SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Peace has come to Bosnia, but is it here to stay?
The American officer who led the 32,000 NATO peacekeepers here for the last year, Gen. Montgomery Meigs, thinks that it is too early to say. "There has been progress," he said in a recent interview here. "Three years ago they wouldn't even talk to each other."The Serbian barricades on the road between Sarajevo, where Muslims are a majority, and the Bosnian Serb Republic, where almost all the Serbs live, disappeared after the peacekeepers arrived. Today, driving between the two places is no more eventful than crossing the border between New York and Connecticut.
Even in hard-line Bosnian Serb villages where graffiti express support for Arkan, a paramilitary leader charged with crimes against humanity, some people give a friendly wave to NATO patrols.
Gone are the sandbags and concrete brick walls that protected people in Sarajevo from snipers in the Serb-controlled neighborhoods across the river during the war, between 1992 and 1995. Brightly painted streetcars packed with passengers now run past the gutted, almost totally collapsed concrete headquarters of the newspaper Oslobodenje, whose basement presses never stopped rolling.
The ruins of the newspaper's tower, a prime target for the Serbs during the war, are being preserved as a monument to past suffering, like the blasted steeple of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in West Berlin.
But Oslobodenje is more a symbol of successful Bosnian defiance than a witness of repentance and reconciliation, as the Berlin tower is. Those feelings do not yet seem to have taken root among the Bosnian Serb, Muslim and Croat populations here, driven apart by the war and still wary of each other.
Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, two of the most notorious Bosnian Serb leaders, both later indicted by an international tribunal in the Hague on war crimes charges, are still exercising power behind the scenes, and the peacekeepers have not arrested them.
Mladic is believed to have fled to Serbia, but Karadzic is said to be in hiding in a sector of Bosnia that is under the supervision of French peacekeepers. French and American officials have publicly batted responsibility for the failure to arrest him back and forth.
Officials here explain that NATO's prime mission in Bosnia is not to arrest indicted war criminals but to maintain a safe and secure environment.
Peacekeepers from 37 countries, their numbers to be reduced to 20,000 after elections next spring, can arrest war crimes suspects they run across during the normal course of their duties but only when they believe that it is prudent and when no bystanders would get hurt. They have arrested 13 so far.
Meigs, choosing his words carefully, said, "I wish we had encountered more persons indicted for war crimes during the course of our business."
Some NATO officials concede that nothing will change fundamentally in the Serbian part of Bosnia until Karadzic and Mladic, with their ties to the Yugoslav security apparatus of President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, are taken off the chessboard.