The Police Fable

Being a foreign correspondent can be a major advantage, sometimes. When you miss a point, you think that it's because you're a stranger to these parts and thus not familiar with the mysterious ways of this exotic country. But, how can we who are from these parts admit that we don't understand what goes on here, no more than if we were stranded in the middle of Kazakhstan? And now it looks as though no one is from these parts any longer, with the exception of a few special emissaries. If they told each other all they knew, they just might be able to put the pieces together and come up with the rounded-off story about hostages, bombing, recognition, sanctions and rapid interventions. My guess, however, is that things would not look particularly logical even then, which means that a person setting out to explain them and make them fit, risks to unwittingly invest them with more sense than there really is. Here are, to begin with, but a few questions and riddles: How is it that Milosevic, at this very moment negotiating about Bosnia's recognition and insisting that he has nothing to do with Karadzic, suddenly releases the latter's hostages? Why does everybody applaud his generosity, and nobody asks whether the fact that he can release them does not prove that he was the one who took them? Whose are these hostages anyway? Do they have anything to do with the negotiations in Belgrade (or wherever Milosevic and

Frasure happened to meet)? Or, were the hostages taken to prevent Bosnia's recognition or were they were set free in exchange for the lifting of the sanctions off Yugoslavia? What does it have to do with Seselj in Gnjilane prison? Has, perhaps, Milosevic taken him as a hostage to force Karadzic to release the innocents of Boutros Ghali? In these parts it is no longer easy even to ask such questions without making them sound absurd, and every answer, every theory seem just as plausible as the next one. The most popular fable of the moment, here and elsewhere, tells how Cyclops Radovan is about to devour his captives when in rides Knight Milosevic, frees the prisoners, stops the beast, takes off his hat, and bows to the ladies clapping hands in the gallery. Almost everybody is eager to believe this fairytale, maybe even Cyclops himself. Be that as it may, he is not, for the time being, the wet blanket in the happy finale and does not ask for a better part. However, the fact that the head of Serbia's secret police appears on the stage as nothing less than Milosevic's emissary, does have something out of the ordinary and bewildering about it: it is as if the director himself has emerged from behind the curtain, now to act - now to direct. The fable thus evidently gets unstuck but who cares whether all this is real if it's all so nice? Moreover, a fable is more economical. It can fit into two sentences on CNN whereas the real story is much longer. It turns out that a Serb has finally learned how best to use his time. For up to this moment, the short news items were always anti-Serb (siege, shelling, ethnic cleansing, hostages) and the Serbs got involved in long explanations. Now, for the first time, the news is that Milosevic has released the hostages, and those who want to dispute it have to expand the story.

The plot begins with Pale decision to take UN soldiers as hostages. Until that moment everything else was deja vu, including the shelling of Sarajevo, the ultimatum and the bombing of Serb positions from NATO planes. On this particular occasion, according to one of various possible theories, Karadzic got the jitters because of Milosevic's negotiations about Bosnia's recognition and because his army has been taking a beating of late. The Pale leaders may have thought, say, that if they had to suffer military and political losses, they didn't have to suffer NATO as well. Somebody, say, remarked "Them, at least, we can beat". And so they captured and took snapshots of the tied UNPROFORians and capped it by downing an American plane. Unprecedented consternation swept over the West. Oaths were taken that there would be no negotiating with the terrorists, that the hostages had to be released unconditionally, but it was also said that NATO was not planning any new action for the time being. In USA, the name of the pilot was not released to the press until they found him themselves, alive and kicking. Had it not been so, the televisions of the world would for days on end show his bereaved family, the journalists would be asking his mother, his wife and his sisters if they knew where Bosnia was, and they would, in between the sobs, indicate they didn't.

Nonetheless, it was decided to set up rapid deployment forces; the real soldiers are arriving in Bosnia and painting the white APCs with war paint. It could mean that the taking of hostages was a crucial mistake which cannot be rectified even by their rapid release. The world community, be it good or bad, will not for long put up with a situation in which in Bosnia there are forces supposed to keep peace, and forces supposed to keep them.

Either Karadzic will immediately turn very tame and pliant, or UNPROFOR will withdraw in a manner which the Bosnian Serbs will not like at all. Up to this point the story is rather transparent, but now enters the chief Serbian secret policeman called Jovica Stanisic and not only starts to release the hostages, but also instructs them to tell everybody that they have no one to thank but Milosevic and Milosevic alone. What's up? What kind of relationship is this between Belgrade and Pale if Milosevic can set free Karadzic's hostages? Could Karadzic, then, capture them on his own? Couldn't he also have appeared side by side with Stanisic and congratulated the hostages on their freedom? He could have said that he had no idea where they'd turned up from, or announced something poetic like "we're all somebody's hostages".

Nevertheless, I think that the conclusion to be derived from this episode should not be that there is no conflict between Belgrade and Pale and that Karadzic, so far at least, has not been much of a rival to Milosevic. The truth may be that there are several power layers here, and that the political one is not the most important, so that Milosevic and Karadzic may diverge, politically and ideologically. The lowermost power layer belongs to the police and there the differences are much smaller, they all cooperate there, and communicate by special lines in a completely different language.

Jovica Stanisic, rather than some diplomat or party official, thus went to settle the matter with the hostages because only he and he alone knew with whom, and how, one should talk in Pale. Everything is done and organized through these police channels anyway: war and hyperinflation, contraband and crime, peace and stabilization, the struggle against crime. That is to say, insofar as anything is organized at all. That particular service has always been more resilient than all of the rest and in the process of Yugoslavia's disintegration, the police ties undoubtedly took more effort to break than the economic, cultural or even military ones. I am not sure if some of these channels are not still in operation even between Belgrade and Zagreb, let alone Pale.

In Pale, Stanisic did not need to persuade and haggle too much with any one. Yet, one is left with the impression that this affair did postpone Milosevic's recognition of Bosnia and maybe even induced him to come up with new terms. If that is so, then Karadzic did get something in exchange for the hostages and for letting Milosevic appear in the role of their only rescuer.

Milosevic then re-sold those same second-hand hostages to the West, even though the question of the price may still be open. We had no luck with the American pilot as they found him themselves, and in the USA he would be worth much more than all the European hostages put together. Milosevic thus missed the opportunity to send Clinton a present, which would improve the American attitude towards Serbia.

According to another theory, these were not Milosevic's concessions to Karadzic and the denouement of the hostage crisis indicates rather that Karadzic is, in fact, completely broken and confused. Moreover, by keeping Seselj in Gnjilane and showing all those concerned that when justice was at stake, nothing was too hard or impossible for his regime, Milosevic has deprived him of his last hope that something might happen in Serbia. Trials go on by day and by night, forwards and backwards, by fax and by telephone, standing and lying down... It was only one point more in the all-round triumph of the police.