From: stojanov@husc11.harvard.edu (Milan Stojanovic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia,soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna
Subject: More Fighting Between "Allies"
Date: 22 Jan 93 00:25:02 GMT
Organization: Harvard University Science Center




Subject: Vance-Owen-brokered cease-fire fails to hold
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 93 6:33:20 PST

       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 arrange 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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Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia,alt.news.macedonia,soc.culture.misc