Disparities Steal Thunder of Albright’s Balkan Trip

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The Sarajevo police whom Secretary of State Madeleine Albright praised last weekend as “heroes” have been accused of abuse in numerous recent cases, international monitors say.

Human rights officials have received about 45 complaints of jailhouse beatings by Sarajevo police in the last two months. Although apparently not directed against ethnic or religious minorities, the alleged beatings of detainees indicate a disturbing abuse of police power.

The disparity between the reality and Albright’s description of the police was one of several contradictions that emerged during her whirlwind tour through the Balkans in what U.S. officials portrayed as an invigorated initiative in American diplomacy in the region.

* During her visit, Albright visited a Sarajevo police station and thanked officers for their “service to Sarajevo” and for “proving the cynics and tyrants wrong.”

“These are the heroes you don’t hear about very often in Bosnia,” Albright, flanked by a telegenic female Bosnian police officer and a 4-year-old child dressed in a tiny police uniform, told reporters during a ceremony at the downtown police station. “They are part of the federation’s first multiethnic [district] police force.”

In fact, U.N. monitors who work with Bosnia’s police estimate that the Sarajevo district’s police force is 93% Muslim. At the downtown station, only 15 of 174 officers are non-Muslim; only two are female.

* In what was described as a modest but important achievement of her visit, Albright inaugurated a bridge between the disputed city of Brcko, currently in Bosnian Serb hands, and Croatia. She declared it a new opening between Bosnia and Europe.

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Bosnian Serb radio reported the bridge as a link between the Republic of Croatia and the Republika Srpska--omitting mention of Bosnia-Herzegovina and elevating the Bosnian Serbs’ half of Bosnia to full state status, and making it appear that Albright was part of such recognition.

The following day, Bosnian Serb officials said their citizens who crossed the bridge were turned back by Croatian officials. “Madeleine Albright wanted to leave with a picture of the bridge full of people,” said Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavsic, “but things here do not go so smoothly.”

Late last week, U.S. officials said the blocking of Serbs was an “administrative hitch” that would be cleared up. The officials said Croatian authorities were refusing to stamp a visa on the Serbs’ Yugoslav passports.

* A cornerstone of the new “tough line” with Bosnians who flout the U.S.-backed Bosnian peace accords was Albright’s threat to discontinue or reduce economic aid to the violators.

In fact, the biggest violators of the peace accords--the Bosnian Serbs--receive very little aid from the United States, rendering such a threat virtually moot.

U.S. officials said last week that they hope the economic threat will have an effect on the Bosnian parties because of direct warnings made to the Bosnians’ patrons in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, and Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital. Also, the officials said Albright dangled the prospect of aid to Bosnian Serb leaders in exchange for their cooperation. But that tactic has not worked in the past.

* During the Albright trip, State Department officials claimed that they were exercising unprecedented leverage on recalcitrant Croatian President Franjo Tudjman by threatening to delay the hand-over of the Serb-held region of Eastern Slavonia to Croatia. The U.N. mandate governing Eastern Slavonia expires July 15, and U.S. officials said they were threatening to extend the mandate to year’s end, thus keeping the U.N. in nominal charge until then.

In fact, that appears to have been the plan for some time. Jacques Klein, who heads the U.N. mission to oversee the return of Eastern Slavonia to Croatian control, indicated to The Times nearly two months ago that the hand-over would be stretched out to the end of the year.

Furthermore, an agreement signed by Croatia and Serbia that provides for the return of Eastern Slavonia to Croatia has always contained a provision whereby any party could extend the U.N. mandate by a year; it was already extended by six months to the July 15 date, and it has been widely assumed that the other six months will be used.

In the aftermath of Albright’s visit, U.S. officials are insisting that the six-month extension of the U.N. mandate is not automatic and that Croatian progress on the repatriation of Serbian refugees and related issues will determine the timing of the turnover.

* Albright’s aides contend that she was extremely tough with both Tudjman and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the two men most responsible for the war. And indeed, the public berating of Tudjman and his senior ministers by an angry Albright was unheard of.

But because any scolding of Milosevic that may have occurred was conducted in private, Serbian television, the source by which most Yugoslavs get their news, showed a chastised Croatian president while portraying Albright’s dealings with Milosevic as routine.

Serbs were generally delighted that Tudjman was taking it on the chin, but those who oppose Milosevic were dismayed to see it appear that the Serbian president escaped such a browbeating. Opposition leaders had predicted that Milosevic would be able to use the Albright visit to his advantage, and he did.

As for the Sarajevo police, Albright may have been on target in singling them out as the best of Bosnia’s various law enforcement agencies. The Bosnian Serb police, on the other hand, as well as the Bosnian Croat police based in western Bosnia, are notorious for their violations of human rights, especially those of minorities, and have been instrumental in blocking the return of refugees, international monitors say.

At the least, the Sarajevo police have submitted to a vetting process and have improved in basic policing techniques over the past year. And this week cadets began U.S.-financed schooling on human rights and “dignity.”

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The reports of beatings in Sarajevo in the last two months--10 of which were judged by U.N. personnel to have been unfounded--did not involve minorities and were concentrated on two especially problematic stations, officials said.

The U.N. placed observers at the two stations in question, but the beatings continued, said U.N. spokesman Alexander Ivanko.

The police station that Albright visited has been named in a few beating incidents, U.N. officials said, but the largest number of cases has been at the Novi Sarajevo station, where most recently a man arrested on gambling charges reported that he was beaten by the shift commander on May 29, three days before Albright’s visit.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall in Washington contributed to this report.