SDS Shrugs Off Ashdown's Financial Squeeze

Monday, 21 February, 2005

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Gordana Katana

The decision to block the bank account of the ruling Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, in Republika Srpska, is unlikely to force a change of heart towards Radovan Karadzic, the party’ founder and the Hague tribunal's most wanted war crimes indictee.

Paddy Ashdown, the international community's High Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, on April 2 blocked all state financing of the SDS to the tune of 100,000 convertible marks (about 60,000 US dollars) a month.

He has also ordered the SDS to provide detailed accounts of the way it has spent money allocated to them.

Explaining his decision, Ashdown said he suspected some funds were being spent on financing Karadzic's life on the run.

The party at the centre of the furore denies it maintains any connection - financial or otherwise - with its ex-leader.

Dusan Stojicic, SDS spokesman, said the SDS did not fund Karadzic, adding that the responsibility for arresting war criminals lies with the institutions of the Republika Srpska, not with individual political parties.

Few independent analysts believe the SDS financial report will yield any vital clues about money spent on Karadzic's fugitive existence.

They suspect the real aim of Ashdown's move was - by depriving the SDS of funds before local elections in October - to force a change of party policy towards the party’s ex-leader.

Even this more modest aim is unlikely to yield fruit, however, in the general patriotic atmosphere that prevails before elections, politicians warn.

Slobodan Popovic, a deputy of the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina, SDP BiH, in the Republika Srpska parliament, predicted that the SDS would not be coerced into actively aiding the search for Karadzic.

"The money that the SDS gets from the [state] budget is only a fraction of the funds available to this party," he commented.

"Most of their money comes from the funds of state-owned firms headed by SDS supporters."

The SDS leadership has consistently denied the latter claim.

Popovic warned that moves to deprive the SDS of official financing - even if the losses reached a million convertible marks a year - would not result in a change of attitude.

A U-turn of that scale was even more unlikely while most Bosnian Serbs continued to look on Karadzic as a national icon.

"Towns in Republika Srpska are full of posters of Karadzic, extolling this war criminal," Popovic remarked.

With local elections approaching, he concluded, anyone advocating cooperation with The Hague stood to lose key votes from "many people who think that Karadzic is a hero".

Boris Divjak, head of the Bosnian office of Transparency International, an NGO dedicated to combating corruption, agreed that the SDS was not dependent on money received from the government budget.

"The basic source of funds for the party comes from state-owned firms run by people from the SDS. That is why the High Representative's sanctions will not greatly affect it," he said.

Tanja Topic, political analyst from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a German NGO promoting democracy, said, “There is no doubt that Karadzic has been financed by the people from SDS, but through some illegal channels that are very difficult to track down."

With no political will among any major parties to arrest war criminals and with elections on the horizon, it was "difficult to believe the overall course of this political party [the SDS] will change significantly", she added.

Zeljko Kopanja, director of the Banja Luka-based Nezavisne Novine newspaper, said, “To expect the blocking of budget funds to lead to a turnabout in their attitude toward war crimes issues is a shot in the dark."

The editor added that while the RS police remained largely under the control of politicians, it was unwise to expect any independent moves from law-enforcement bodies to arrest indictees.

"Political actors in the Republika Srpska control the police to a significant degree," he said. "Police activities in relation to finding war criminals have only been a charade put on for the international community."

Police spokesmen deny this. The Republika Srpska's interior ministry spokesman, Zoran Glusac, said officers had been carrying out orders. "We have no intelligence in relation to Karadzic's whereabouts and nobody can accuse us of failure to perform," he said.

While most independent voices suggest the High Representative's latest action is doomed to failure, others suggest the financial squeeze on the SDS may have long-term positive consequences.

Senad Slatina, analyst of the International Crisis Group in Bosnia, said the High Representative had made "a wise decision that will serve to urge the SDS to show a greater level of cooperation with the Hague rribunal".

Slatina maintained that the financial loss would hurt the SDS more than many believed, adding, "The SDS will not easily renounce the money that they get through the legal channels.

"These funds are considerable and we cannot rule out the possibility that they will decide money is more important than the national interests - that is, Karadzic!"

Slatina concluded that the effect of Ashdown's action might have been more marked, however, if he had demanded a general audit of all the SDS's financial dealings, rather than a report solely on money it had received from the state.

For the moment, such views are isolated ones, however. Over the next six months, the run-up to local elections will occur in an atmosphere of patriotic competition; and one thing is certain - aiding the arrest of Karadzic will not contribute to any party's victory.

Gordana Katana is a journalist with Radio Free Europe.