Election of Moderate in Bosnia's Serb Republic Boosts Dayton Accords

By Lucille Barnes

A one-vote victory by moderate Social Democratic Party candidate Milorad Dodik in a parliamentary vote to choose a new prime minister of Bosnia's Serb Republic is being hailed as a giant step toward implementing the U.S. Dayton accord for peace in Bosnia. The winning vote was made possible when NATO forces located an absent parliamentarian and sped him to the session to provide a quorum. Dodik was endorsed by U.S.-backed Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, although she is no moderate herself, and also had the blessing of Serbian kingmaker and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Many blame the extreme nationalism of Milosevic, a former communist strongman, for the Bosnian war. However, he has withdrawn his support from Radovan Karadzic, the former Serb Democratic Party chairman who is an indicted war crimes suspect but who still controls the eastern half of the Bosnian Serb Republic. Newly elected Dodik says he favors a "global return" of refugees displaced by the fighting "in a certain period of time...to enable everybody to return at once" and that after his supporters gain "real power...we will establish cooperation" with the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. His selection may loosen up the international economic aid that has been made available to Bosnians in the Croat-Muslim federation areas but so far has been denied to those in the Bosnian Serb areas.

Former Serbian prison camp commander Goran Jelisic, who called himself "the Serbian Adolf" and was known even among fellow Serbs as a bully, became the first war crimes suspect to be arrested by U.S. troops in Bosnia Jan. 22. Although Dusan Tuzlancic, a Serbian caf³ owner in Bijeljina, where Jelisic was arrested, said "no one is crying for him today," American troops in Serb-controlled areas were put on alert for possible retaliation. The indictment charges that he supervised and often personally carried out systematic murders of hundreds of Muslim prisoners in the Luka detention camp near Brcko and other localities in the summer of 1992. Since the war he has been the bodyguard for an official of a hard-line Bosnian Serb party. Although British troops have arrested one and killed another war crimes suspect when he resisted arrest, and Dutch troops also arrested two war crimes suspects before the American move, President Bill Clinton said immediately afterward, "Today I call again on all parties to the Dayton accords to fulfill their obligations to bring all indicted war criminals to justice."

To date 21 war crimes suspects have been arrested (10 Croats by the Croatian government) or have surrendered to face trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, and more than 50 others, some of whose indictments are secret, remain free. Ironically, Jelisic, who told a Washington Post correspondent a year ago that "It's much easier to kill a Muslim than to save him," said in the same interview that if he were ever caught "I'd commit suicide. I could never beat the case." At this writing he is alive and well in The Hague, awaiting a trial which may not take place for another year because of a shortage of courtrooms, according to the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour. Her predecessor, Richard Goldstone, and a group of former government officials and jurists have previously criticized the Clinton administration for not ordering U.S. troops to seize war criminals, charging that U.S. failure to act has provoked contempt for the Dayton accord and impeded creation of a new Bosnian nation.

A proposal by Israel's Orthodox Jewish religious establishment to reverse its stand against recognizing Conservative and Reform conversions to Judaism within Israel drew confusing reactions among the rabbis who announced it at a press conference in Israel. The proposal, which has yet to be approved by the Israeli Knesset, is designed to bridge the gap between Israel's religious Jews, who are overwhelmingly Orthodox, and the Conservative and Reform Jews who constitute an 80 percent majority among U.S. Jews. "It provides equal status from a civil point of view," Rabbi Uri Regev, leader of Israel's Reform movement, told a press conference in Israel. Rejoined Rabbi Yehuda Gilad, representing Israeli's Sephardic Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, "The fact that we recognized that the state will accept this does not mean that we will recognize this under Jewish law."

Newly arrived U.S. Ambassador to Malta Kathryn Profitt told the Times of Malta that the U.S. will not lift its sanctions on Libya until it turns over suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Scotland. She said, "270 people lost their lives at Lockerbie, Scotland...As the ambassador I want to make it very clear that the U.S. government wants to see the perpetrators brought to justice." U.S. investigators believe the bombing was carried out by Libyan agents working from the Libyan Arab Airlines office in Malta.

In the United States, Pakistani national Mir Aimal Kasi was sentenced to death in Fairfax, Virginia, for the murder of two men and the wounding of three more, all apparently chosen at random as they waited in their cars to make a left turn into CIA headquarters. Kasi, who initially escaped to Pakistan, said his attack was to protest U.S. Middle East policy.

In New York Ramzi Ahmad Yousef, of uncertain nationality, was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole as the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing. Yousef, who claims partial Palestinian ancestry and was captured in Pakistan, said the bomb plot, in which six persons were killed and which apparently was designed to crash one of the twin towers into the other with thousands of casualties, said this and other acts of terrorism in which he allegedly was implicated were to protest U.S. Middle East policy.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made news when she stood up to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a key component of Israel's phalanx of lobbyists and advocacy organizations in the U.S. The Conference, representing 52 member groups, fired the first shot with a Nov. 25 letter to Albright expressing concern about administration comments linking U.S. difficulties in recruiting Middle Eastern allies in the quarrel with Iraq's Saddam Hussain to the gridlocked Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Albright replied that "the reality we have to deal with is that when the peace process is stalled, our influence in the region is affected" and "this would be true whether or not we had an ongoing crisis with Iraq, but it has manifested itself in this crisis as well." Since she wouldn't waffle, the Presidents Conference simply manufactured a victory by putting out a press release headlined: "Albright to Jewish leaders: Iraq Crisis 'Totally Unrelated' to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations," which of course was not what she had said. No one except Albright might have noticed, except that in fact the 52 members of the Conference of Presidents are divided among themselves about what to do with Binyamin Netanyahu's deliberate destruction of the Middle East peace process. The problem is that leaders of member groups that have actively supported the peace process wouldn't go on the record when they said that the U.S. now needs to pressure Netanyahu. But critics of administration pressure on Israel did go on the record. Examples include executive director Phil Baum of the American Jewish Congress, which supported the Oslo accords, but who now says, "to single out Israel as the villain, as they have done, is a mistake." Or Conference executive vice chair Malcolm Hoenlein, always a hard-liner, who said, "There's a pattern recently of demonizing Prime Minister Netanyahu." Or president Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, who is something of a demon himself with his consistently untruthful charges against the Palestinian Authority and his current tortured line that "pressure [on Netanyahu] from the United States decreases the likelihood that the Palestinian Authority will honor its agreements under Oslo." The dustup with Albright and its aftermath showed once again that "mainstream American Jewish leaders" know that if they go on record with criticism of any elected government of Israel, even that of Binyamin Netanyahu, they soon will become "former mainstream American Jewish leaders."

Israeli Minister of Communications Limor Livnat, the only female member of Binyamin Netanyahu's cabinet, on Dec. 17 became the first Israeli official ever to visit convicted American spy for Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard, who is serving a life sentence in federal prison in North Carolina, and who recently was formally granted Israeli citizenship. She told some 30 Washington-Baltimore Hadassah leaders, "It is time to set him free." Israel's Knesset also made a public appeal for Pollard's release when Deputy Defense Minister Silvan Shalom announced in mid-December that the Israeli government was changing its policy and would campaign openly to obtain his release. In related moves, Israeli Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Eli Yishai released a letter officially confirming that Pollard spied on behalf of Israel, an admission never before made by the Israeli government, and Pollard released a letter expressing contrition and remorse for his deeds, something he had never done previously. The flurry of Israeli activity, after years of ignoring or disowning Pollard (although the Israeli government continues to pay his monthly Israeli salary into a Swiss bank account), gave some credence to rumors going back to the 1996 election that President Clinton pledged to the Israeli government or to American Jewish supporters of Pollard that in return for the support of the American Jewish community, which he received, he would release Pollard before leaving office and thus remove the problem from his designated successor, Al Gore. In the flurry of activity in Israel and among U.S. supporters of Pollard, there was no mention of Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli convert to Christianity who is in solitary confinement in Israel for revealing Israel's nuclear program to the world. So far as this writer is aware, none of Pollard's "compassionate" supporters has ever suggested a trade of Pollard for Vanunu, or that in Vanunu's case, too, "enough is enough."

Lucille Barnes covers Washington, DC for U.S. and Middle East publications.