THE Bosnian peace process was in serious crisis yesterday when Bosnian Serb anger at the seizure of two Serb officers boiled over and a fault line appeared in the Muslim Croat alliance.
The UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague asked the Muslim led Bosnian government to arrest provisionally the two officers, Gen Djorde Djukic and Col Aleksa Krsmanovic, saying it was considering indicting them for atrocities. This the government did.
Nato urged restraint. But the Serbs, who say the two senior officers were negotiators on their way to a meeting with Nato officials, said the entire peace process was under threat.
The Bosnian Serb army commander, Gen Ratko Mladic, himself indicted for war crimes, broke two months of silence to threaten to freeze contacts with the Nato led Dayton peace Implementation Force (Ifor).
The Bosnian Serb "prime minister", Mr Rajko Kasagic, called off meetings with international mediator, Mr Carl Bildt, and Prince Charles in Sarajevo later this week, pursuing a Serb boycott of all contacts on Bosnian government territory.
Another threat to the survival of a single Bosnian state as envisaged by the peace accord negotiated in Dayton, Ohio, in November, emerged in the southwestern town of Mostar.
Local Croat leaders rejected the arbitration of the EU over the town's future and announced they were breaking off relations with the EU.
Several hundred angry Croats occupied EU offices and kicked a car containing the chief arbitrator, Mr Hans Koschnick, for an hour, an EU spokesman said.
Ifor said it sent three Spanish armoured cars of the peace farce to Mostar and reported the situation had calmed down.
Mr Koschnick ruled that Mostar, scene of fierce Muslim Croat fighting in 1993-94, should have three Muslim majority and three Croat majority districts, plus one district for its central administration. The Croats, who want to keep two distinct entities, say the solution favours the Muslims.
In Geneva, a senior official of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), confirming the long held views of its staff in Bosnia, said he was convinced that 3,000 Bosnian Muslims had been massacred in the eastern town of Srebrenica.
The Bosnian Serb authorities have a serious responsibility for what happened in Srebrenica said Mr Jean de Courten, ICRC director of operations.
UN human rights investigators have visited several sites in Serbheld territory where survivors say there are mass graves of executed Muslims, but no proper examination has been done.