From: CP6uH@plains.NoDak.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: the other side
Date: 23 Jul 92 05:59:36 GMT
Organization: University of North Dakota at Grand Forks


RTw  07/20 1934  BOSNIA WAR CLAIMS INNOCENT VICTIMS ON BOTH SIDES
    By Hugh Pain
    SARAJEVO, July 21, Reuter - Bozidar sits in a chair in the sunshine and
weeps, tears of despair coursing down his grizzled face.
    "They killed the people in the village, they burned the houses, they
destroyed everything, everything," he says.
    Bozidar, a Bosnian Serb, is one of six men from Bradina, 40 km (24 miles)
southwest of Sarajevo, who has just arrived, weary beyond words, after a
four-day trek across the hills to Serb-held territory and safety.
    "They came on Wednesday. They killed more than 100 civilians, they rounded
up 300 other men, all those between 14 and 80. They took away all the women and
children to their camps. We escaped because we ran away."
    There is no way of verifying these statements. But the old man's tears are
real enough. So is the exhaustion, and the broken shoes the six men wear, and
the loaf of mouldy bread which was all that had sustained them.
    Bozidar's elder son Branko, 28, was among the dead. His son's wife, his
four-year-old daughter, his two-year-old son, were missing, as was Bozidar's own
wife.
    His younger son Ranko, 25, escaped with him. He was all the family the old
man had left. Ranko put a comforting arm around his broken parent, as if he were
the father not the son, and they wept together silently.
    The troops who destroyed their village, they said, belonged to the HOS --
the Bosnian Croats' tough special forces. They said Moslem Green Berets also
took part.
    "Most of us in the village were Serbs -- a few Moslems. A month ago we held
a peace meeting. We all sang songs together. How could they let this happen
now?" said Dusanka, another survivor, grieving for his wife and his
three-year-old boy.
    "I do not understand why everybody in Europe says we Serbs are aggressors --
I do not believe in anything now," said Ranko, tears in his eyes too.
    The United Nations and the European Community hold Serbia largely
responsible for the bloodshed in Bosnia. Between two-thirds and three-quarters
of the former republic has fallen to the superior firepower of Serb forces in an
area of former Yugoslavia where Serbs account for a third of the population.
    The Serb camp Ranko and his father came to is close to the ancient Roman
thermal springs of Ilidza, west of Sarajevo, a famous beauty spot.
    Here the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife spent their last
evening walking in the woods in June 1914 before they were assassinated in
Sarajevo the following morning and World War One began.
    The sun played on a still lake behind the men; two swans glided silently by.
    "Now I will fight for our part of Bosnia, because I have nothing else," said
Ranko. "You have to understand: we don't have any connection with Serbia. I am a
Serb of Bosnia- Herzegovina; I don't want to be under anybody else's rule."
    Two neighbours they knew in the village, who left it in time, arrived and
greeted them. They embraced the men, said they would take care of them, help
them to pick up the pieces of their lives.
    A mortar exploded not far away. The war continued.