In his first comments since a U.S.-brokered peace deal established a Bosnian Serb republic but ended his political future, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic agreed Friday to accept the accord and stop the fighting.

But he vowed to continue to demand some Serb control over Sarajevo, the disputed and coveted capital of Bosnia.

“We accept the peace,” a subdued Karadzic said in a live broadcast Friday night on Bosnian Serb television, even as Serb protesters marched against the peace plan. “We achieved most of our objectives [in the war], and now the time has come to switch to a political way to achieve our goals.”

Karadzic’s public acceptance of the comprehensive agreement reached Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio, was seen as crucial to the success of the most promising effort yet to end a 43-month war that has claimed more than 200,000 lives and forced nearly 2 million people from their homes.


The Bosnian Serb leader, twice indicted by a U.N. war crimes tribunal, acknowledged that the agreement dealt several blows to his nationalist cause, naming the loss of Sarajevo as especially painful.

And he gave no indication of plans to leave power, a demand made repeatedly by U.S. officials. The accord bans indicted war criminals from public office.

Karadzic’s comments, part of an hourlong attempt to explain the Ohio agreement to the Bosnian Serb people, came on a day of unexpected illustrations of the complexities of making peace in the bloody Balkans.

Bosnian government troops, apparently taking advantage of an imminent withdrawal of U.N. forces to make way for NATO deployment, ransacked a U.N. base and fired machine guns over the heads of Bangladeshi peacekeepers.


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About 200 Bosnian government soldiers made off with nine armored vehicles, fuel and food from the base at Velika Kladusa in northwest Bosnia, U.N. officials said. It was the Bangladeshis’ last night there before their withdrawal in anticipation of the arrival of a NATO contingent to enforce the new peace.

U.N. officials also said the Bosnians’ Croatian allies had started torching homes in two towns that will revert to Serb control under the terms of the peace agreement. Aid workers reported considerable destruction.

The violence showed that the estimated 23,000 U.S. troops expected to be deployed to Bosnia with the NATO peacekeeping force will face challenges not just from the Bosnian Serbs but from all parties, including the Muslim-led government’s army, which U.S. officials have pledged to help train.


Despite Karadzic’s conciliatory tone Friday, local Bosnian Serb authorities sounded more hostile.

Emerging from an eight-hour meeting with Karadzic in Pale, the Bosnian Serb stronghold near Sarajevo, the leaders of several Serb-held Sarajevo suburbs vowed to fight the peace plan, which restores their areas to Muslim-Croat government control.

“Our city, our property, we have to protect by military means, fighting one for all, all for one, doing what is in the best interest of all of us,” said Ratko Adzic, the nominal mayor of Ilijas, a Serb suburb. In another Serb suburb, Ilidza, hundreds of schoolchildren, soldiers and war wounded marched to protest the transfer of their town to government hands.

“We won’t give up Ilidza! We won’t give up being Serb!” they shouted, waving signs that said “Our Sarajevo” in the Cyrillic alphabet used by the Serbs.


More demonstrations were planned for today. The U.N. estimates that about 60,000 people live in the front-line Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo, equal to about a third of the city’s total population; the Serbs put the figure at twice that.

Karadzic, in his televised appearance, said he intended to press for a different solution for the Sarajevo dilemma.

He said Serbs would never feel safe under Muslim-Croat governance, adding that Sarajevo would become another Jerusalem, where Jews and Arabs for decades have eyed each other with fear and hatred.

U.S. and NATO troops will have to spend the next five years, at least, protecting the Serb minority in Sarajevo, he said.


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“Sarajevo is a problem not yet solved,” Karadzic said. “We never accepted losing Sarajevo.”

He spoke seated at a table and pointing at a map of Bosnia-Herzegovina with the new lines dictated by the Ohio agreement. Also appearing was Momcilo Krajisnik, the hard-line head of the Bosnian Serbs’ self-declared parliament. Krajisnik formed part of the negotiating team in Dayton.

The Bosnian Serbs had agreed to be represented at the talks by the president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, with Krajisnik and two other Bosnian Serbs participating in the delegation.


But now several stunned Bosnian Serbs contend that Milosevic exceeded his authority.

Krajisnik told viewers that Milosevic frequently overruled the Bosnian Serbs’ demands, which included a ban on NATO troops in Serb territory, a piece of Sarajevo and a wider land corridor connecting Serb holdings in eastern and western Bosnia.

Milosevic on Thursday summoned Karadzic, Krajisnik and other key Bosnian Serb leaders to a closed-door meeting in which he persuaded his onetime proteges to accept the Dayton agreement.

The Bosnian Serbs also complained that the U.S. negotiators who shepherded the landmark agreement acted in favor of the Muslim-led government. But overall, Karadzic said, the Serbs had not fared so badly. “We have lost some things and we have gotten some things,” Karadzic said. “We have half of Bosnia, more than 40 cities, good land. . . . We are one step forward toward recognition.”