Bosnia’s arms to Iraq scandal claims top political scalp

The Serb member of Bosnia’s three-man, multi-ethnic presidency resigned yesterday over illegal military supplies to Saddam Hussein.

Mirko Sarovic, a follower of the indicted Bosnian Serb war criminal, Radovan Karadzic, stepped down to avoid the humiliation of being sacked by Paddy Ashdown, the international community’s high representative in Bosnia.

Sarovic was found to have known about and done nothing to halt an elaborate scheme to smuggle military aircraft engines and spare parts to Baghdad, in league with Serbia’s main arms trading company.

The scandal over arms and equipment to Iraq erupted last October when Nato peacekeeping forces raided a Bosnian Serb aircraft engineering plant in Bijeljina near the Serbian border. The plant was closely associated with the Serbian military and top politicians in Belgrade and Bosnia.

While several senior military and government officials were promptly sacked in Belgrade and in the Serb half of Bosnia, a national-level investigation into the affair was deemed by international officials running Bosnia to have compounded the cover-up rather than to have shed light on the deals.

Western intelligence experts were then sent to Serbia and Bosnia to investigate further. They presented their findings to Ashdown last week, naming Sarovic as the key political culprit.

Sarovic, a leader of Bosnia’s Serbian Democratic party set up by Karadzic, and president of the Serb half of Bosnia at the time of the illicit trading, is the most senior casualty of the affair. Until yesterday’s resignation, he was chairman of the three-man presidency, which includes one directly elected representative from each of Bosnia’s three ethnic groups: Serbs, Muslims and Croats.

But his aides indicated yesterday that it was a tactical resignation, forced on him by Ashdown and that he would make a political comeback.

On Tuesday, Nato peacekeepers in Bosnia had accused the Bosnian Serb military and intelligence service, in collaboration with Serbian military counterintelligence, of spying on Nato and EU officials, and the international administration in Bosnia for at least a year.

The spying saga and the arms to Iraq scandal suggest that the Bosnian Serb military, backed by powerful figures in Belgrade, was not under the con trol of the civilian administration. Following the Sarovic resignation, Ashdown was expected last night to set in motion a crackdown on the Bosnian Serb military top brass and a strengthening of civilian control over the military.

The raid on the Orao aircraft plant uncovered documents proving that it was supplying engines to Iraq for MiG fighter aircraft in violation of a UN embargo. The trade was arranged through the Yugoimport arms agency in Belgrade. The engines and spare parts were smuggled to Iraq via Syria.

The Serbs were discovered to be helping Saddam Hussein boost and maintain his anti-aircraft defences in the run-up to the war. Letters seized by the Nato forces advised Baghdad how to disguise the military cooperation and hide it from UN weapons inspectors.

The Bosnian Serb authorities announced last month, after sacking the defence minister and army and air force chiefs, that 17 officials were being charged in connection with the illegal trading, either for being involved in the trade or helping to cover it up.