MR Carl Bildt, the international mediator, has a firm understanding rather than a formal agreement with the Bosnian Serb leadership that Dr Radovan Karadzic will leave public life, Mr Bildt's spokesman said yesterday.
Clarifying the sequence and substance of negotiations over the Bosnian Serb president's future, which were held in the Bosnian Serb capital of Pale at the weekend, Mr Bildt's spokesman, Mr Colum Murphy, said in Sarajevo that the agreement was "hard won and hard fought".
"The Bosnian Serbs have said that he (Karadzic) would not be seen from or heard from and that he would take no part in public life," Mr Murphy added.
"I think a sea change has taken place in the Bosnian Serb leadership at least in their understanding that Dr Karadzic must be removed and must stay out of public life," he said.
Mr Murphy cited the President of the Bosnian Serb Assembly, Mr Momcilo Krajisnik, and the Foreign Minister, Mr Aleksa Buha, as two senior officials with whom Mr Bildt had reached the understanding.
He said Mr Bildt had sought a formal, written agreement from the Serbs but so far they had failed to sign the agreed document.
"We don't think the game is won. We don't think this is over. There are set backs . . . We do think that the discussion we had added up to something," Mr Murphy said.
"A text was discussed, language was discussed and even the Bosnian Serb leadership itself agreed that Dr Karadzic had to stay out of public life. So it's not everything, but it's certainly not nothing," Mr Murphy said.
Mr Bildt, the European Union's High Representative for Bosnia, has spent the past two weeks working intensively with moderate Bosnian Serb politicians to get Dr Karadzic, a twice indicted war criminal, out of office.
Dr Karadzic dismissed his moderate prime minister, Mr Rajko Kasagic, and replaced him with a hardliner last week. But the president did agree to transfer some duties to his vice president, Ms Biljana Plavsic, another hardliner.
Mr Murphy said even Dr Karadzic's replacement by hardliners was a step forward because they were not indicted for war crimes and lacked his influence over the Bosnian Serb political scene.
The international community wants Dr Karadzic removed from power because they see him as the main obstacle to a successful implementation of the Dayton peace deal reached late last year.
Dr Karadzic, a former Sarajevo psychiatrist and occasional poet, led the Bosnian Serbs in their 43 month separatist war against the Bosnian government. Under Dayton he should have stepped out of public life. Instead, he has stubbornly held on to power and there have been reports from his supporters that he might even contest elections scheduled for September.
Bosnian Serb authorities yesterday raised the possibility of holding a referendum soon to rally support behind Dr Karadzic, resorting to a favoured method of defying the international community.
The Bosnian Serb news agency (SRNA), quoted unnamed sources as saying a referendum would "show and prove the true will of the people" and would deliver a "defeat" to international efforts to remove the "state leadership".
A French soldier of the Bosnia peace implementation force (Ifor) died at the weekend in a shooting incident near Sarajevo.
The soldier died on Sunday on Mount Igrnan, which overlooks Sarajevo, in an incident still under investigation.
The French soldier's death brings the number of Ifor troops killed in Bosnia to 26 since they deployed last December, most of them in road accidents or mine explosions. Another 36 peacekeepers have been wounded.