In Bosnia, Tide Turns Against Hard-Line Serbs

VIENNA —  Hard-line Serbian nationalists in Bosnia suffered two punishing setbacks Friday when they lost their elected president and their claim to the disputed town of Brcko.

Carlos Westendorp, the Spanish diplomat overseeing Bosnia-Herzegovina’s difficult transition from war, fired Nikola Poplasen as president of the Bosnian Serb Republic after accusing him of creating instability.

Poplasen, who had made threats of unspecified action if Brcko did not remain under Serbian control, rejected Westendorp’s order that he leave office immediately.

A few hours later, an arbitration panel headed by U.S. lawyer Roberts Owen announced that Brcko, on Bosnia’s northern border, will be ruled by all three of the country’s ethnic groups--Muslims, Croats and Serbs. The decision incensed Serbs, who lay exclusive claim to it.

The decision means that Brcko will be a self-ruling district, with its own multiethnic assembly.

Serbs consider the town an essential land corridor between eastern and western sections of their republic, one of Bosnia’s two autonomous entities.

Bosnian Muslims and Croats made up the majority of Brcko’s population before war broke out in 1992. Serbian fighters seized the town the same year, killing many Muslims and forcing many more to flee.

Turning Brcko into a self-ruling district is supposed to make refugees feel safer to return, but Westendorp conceded that it will take months to prepare for elections and a new administration.

“This is not a decision which can be implemented in one night,” Westendorp said. “We hope to have the governing structure in place by the end of the year.”

U.S. troops keeping the peace in Brcko as part of a NATO-led force will have to deal with any violent reaction from Serbs.

A few hours after Owen’s ruling, a U.S. soldier serving with the force shot and killed an armed Serb in a town southeast of Brcko. A spokesman said the soldier fired in self-defense when the man, a Serbian politician in Ugljevik, attacked him in a restaurant, the Reuters news agency reported.

In the shake-up in the Bosnian Serb entity’s leadership, Westendorp dismissed Poplasen after accusing him of trying to unseat Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, a relative moderate supported by the West.

However, if Westendorp’s decision was supposed to prop up Dodik, the ruling on Brcko quickly undercut him because it is likely to be unpopular with Serbs.

Citing the Brcko ruling, Dodik resigned as prime minister Friday, creating a dangerous vacuum in the Bosnian Serb Republic.

A senior Clinton administration official scoffed at Serbs who accused Dodik of losing Brcko.

The official said Owen probably would have awarded the city entirely to Bosnia’s other entity, the Muslim-Croat Federation, if it had not been for Dodik’s efforts. Conversely, he said, if the Bosnian Serb Republic’s political system “had allowed Dodik to carry out his policies, the tribunal might have awarded the town to the Serbs.”

The official said the Owen panel retained jurisdiction in the case and might change its decision if one side or the other engaged in gross violations of the Dayton accords that brought peace to Bosnia in 1995.

Friday’s events in Bosnia may further complicate efforts to bring peace to neighboring Kosovo by feeding fears of what many Serbs see as a foreign plot to destroy them.

Poplasen is a political ally of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who is fighting foreign pressure to sign a peace deal for Kosovo. The deal would force him to allow North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops onto Serbian soil.

Ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1 in Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of what remains of Yugoslavia--and Serbian nationalists fear that NATO troops would help separatist Albanians carve out a state.

As Milosevic prepares for more peace talks in France on March 15, Friday’s rulings are not likely to help soften his tough stance against NATO troops in Kosovo.

Calling it the most serious violation yet of the letter and spirit of the Dayton peace agreement, the Yugoslav government said Westendorp’s decision has no legal effect.

It “represents a severe blow to efforts for progress and stabilization of the peace process,” said a government statement issued in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital.

Poplasen is a decorated veteran who fought in an extreme nationalist Serbian army accused of committing atrocities during Bosnia’s war.

Ethnic animosities are still so strong in Bosnia that Westendorp rules it almost as a protectorate by issuing decrees when elected leaders refuse to act--and by removing those who threaten the peace.

Even some moderates in the Bosnian Serb Republic objected to the dismissal of Poplasen, who won an internationally supervised election by defeating Western-backed Biljana Plavsic in September.

“It would have been better if they had worked on a compromise instead of this radical cut,” moderate leader Miodrag Zivanovic said in a radio interview. “All of us are brought into a situation from which we don’t know how to find an exit.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.