From: malenovi@plains.NoDak.edu (Malenovic Nikola V.)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: Muslim Slavs loot and burn Serbian homes in Goradze
Date: 5 Sep 92 04:06:08 GMT
Organization: North Dakota Higher Education Computing Network

-courtesy of SII-

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Subject: Muslim Slavs loot and burn Serbian homes in Gorazde
Date: 4 Sep 92 13:49:39 GMT

	GORAZDE, Bosnia-Hercegovina (UPI) -- Encircled and bombarded for five
months by Serbian forces, Muslim Slavs have been looting and burning the
homes of Serbs who fled with the easing of the siege of this war-ravaged
town in eastern Bosnia-Hercegovina.
	Virtually the entire Serbian enclave has been devastated in the pent-
up wave of retribution.
	Homes and apartment buildings are fire-blackened shells and at least
one blaze raged out of control during a visit Thursday to the Drina
River town by Western journalists accompanying a U.N. humanitarian aid
convoy.
	Pigs with their necks slashed lay dead in the streets and yards of
Serb-owned homes. Looters carried away property, one man pushing a
wheelbarrow bearing a sofa, another hefting a bookcase.
	Mayor Hadzo Efendic denied that Muslim Slav residents were exacting
vengence on their former neighbors, contending that the Serbs had burned
their own homes and slaughtered their own pigs.
	The U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) convoy arrived in
Gorazde days after Yugoslav army-armed Bosnian Serb forces and Serbia-
based ultranationalist paramilitary fighters withdrew some 12 miles,
loosening a brutalfive-month blockade.
	Serbian leaders ordered the pullback amid a breakout attempt by the
town's Muslim Slav defenders. It amounted to one of the most significant
military setbacks for Serbs fighting to rip a self-declared state out of
newly independent Bosnia-Hercegovina.
	Gorazde was the only town on the former Yugoslav republic's Muslim
Slav-dominated eastern border with communist-ruled Serbia that held out
against the Serbian ``ethnic cleansing'' drive.
	An estimated 70,000 people, including 30,000 refugees from other
towns that fell to the Serbs, withstood incessant barrages by Yugoslav
army-supplied canons, tanks, mortars and anti-aircraft weapons, living
underground with little food or medicines.
	There are no buildings in the Muslim Slav areas that escaped the
storms of shellfire, Many are devastated, all are pock-marked and none
have windows.
	Residents said that long-range shelling persists even though the
Serbs have pulled back.
	The UNHCR convoy was twice delayed this week in departing Sarajevo
because of fighting in the tree-shrouded Drina River Valley hills and
dales that surround the town.
	It comprised 10 trucks carrying 100 tons of food and medicines.
Guarded by five French army armored personnel carriers of the U.N.
Protection Force, the convoy arrived Thursday afternoon and spent 24
hours on the 60-mile return trip to Sarajevo at an average speed of 3
mph.
	The journey was made despite a widespread belief by Serbian
militiamen that UNHCR delivered weapons, and not food and medicines, to
Gorazde three weeks ago in the only other convoy that has been permitted
through the siege.
	Larry Hollingsworth, the chief of UNHCR's Sarajevo-based operations,
had to give two truckloads of aid to Serbian fighters in Rogatica, a
Serbian stronghold north of Gorazde.
	In addition, Serbian soldiers insisted in conducting lengthy searches
of the remaining vehicles. Some flitched boxes of soap powder.
	One stretch of the road between Rogotica and Gorazde was littered
with bodies and the detritus of war: shell casings, empty ammunition
boxes and mortar rounds.
	Machinegun fire echoed from afar as the convoy entered Gorazde, its
arrival greeted by scores of residents, many of them sobbing.

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