NATO Would ‘Use Force’ Against Bosnian Serb Media

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The U.S. and its European allies Friday threatened a new clampdown on the Bosnian Serb radio and television network controlled by war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, after it whipped up a frenzy of anti-West violence against American troops and international peacekeepers.

Here in the headquarters city of Karadzic’s nemesis, Bosnian President Biljana Plavsic, a deadly explosion heightened tension, while in neighboring Yugoslavia, American diplomats began yet another round of talks with the region’s most powerful Serb, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

NATO is increasingly the target of Bosnian Serb wrath as the peacekeeping force backs Plavsic’s efforts to marginalize Karadzic and his hard-line allies. NATO troops are helping forces loyal to Plavsic take over police stations in the Bosnian Serb half of the country, a move that unleashed daylong riots in the strategic Serb-controlled city of Brcko on Thursday.

“Yesterday’s events were clearly orchestrated and planned from the outset,” said Robert Farrand, an American diplomat appointed earlier this year as the international supervisor in charge of administering Brcko.

Plavsic’s forces have also seized one crucial television transmitter, breaking the Karadzic monopoly on propaganda, but four more remain in dispute. International officials have complained for weeks of the virulent rhetoric from Karadzic-controlled television and radio, which have lately been equating NATO troops with Nazi occupiers. On Thursday, they rallied crowds in Brcko to attack peacekeepers, international officials said.

At the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels on Friday, ambassadors from the 16 member states said they would “not hesitate” to “use force” against broadcasters who incite violence against international peacekeepers.

Later Friday, NATO’s commander in Bosnia, U.S. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, and a senior civilian peace envoy, German diplomat Gerd Wagner, delivered a warning to Karadzic’s principal ally, Momcilo Krajisnik.

Krajisnik was told that the Serbian Radio Television network that he and Karadzic control is being given its last chance to tone down its rhetoric or it will be subjected to permanent censorship by an imposed outside monitor, Western sources said.

“We are basically telling them that SRT’s days are numbered,” said an official involved in formulating media policy.

Krajisnik was said to have refused to discuss the SRT broadcasts. Within hours, SRT was again giving its own spin to events. It reported the meeting but said participants “concluded that [NATO] overstepped its mandate” in supporting Plavsic.

United Nations police monitors who were evacuated from Brcko amid the chaos attempted to return to their headquarters Friday but were again pelted by rocks and bottles hurled by residents.

The monitoring team was in Brcko on Friday, long enough to determine that its headquarters had been completely looted of computers, satellite dishes, tables, chairs and all equipment, spokesman Liam McDowell said. An estimated 80 U.N. vehicles were heavily damaged, upturned or ditched, he said.

It took hours for NATO to evacuate the U.N. police, a force that includes many Americans, and several were forced to escape on their own.

In Banja Luka, an explosion near a bus station killed a Bosnian man and wounded two other people. It was not clear whether the blast was caused by a bomb or a gas leak, a NATO spokesman said, nor whether the motive was political. But it further unnerved a city already worried that Karadzic’s forces will attempt to retaliate.

The Clinton administration’s special envoy to Bosnia, Robert Gelbard, met with Milosevic in Belgrade on Friday in an attempt to persuade the Yugoslav president to support Plavsic over Karadzic--something Milosevic has refused to do.

Gelbard blamed Bosnian Serb hard-liners for the Brcko violence, saying it was typical of “a totalitarian dictatorship losing control.”