Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 11:09:33 CST
From: <U15231@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna
Subject: Bosnians Accuse U.N. of Failing to Protect Them

Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 02:23:06 EST
Subject: NYT: John Burns



AFTER MINISTER IS KILLED, BOSNIANS ACCUSE U.N. OF FAILING TO
PROTECT THEM
By JOHN F. BURNS
c.1993 N.Y. Times News Service

   SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina  As crowds of angry Bosnians
demonstrated in the streets, leaders of the Muslim-led Bosnian
government on Saturday accused U.N. military commanders of failing
to protect them from Serbian attacks, including the murder on
Friday of one of Bosnia's deputy prime ministers.
   The demonstrations came as a group of hardline political and
military leaders who control the Sarajevo government announced that
they had ordered the Bosnian delegation at the peace negotiations
in Geneva to boycott the next round of discussions on Sunday.
   The anger of the Bosnians was directed largely at Gen. Philippe
Morillon, the U.N. military commander. Demonstrators outside the
U.N. headquarters carried placards saying, ``Morillon is a
killer,'' ``Morillon, you are guilty for everything,'' and
``UNPROFOR, we don't want you here.'' UNPROFOR is the acronym for
the U.N. Protection Force, the designation of the world body's
force in Balkans.
   In a statement, the Bosnian government not only accused Morillon
of failing to protect Hakija Turajlic, who was shot to death by a
Serbian gunman while under U.N. protection, but also attempting to
cover up the events that led to the killing.
   The anger could also be measured by the crowds of people
carrying placards outside the U.N. headquarters here, many of whom
had walked miles in a city where black-market gasoline costs nearly
$100 a gallon and public transport has disappeared.
   The murder of Turjlic, one of three deputy prime ministers in
the Bosnian government, occurred on Friday night when Serbian
nationalist troops besieging Sarajevo shot and killed him after
halting a U.N. armored vehicle that was carrying him from Sarajevo
airport into the city. The vehicle was painted white and bore the
blue U.N. flag.
   Much of the bitterness by the Bosnian government focused on the
fact that a Serbian soldier was somehow allowed to thrust his
automatic weapon over the shoulder of the French officer who
commands the airport, Col. Patrice Sartre, and fire at Turajlic
through the open rear door.
   The episode appeared to demonstrate more than any recent
occurrence the weakness of U.N. authority in the Balkans war.
   Morillon admitted on Saturday that it also exposed major
weaknesses in the U.N.'s procedures. He called the event ``a
tragedy of errors'' committed by the French soldiers on the scene.
   At an emotional news conference, Morillon said that soldiers
serving with the 7,500-man U.N. force had erred particularly in
opening the rear door of the vehicle, allowing Turajlic to be
killed by one of a group of about 40 Serbian soldiers who had
stopped the convoy at dusk and demanded that Turajlic be handed
over.
   Morillon, who described the killing as ``the worst blow of my
career,'' warned that it could prove to be the prelude to a still
greater tragedy if what he called the ``madness'' of Bosnia
spiraled out of control and provoked a new and still more brutal
chapter in the nine-month-old war.
   In that event, he said, the U.N. Security Council would have to
decide whether a new and tougher approach to the conflict was
needed.
   Morillon, who has previously spoken out strongly against western
military intervention here, saying that it might prolong the war
and cause tens of thousands of casualties among western troops,
pointedly avoided repeating his warning.
   Instead, he said that the killing of Turajlic had made it clear
that time was running out for the U.N. operation, and that it could
be a matter of days before the Security Council would have to
decide on something more than the delivery of relief supplies and
attempts to negotiate cease-fires.
   The 57-year-old general, who sometimes spends evenings reading
histories of the Balkans, even raised the specter of World War I,
which was triggered after Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian-born Serbian
nationalist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and
his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
   ``Everybody here has a memory of the first assassination in
Sarajevo, which was followed by millions of deaths,'' he said. ``I
hope that history will not repeat this madness.''
   Morillon spoke as thousands of people gathered outside a
16th-century mosque in the center of Sarajevo for the funeral of
Turajlic.
   On a thickly misted day, mourners outside the Ali Pasina mosque
were given a respite from the Serbian sniper fire that usually
makes the mosque and the grounds around it a danger zone. But the
burial was hurried anyway, as thousands of others have been since
Serbian forces began the siege of Sarajevo last April.
   Morillon appeared at his news conference with Sartre, the
commander of the French Marine battalion attached to the U.N. force
and who played a central role in the incident when he was summoned
to the ambush site an hour after the confrontation with the Serbian
forces developed.
   From the account given by the French officers, and from others
at the scene, a fuller picture of what occurred emerged on
Saturday.
   The incident appeared to have started when a Serbian military
liaison officer at the airport, seeing a Turkish air force C-130
Hercules landing and discharging a delegation of 24 Turkish
officers and officials, radioed the Serbian military headquarters
at Lukavica, two miles away, and reported that Turkish fighters had
arrived to join the Bosnian forces.
   In fact, the delegation consisted mainly of Turkish aid
officials, and all 24 left aboard the same aircraft less than 90
minutes after landing, leaving behind 10 tons of food and medicine.
   By the time that this report reached Serbian troops in the
Sarajevo suburb of Ilidza, flanking the airport road, it had taken
on new and still more inflammatory coloration.
   Turajlic, who had gone to the airport to greet the Turkish
delegation in his capacity as Bosnia's economics minister, was
returning to the city in the U.N. armored vehicle that had taken
him there when a force of two tanks and 40 to 50 Serbian soldiers
blocked the road and accused the three French soldiers manning the
vehicle of transporting ``Turkish mujahideen,'' meaning Muslim
fighters engaged in a holy war.
   The allegation has a powerful resonance in the Bosnian war,
which has pitted Serbian fighters, who are mainly Eastern Orthodox,
against the mainly Muslim forces of the Bosnian government.
   Serbian leaders have accused Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian
president, of planning an Islamic fundamentalist state, which he
has denied, but the claim has achieved the status of truth wherever
Serbian fighters gather.
   There is also a traditional distrust and enmity of Turkey, too,
because of the 400-year history of colonial rule here by the
Ottoman Turks.
   In the shooting, six of the seven bullets fired struck Turajlic
in the chest and arms. He was killed instantly, according to
information available on Saturday. Sartre said that the senior
Serbian officers present shouted: ``No, no,'' and grabbed for the
killer, but released him quickly and ordered their men to withdraw.
   There was no official statement from the Serbian nationalist
leaders on Saturday, but spokesmen at the Lukavica barracks offered
what appeared to be excusatory accounts, saying that Turajlic had
made insulting remarks about Serbs, and that the man who killed him
thought he was a Turk.
   U.N. officers said that there was never any doubt about who the
passenger was, and that Turajlic had been personally identified at
the scene by a Serbian military liaison officer summoned from the
U.N. headquarters. The U.N. officers also denied that Turajlic had
offered any provocation.
   Heated exchanges developed at Morillon's news conference over
why the French soldiers had opened the door of the armored vehicle,
which is operated by steel bars that can be operated from inside or
outside the vehicle.
   U.N. procedures laid down in November forbid soldiers to open
the doors of armored vehicles at checkpoints, and also forbid any
identification of passengers. The rules also authorize U.N. troops
to fire their weapons if necessary to protect civilian passengers
inside their vehicles.
   Sartre declined to say who had opened the doors, other than
noting that they were open when he arrived at the scene. He said he
had not been able to order the doors closed because they were being
held open by Serbian soldiers, and any attempt to force the matter,
or to use weapons to make the Serbs withdraw, would only have made
matters worse.
   ``It was 50 against two or three,'' he said, referring to
himself and two other French soldiers who stood between the vehicle
and the Serbian troops.
   Morillon listened to part of the colonel's account with his head
in his hands. He said that he had been kept informed of the
incident as it developed by accounts radioed to his headquarters,
but that he agreed with Sartre's decision not to summon
reinforcements because similar incidents in the past had usually
been resolved peacefully.
   ``You have all faced this kind of crisis,'' he said, referring
to reporters who have frequently been threatened at Serbian
roadblocks. ``And you know that it is a question of calming things
down. In the end, this was an act of a singular fanatic.''
 NYT-01-09-93 1738EST