From: trh@jack.sns.com (Al Trh)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Vance-Owen-brokered cease-fire fails to hold (21 Jan) {fwd} (fwd)
Date: 22 Jan 1993 10:34:41 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
Reply-To: Turkish Cultural Program List <TRKNWS-L%USCVM.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

 Vance-Owen-brokered cease-fire fails to hold

        SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (UPI) -- Muslim Slav and Croatian forces
 fought fresh clashes Thursday around a central Bosnia-Herzegovina town
 despite a cease-fire accord brokered between the nominal allies by
 international mediators Cyrus Vance and Lord David Owen, news reports
 said.
        French Gen. Philippe Morillon, the commander of the U.N. Protection
 Force (UNPROFOR), hoped to arranged a meeting between senior commanders
 of the Muslim Slav-led Bosnian army and the Croatian Defense Council
 militia in a bid to secure an end to the fighting around Gornji Vakuf,
 U.N. officials said.
        Sarajevo radio quoted refugees from the predominantly Muslim Slav
 town as saying that it was under ``constant'' artillery fire from the
 Croatian Defense Council, a ultra-nationalist paramilitary force backed
 by President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and known by the initials of HVO.
        The Bosnian army charged in a statement that the HVO was also massing
 soldiers from Croatia and the Western Herzegovina region for an attack
 on the Muslim Slav stronghold of Vitez, 20 miles north of Gornji Vakuf.
        There was no independent confirmation of the allegation.
        Spanish Maj. Juan Villalon, UNPROFOR spokesman, said that tensions
 between Muslim Slavs and Croats in the towns of Mostar and Jablanica
 appeared to have been defused.
        The developments came 24 hours after Vance and Owen paid a one-day
 visit to Sarajevo to broker the truce agreement between the Muslim Slav-
 dominated government of Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and senior
 Croatian ministers who belong to the republic's wing of Tudjman's
 Croatian Democratic Union.
        Vance and Owen then flew to the Croatian capital of Zagreb for talks
 with Tudjman.
        The fighting in Gornji Vakuf erupted last week after Bosnian troops
 apparently rejected HVO demands to vacate the town, located inside one
 of three Croat-dominated provinces that would be created under a new
 plan drafted by Vance and Owen to end the war in the former Yugoslav
 republic.
        Izetbegovic has accused Tudjman's regime of ``aggression'' by
 allegedly orchestrating the HVO attacks on Gornji Vakuf in a bid to pre-
 empt a final rendering of the boundaries of the Croat-dominated
 provinces.
        The Vance-Owen plan would divide the republic into 10 mostly self-
 ruling provinces linked by a weak central government. The 1.9 million
 Muslim Slavs, 1.4 million Christian Orthodox Serbs and 750,000 Roman
 Catholic Croats would each dominated in three provinces, and the 10th
 around Sarajevo would be neutral.
        The plan rules out acceptance of the self-declared Serbian state that
 Yugoslav army-equipped Serbian forces set out of conquer in late March
 on 70 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina, igniting the civil war.
        The self-styled Bosnian Serb parliament on Wednesday voted to accept
 the main principles of the plan. But, statements by senior Bosnian Serb
 leaders after the decision indicated that they were still intent on
 gaining their state and merging it with Serbia, Montenegro and Serb-
 captured areas of Croatia in a ``Greater Serbia.''
        The Muslim Slavs and Croats had been nominal allies because of their
 shared emnity for the Serbs. But, Tudjman and senior Bosnian Croat
 leaders are regarded as being closer to the Serbs politically in that
 they are believed to secretly share their goal of an ethnic partition of
 the republic.
        In other developments, Sarajevo was relatively quiet.
        But, fighting was reported in numerous other areas between Bosnian
 and Serbian forces, including around the towns of Gradacac, Maglaj,
 Doboj, Brcko and Bihac.
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