooperative cabinet.

As opposed to Ivanic, who attempted to untie the Hague knot before accepting the mandate for a new cabinet, during the three years he spent in office, Dodik had (un)skillfully avoided any cooperation with The Hague-based court. True, he had meetings with Carla del Ponte, he was even said to have asked Bill Clinton when the Americans would start arresting Hague indictees, because his government "cannot do it," he dispatched liaison officers to the Dutch city, and his cabinet was preparing the famed bill, but there was no progress at all. To avoid political risks, he allowed his generals and government officials (Brdjanin) to be arrested by foreigners in the streets and at international conferences.

Responding to a question asking him how he intended to resolve the issue of cooperation with the ICTY, Ivanic recently said that "any solution is better than the situation of the past several years." A bill on cooperation with the ICTY, which among other things envisages the possibility of certain indictees being tried in RS, under ICTY supervision, should enter legislative procedure as soon as the new RS Assembly is formed. It has been announced that an ICTY office in Banjaluka will finally open. If the Serb Democratic Party has indeed accepted all of the international community's conditions, it will mean that at the beginning of 2001 the issue of cooperation with the ICTY will indeed be removed from the agenda. It is worth noting that this will be the result of the first post-war RS cabinet in which the Serb Democratic Party is participating.

Tijana Tadic

(AIM)