Organization: Ryerson Polytechnical Institute
Distribution: world
Date: Sunday, 6 Sep 1992 12:40:55 EST
From: <ADMN8686@RyeVm.Ryerson.Ca> [Tom Grgic]
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: UN Scam in Sarajevo

From The Observer, August 23, 1992.

John Sweeny in the Bosnian capital reports on the sorry shambles
which is the United Nations Protection Force ...

THE REPORT WHICH HAS SHOCKED SARAJEVO

CRUELLER and crueller -- this city, tingling with fear, sufferred
a fresh shock yesterday when news broke of a confidential United
Nations  report  blaming the Bosnians for some of the worst
atrocities in the past hellish months.

One fighter, told that the UN blamed the beseiged bosnians or the
masacre of the bread queue and the mortaring of the cemetaryduring
the funeral of two orphans, banged his head, against the wall in
despair.

Another cried angrily: 'This is just an excuse by the west not to
come in. If I believed for a moment that we were killing our
people, do you think I would be here?'

Yesterday the bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, expressed his
concerns over the reports to the local UN commander, brigadier-
general Ali Abdel-Razek Hussein.

Minutes after they met, the general's headquarters at the UN
Protection Force in the city was hit by mortars. No one was killed.
Mortars also hit the airport; routine Sarajevo violence.

But the UN report added a jagged edge to the story. Nothing is out
of bounds in Sarajevo, exhausted by the Serbian seige. The curreny
of attrocity has been so devalued that the drizzle of deaths and
amputations last week seemed unremarkable; the shooting of a
grandmother as she was fetching water, a commonplace.

Slobodan Milosevic, the serbian president, though, will be
delighted he has something to fire back at the Bosnians during next
Wednesday's peace talks in London. But a heavy question mark hangs
over the UN report: what, is the evidence for its claim that
Bosnians are attacking their greiving dead, the Un and Western
journalists?

The 'belief' by the UN official that the bullet that killed US TV
producer David Kaplan was unlikely to have been fired from a
'distant Serbian position' is supposition, silly at that. kaplan
was killed on the airport road, 'Snipers Alley', which is ringed by
towering hills and burnt-out high-rise flats. Unless the UN has an
affidavit from the sniper concerned, its report is guesswork.

But the leaking of the report to yesterday's Independent is itself
ugly news for the Bosnians, because it imports a handy 'moral
equivalence' between seigers and beseiged. If the Bosnians are
killing their own side to evoke sympathy, this is good reason to
call off Western armed intervention.
The impact of the report will also divert attention from the sorry
shambles that the UN Protection Force (Unprofor) in Sarajevo has
become. Last week, it could not even look after itself, as the
beseiged serbs serially humiliated it.

take the fate of the chlorine convoy last Thursday, bound for
Bosnia held Tuzla, to pick up vital chemicals to make sarajevo's
faltering water supply drinkable. It set off from Sarajevo -- two
armoured personnel carriers manned by 12 Canadians with a truck
between.

They were ambushed by Serb irregulars, the Chetniks, in hill
country. Outnumbered three-to-one, the Canadians faced machine-
guns, mortars, and anti-tank weapons, which the Serbs trained on
the APCs.

One of the Canadian soldiers said last week: 'They were really
pumped up. They were ready to fight. It would have been a massacre
on both sides.' Another said: 'They gave us an offer we could not
refuse.' The Canadians handed over the truck, and had to plead with
the Serbs not to take their APCs too.

Unprofor's spokesman, Jusuf Khalef, gave a mumbled version of the
story, witholding from his official report that the irregulars were
Serbs.

Take, too, the RAF Hercules cargo plane which was last week 'locked
on' to by an enemy anti-aircraft battery. In the Gulf, the batery
would have been blown away by Allied fighters; here, Sarajevo
airport was closed for two days.

And take the gutted wreck of Marshall Tito barracks, home to the
Unprofor's Ukranian contingent. It was pounded last Thursday
evening by Serbians, the mortar attack so intense no one dared put
out the fire.

The following day the Ukranians sheltered fearfully, 19-year-old
farm boys looking nervously at the hills. Their commander admits
the 'rules of engagement' prohibit them from fighting back. He also
concedes that his troops have not got the weapons.

The Ukranians have another, darker reason to be scared: they are
Orthodox, like the beseiging Serbs. On Thursday, one of the
Ukranians, a Sergeant Viktor Alexandreyovich Solokhin was shot dead
as he walked along ceside the barracks. The UN ballistics experts
reckon, off the record, the weapon was fired from a close, Bosnian
position.

Even if the UN has evidence of Bosnian attacks against Bosnians,
they must be seen as wild eddies against the maddening current of
Serbian violence.

Nowhere in this city is safe: last week the main hospital was hit
several times. The exquisite Muslim old quarter is a magnet for
mortars and sniper fire, and the fine stonebuilding that is the
office of President Izetbegovic is probably the Serbs main target.

The president did not jump at all as sniper shots cracked down on
the streets outside during an exclusive interview with me.

'The serbian blitzkrieg has failed,' the blue-eyed 67-year-old
Bosnian Muslim leader said. The invasion of two-thirds of his
country was like a 'bone in the throat' for the Serbs.

He expressed no great optimism for the London peace talks, fearing
that 'Milosevic has fooled many in the west, not just Lord
Carrington.'

The president said he would attend the peace talks, even if
president Milosevic of Serbia did not. But he repeated his
oftstated description of the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan
Karadzic, as a 'war criminal' and clearly had little time for the
prime minister of the unrecognised, Serb-dominated New yugoslavia,
Milan Panic.

He offerred no hint of a climb down: "It is impossible to negotiate
with the butchers.' And if they surrendered, they would be killed.
'As a young man I remember when Rudolf Hess parachuted to Britain
to negotiate, and Churchill had him locked up.'

He was not 'satisfied' with the way the United Nations forces in
Sarajevo were coping, but added that ws for weapons so that
Bosnians could fight their own battles. Outside his office, the
city -- which is about all that is left of the internationally
recognised state of Bosnia -- continued to be hit.

UN officials said privately that talk of humanitarian aid is beside
the point under this barrage, when the hospital, homes and cemetary
of sarajevo are hit, day and night. The sufferring is written on
every pale, tense face.

The sight of British paras on the hills above or a few overflights
by the US airforce would cut this misery, but the danger now is
that the West will send 'too few to fight, too many to die.' The
British government may have got the domestic political nuances just
right by offering 1,800 troops for Bosnia, but they will be setting
the men against massively superior odds, commanding the heights
over over town: not Desert Rats, but Sacrificial Lambs.

Yesterday morning eight Bosnians were buried at the cemetary. A
shell had blown the edge off a grave stone, belonging to a Bosnian
serb, Gojko Kicic. He had been dead 37 years, but the killers were
taking no chances.

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