THE BOSNIAN Serb in charge of foreign affairs, Mr Aleksa Buha, said yesterday that an "agreement" reached with international peacekeepers on the future of Dr Radovan Karadzic, was "relatively satisfying" for both sides.
Mr Buha told Bosnian Serb radio that on a visit to the Serb stronghold of Pale this week by Mr Carl Bildt, the international civilian official enforcing the Bosnian peace: "We reached, I hope, an agreement, a solution, which is relatively satisfying for both sides."
Under the terms of the verbal agreement, reached earlier this week and already made public, Dr Karadzic, an indicted war criminal and Bosnian Serb president, has to retire from public life or Serbia will face the return of crippling economic sanctions.
Mr Bildt has threatened to "discuss" the re imposition of sanctions on the former republic of Yugoslavia, composed of Serbia and Montenegro, if Dr Karadzic appears again in public life in the Serb entity in Bosnia.
Mr Buha told Bosnian Serb radio it was still possible the Serbs would organise a referendum to confirm support for Dr Karadzic. He said this would not happen if the international community accepted the agreement made between Mr Bildt and the Serb leader, Mr Momcilo Krajisnik, "as a long term solution".
Western leaders still say Dr Karadzic and other war crimes suspects should be made to appear in The Hague to answer charges at the UN war crimes tribunal.
The French Foreign Minister, Mr Herve de Charette, said yesterday the international community could reconsider its commitment to bringing peace to Bosnia unless the former warring parties fulfil the pledges they made under the Dayton accord.
The Nato Secretary General, Mr Javier Solana, yesterday denied a press report that the US and its allies would consider allowing the two Bosnian Serb leaders to stay in power.
"There is no agreement with war criminals, nor can there be," Mr Solana said in Madrid.
He was replying to questions about a New York Times report from Sarajevo which said Washington and its allies would accept an arrangement whereby Dr Karadzic and his military chief, Gen Ratko Mladic, remained in power as long as Dr Karadzic slipped from public view and shed all formal duties.
Meanwhile, the European Union administrator of Mostar announced that elections to help reunify the ethnically polarised city, originally set for May 31st, would be postponed until the second half of June.
He confirmed the gist of a report given on Thursday by a senior European diplomat who said mediators had struck a deal to bead off a Muslim boycott that threatened the first postwar vote in western Bosnia's biggest city.
Initial rules for the election convinced Bosnian Muslim leaders that kinfolk who had been expelled from the city by Croat separatists during a 1993-94 war would be unable to vote.
"After many meetings we reached the basis for an agreement on Mostar elections. The first part of the agreement is to postpone the elections to the second half of June," said the EU administrator, Mr Ricardo Perez Casado.
"It's an agreement on the basis of which all Mostar citizens registered in 1991 (before the war) will be able to vote and do so in the best possible political conditions," he told a news conference in the Croat Muslim city.
Elections in Mostar are seen as crucial for the survival of Bosnia's fragile Croat Muslim Federation, the cornerstone of the Bosnia peace treaty signed last December. The accord split the country into the federation and a Serb entity.
