From: trh@jack.sns.com (Al Trh)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: News 3 Jan 93 (from Haluk)
Date: 6 Jan 1993 00:42:36 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
Reply-To: Turkish Cultural Program List <TRKNWS-L%USCVM.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
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 : Cold bites Bosnian capital as leaders talk in Geneva
 : Bush and Yeltsin urge Azerbaijan, Armenia to resolve conflict
 : Yugoslav talks focus on borders
 : Ex-Yugoslavia to dominate Bush-Mitterand talks

 =========================================================================
 Subject: Cold bites Bosnian capital as leaders talk in Geneva

        SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (UPI) -- A thick layer of snow covered
 the freezing city of Sarajevo Sunday, posing a new threat to life in the
 Bosnian capital amid a lull in fighting, while the leaders of three
 warring factions discussed the fate of the former Yugoslav republic in
 Geneva.
        About 380,000 residents and refugees in the shell-shattered city
 shivered in their apartment blocks and U.N. officials reported continued
 lack of cooperation from both Bosnian and Serbian forces in efforts to
 restore essential services.
        The predominantly Muslim Slav city, under a Serbian siege since early
 April, Sunday entered its 25th straight day without running water and
 electricity.
        The capital was covered with 4 inches of snow, with temperatures
 ranging between 10 and 17 degrees Fahrenheit.
        A water repair mission scheduled for Sunday in Sarajevo was canceled
 because Serbian officials said they were unable to escort utilities
 workers into Serbian-held territory.
        An electricity repair mission also was canceled because of opposition
 from commanders of Muslim Slav-dominated Bosnian government forces.
        A third mission, to repair an electricity installation, was canceled
 for the third day in a row because of bad weather.
        Irfan Durmic, director of Elektroprenos, Sarajevo's electricity
 supplier, said power could be restored within two days if utilities
 teams were allowed to reach repair sites. He said even with U.N.
 escorts, workers were routinely forced to retreat because of shooting.
        Fighting, meanwhile, was less intense than at any time since the
 beginning of the Serbian siege nearly nine months ago, with sporadic
 artillery and small-arms fire in parts of the city during the day.
        Bosnian health officials said three people were killed and 28 wounded
 in fighting around the republic in the 24-hour period that ended at 10
 a.m. Sunday. One person was killed and eight were wounded in Sarajevo.
        Fifteen out of 20 scheduled humanitarian aid flights landed at the
 city airport Sunday.
        Outside the capital, Sarajevo radio reported some small-arms fire in
 Tuzla Sunday, and said the strategic link road stretching from
 Miljanovici through Kalesija to Memici, between Tusla and Zvornik, came
 under intense anti-aircraft fire throughout the day.
        The radio said Serbian forces launched tank, missile and artillery
 fire on Srebrenica for a third day.
        An artillery and mortar attack on Turbe was reported, and the Bosnian
 lines around Vogosco just north of Sarajevo came under artillery fire in
 the early afternoon, Sarajevo radio said.
        In Geneva, the leaders of Muslim Slavs, Serbs and Croats on Sunday
 continued for a second day negotiations on territorial partition of
 ethnically mixed Bosnia-Herzegovina, one in a series of attempts to
 bring peace to the republic.
        Presidents Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Dobrica Cosic of the rump
 Yugoslav union of Serbia and Montenegro were among those attending the
 Geneva talks, chaired by U.N. special envoy Cyrus Vance and European
 Community representative Lord David Owen.
        But some residents in the freezing Bosnian capital were doubtful
 about the prospects for progress in Geneva.
        ``It would be better if they held the Geneva talks in a cold room
 without electricity or water. That way they would reach a settlement
 soon enough,'' said one Sarajevo woman.
        On the streets of Sarajevo, small wooden toboggans have replaced baby
 carriages and homemade trolleys as the preferred means of transporting
 firewood and water along city streets.
        ``It's easier today because there's snow,'' said Abasa Begic, a high
 court judge, who was helping her sister Yasminka pull a toboggan with
 four plastic containers filled with water through Sarajevo's old town.
 ``We can pull much more than we can carry,'' Begic explained.
        Facilitating the primitive form of transport was the only positive
 aspect of the snow. Begic removed her gloves to reveal blue cold-
 blisters on her fingers. She said she and her sister had to drag their
 water supplies two miles from a natural well in the old town to their
 apartment.
        Zaciragic Vekas, a financial controller, and his wife Ismeta, a
 businesswoman, were dragging their sled with empty containers toward one
 of the main functioning wells. ``We had a good life before, and now we
 are suffering like this,'' Vekas mused.
        Zaciragic said he had lost 40 pounds during the Serb siege, but he
 was confident the Bosnians would win in the end. ``We will make it
 through the winter. They want to destroy us and that's why we will
 survive,'' he explained.
        The war began in late March when Serbian guerrillas, with backing
 from the Serbian-led former Yugoslav army and the communist regime of
 President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, launched a land-grab drive to
 carve out a self-declared ``Serbian state'' in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
        In the past nine months, well-armed Serbian forces have captured
 about 75 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where they declared the
 ``Serbian state'' for only 31 percent of Serbs of the republic's 4.4
 million population.
        Nationalist leaders of 1.4 million Christian Orthodox Serbs plan to
 merge the Bosnian ``Serbian state'' with neighboring Serbia.
        Many of 1.9 million Muslim Slavs and some of 750,000 Roman Catholic
 Croats advocate an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina.
        The level of fighting in Sarajevo has declined markedly since the
 beginning of the New Year. U.N. monitors Saturday reported 32 large-
 caliber shells incoming on Serbian positions around Sarajevo, and 10
 mortar and five artillery rounds landing in Bosnian government-
 controlled parts of the city.
        Back on the streets of the capital, three schoolgirls walking through
 the still-picturesque, snow-clad, shell-shattered streets of the old
 town displayed an other-worldly preoccupation with an issue not usually
 associated with the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
        They wanted desperately to hear news of U.S. rock star Axl Rose, lead
 singer of the heavy metal group Guns N' Roses. The girls were relieved
 to discover that rumors they had heard of his death were unfounded.
        The three were not fetching water or gathering firewood, but
 promenading in a frigid dusk.
        ``We try to be beautiful in these days. We dont want to just sit
 around because of the war,'' 16-year-old Lida Kapic explained.
        ``If you ever meet Axl or if you can send a message to him, please
 tell him we are waiting for him to come to Sarajevo,'' Lida said.
 =========================================================================
 Subject: Bush and Yeltsin urge Azerbaijan, Armenia to resolve conflict

        MOSCOW (UPI) -- President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin
 Sunday called on Azerbaijan and Armenia, which have been engaged in a
 bloody undeclared war over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, to negotiate a
 peaceful end to the conflict.
        ``We note with alarm the continuation and deterioration of the
 conflict,'' the two leaders said in a joint statement issued following
 their Kremlin summit.
        They said the war had inflicted incalculable damage on the economies
 of both ex-Soviet republics, was discrediting democracy and jeopardizing
 stability in the whole trans-Caucasus region south of Russia.
        Muslim Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia have been fighting an
 increasingly bitter war over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, a mountainous
 Armenian-populated enclave inside Azerbaijan. The four-year-old conflict
 has killed 3,000 people.
        Initially the war was confined to the enclave itself, but since
 spring the fighting has spread to the border regions of the two
 republics and has involved heavier weaponry inherited from the breakup
 of the Soviet army or taken in raids on army installations.
        The Bush-Yeltsin statement condemned ``brutal'' actions in the war
 including attacks on civilian targets, the imposition of economic
 blockades, the seizure of hostages and ill treatment of prisoners.
        ``Russia and the United States call for an immediate end to the
 bloodshed,'' the statement said.
        The statement called for the two sides to resolve the conflict by
 returning to negotiations through the Conference on Security and
 Cooperation in Europe.
        The talks, which had been planned earlier this year in the Belarus
 capital Minsk, were derailed by continuing fighting in and around the
 mountainous province.
        Previous separate efforts by the United States and Russia to
 negotiate an end to the fighting have failed. European countries and
 Iran also have failed in efforts to mediate an end to the violence.
        Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenians have declared their independence from
 Azerbaijan, embroiling the former Soviet neighbors south of Russia in a
 protracted war.
 =========================================================================
 Subject: Yugoslav talks focus on borders

        GENEVA (UPI) -- Yugoslav ethnic leaders met Sunday for renewed peace
 talks amid suggestions from the United Nations and European Community
 chairman that progress was being made on the territorial aspects of a
 settlement.
        The U.N. and EC leaders said they remained insistent that Serbian
 leaders give back territory seized in Bosnia-Herzegovina and give up any
 hopes of ethnically pure divisions, but made no predictions of an
 imminent settlement and said a cease-fire agreement appeared even
 further away.
        ``I hope there'll be some movement on getting a cease-fire in
 Sarajevo and elsewhere, but this is going to be more difficult than
 making progress on the map issue,'' U.N. special enovy Cyrus Vance told
 a news conference.
        Vance and his EC co-chairman Lord David Owen on Saturday gave the
 leaders of the three warring factions attending the Geneva talks a map
 of a proposed new political layout for Bosnia-Herzegovina.
        Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Muslim Slavs were the single largest ethnic
 group prior to the war, would be divided under the new Vance-Owen
 proposal into 10 provinces plus a neutral capital Sarajevo as an ``open
 city.''
        Vance and Owen also proposed a new constitution and administrative
 structure for Bosnia-Herzegovina.
        While drawn partly along ethnic lines, the Vance-Owen map does not
 establish any single province in which one of the three ethnic groups in
 Bosnia-Herzegovina would have exclusive rights.
        ``I think they want to live together,'' Vance said.
        But the republic's well-armed Serbian forces, who have captured about
 75 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina despite representing only 31 percent of
 the its pre-war population of 4.4 million, have insisted on ethnic
 divisions during previous peace talks.
        Owen said he and Vance were not prepared to reveal the reaction of
 the Bosnian Muslim Slav, Serbian and Croatian factions to the map and
 the constitutional plan.
        Outside the conference, spokesmen for Bosnian President Alija
 Izetbegovic, a Muslim Slav, and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic
 said they found parts of the proposed map unacceptable.
        ``This whole thing is the subject of negotiations and that's what
 we're involved in now,'' Owen said.
        ``But these negotiations are being conducted in the framework of
 people having to live together and we're negotiating on provincial
 boundaries, not on the basic question of whether there will be mixed
 populations in these provinces,'' he said. ``That's already been
 decided.
        ``The (Bosnian) Serbs have already accepted for example that they'll
 have to roll back their frontiers -- the only question remaining is how
 much?'' Owen said. ``But you cannot carve up Bosnia-Herzegovina
 ethnically, and there will always be some provinces where somebody is a
 minority.''
        The second day of the peace talks Sunday was spent partly in meetings
 of the two working groups, on demilitarization and a cease-fire and on
 map-making, and partly in various bilateral discussions, Vance spokesman
 Fred Eckhard said.
        The conference was scheduled to resume in a plenary session Monday
 afternoon before ending Tuesday in time for the Orthodox Christmas
 celebrations.
        Izetbegovic, who once said he never would sit at the same table with
 Karadzic, whom he publicly condemned as a war criminal and a murderer,
 scheduled a one-on-one meeting with him for Sunday afternoon. Eckhard
 said it was believed to be the first such encounter between the two
 leaders.
        Photographers were warned by U.N. security officials to keep well
 away from the room where the meeting was scheduled.
        Vance said he thought the meetings so far had been ``serious and
 thoughtful'' and had been conducted in a civil manner.
        Presidents Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Dobrica Cosic of the rump
 Yugoslav union of Serbia and Montenegro were leaving Geneva on Sunday
 evening to return to Zagreb and Belgrade, he said.
        Their departures were attributed to domestic state affairs and were
 described as having no bearing on or indication of any progress at the
 Geneva talks.
        ``It would be better if they held the Geneva talks in a cold room
 without electricity or water,'' said one Sarajevo woman, struggling
 Sunday through the encircled city's 25th straight day without running
 water and electricity.
        ``That way they would reach a settlement soon enough,'' she said.
 =========================================================================
 Subject: Ex-Yugoslavia to dominate Bush-Mitterand talks

        PARIS (UPI) -- The war in former Yugoslavia will dominate talks
 between President George Bush and President Francois Mitterand in Paris
 Sunday, according to Elysee Palace sources.
        Bush is due arrive in the French capital from Moscow about 4 p.m.
 local time after his expected signing of the START II nuclear
 disarmament treaty between the United States and Russia.
        The French and U.S. presidents are expected to discuss conditions for
 possible military intervention in the former Yugoslavia if the peace
 talks currently taking place in Geneva break down.
        Mitterand made public his conditions for intervention to end the
 fighting in Bosnia during his New Year address on French television
 Thursday night. He said if the Genava talks between the warring factions
 broke down French troops would only be committed as part of combined
 European and U.S. force under a United Nations mandate.
        President Mitterand, who requested the meeting with Bush before the
 U.S. president leaves office on Jan. 20, is also likely place French and
 U.S. involvement in the Somalian relief operation on the agenda.
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