From: draskovi@usc.edu (Zoran Draskovic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.europe
Subject: Independent
Date: 25 Aug 92 20:36:54 GMT
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: sal-sun32.usc.edu


The INDEPENDENT
22.August 1992.
Published in London


         MUSLIMS 'SLAUGHTER THEIR OWN PEOPLE'

--- Bosnia bread queue massacre was propaganda ploy, UN told ----
From
Leonard Doyle in New York

  United Nations officials and senior Western military officers believe
some of the worst recent killings in Sarajevo, including the massacre
of at least 16 people in a bread queue, were carried out by the
city's mainly Muslim defenders - not Serb besiegers - as a propaganda
ploy to win world sympathy and military intervention.
  The view has been expressed in confidential reports circulating at UN
headquarters in New York, and in classified briefings to US policymakers
in Washington. All suggest that Sarajevo's defenders, mainly Muslims but
including Croats and a number of Serb residents, staged several attacks
on their own people in the hope of dramatising the city's plight in the
face of insuperable Serbian odds.
  They emphasize, however, that these attacks, though bloody, were
a tiny minority among regular city bombardments by Serbian forces.
  The reports recite a litany of gruesome events, from the bombing
of the bread queue on 27 May  to the 4 August explosion at a cemetery
while two orphans were being buried, and a "choreographed" mortar salvo
30 seconds after Douglas Hurd entered a building for a meeting with
the Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, on 17 July. The mortar
attack, which the Foreign Secretary played down by saying "it wasn't
as bad as the No 10 bang," killed or wounded 10 bystanders. A Bosnian
guard of honour for Mr Hurd's security had, however, already taken
cover.
  Speaking about the attack on the cemetery, a UN official said: "The
smoke upon impact was...only about five or six feet [two meters] from
her [one of the injured] and if it had been a mortar round as
reported she would have been cut in about 20 pieces."
  UN officials also believe the bullet which killed the American
television producer David Kaplan near Sarajevo airport on 13 August
was probably not fired by a sniper from distant Serbian positions.
"That would have been impossible," one UN military officer said.
"That shot came in horizontal to the ground. Somebody was down at
ground level."
  UN officials also say a Ukrainian soldier shot in the head and
heart at Sarajevo's Marshall Tito barracks on Thursday was killed by
"small arms fire" - by implication the Bosnians. The officials were
anxious to point out that they were not trying to exonerate the
Serbs, who have been besieging Sarajevo for months, killing unknown
numbers of townspeople, as well as carrying out "ethnic cleansing"
around the city and elsewhere in Bosnia.
  But they expressed fears that the "self-inflicted" attacks may not
augur well for existing UN forces or for additional Western troops,
including Britons, who have to serve there.
  In a New York meeting on Thursday attended by Sir Peter Inge, the
Chief of the General Staff, it was agreed that the 1,800 British and
1,000 French soldiers being sent in would use their weapons strictly in
self-defence and would not intervene to separate Serbs from Muslims.
  The televised scenes of civilians cut to pieces by an explosion as
they queued for bread on one of Sarajevo's main shopping thoroughfares,
Vase Miskina, horrified international public opinion and added to
growing pressure for military intervention against the Serbian side in
the war. Vivid footage showed dead bodies littering the street and
people with severed limbs sitting on the pavement in pools of blood.
  The attack came shortly before a meeting of European Community
ambassadors to consider imposing sanctions on Serbia. The world's
press concluded that the atrocity was caused by mortar bombs fired
from a Serbian-held positions and attack was widely interpreted as
a cynical display of defiance by the Serbs.
  UN officials said then that they were suspicious about the
circumstances but could not go public without jeopardising the UN
mission and possibly endangering UN peacekeepers' lives.
  Classified reports to the UN force commander, General Satish Nambiar,
concluded, however, that the Bosnian forces loyal to President
Alija Izetbegovic may have detonated a bomb.
  "We believe it was a command-detonated explosion, probably in a can,"
a UN official said then. "The impact which is there now is not
necessarily similar or anywhere near as large as we came to expect
with a mortar round landing on a paved surface."
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