Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 3, 1993 TAG: 9303030200
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press
DATELINE: UNITED NATIONS LENGTH: Medium
AIRDROPS HALTED AMID SERB ATTACK
Serb forces overran the embattled Muslim enclave of Cerska in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina on Tuesday in a brutal, defiant act that embarrassed U.N. peace negotiations and the Clinton administration's emergency airdrop in the region, according to reports reaching U.N. officials."If only 10 percent of the reports being received from ham radio operators are true, a massacre is taking place," said officials of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, in a report radioed to Sarajevo from the northeastern city of Tuzla.
Bosnian radio reported 500 civilians killed and about 15 villages set ablaze since the Serbian assault began Sunday.
Although not linking their action to the latest flare-up of fighting, American officials decided to end the airdrop, which began three nights ago - at least for a while - after Tuesday's night of high-altitude flights.
Officials said the deliveries of food and medicine had accomplished the symbolic aim of pressuring the Serbs into allowing land convoys through.
But they also acknowledged many supplies were falling astray. Further, the Air Force was running out of the huge wooden pallets that carry the food and medicine to earth.
The news about the fall of Cerska came from amateur radio operators, broadcasting from an enclave that has been cut off from the outside world since the war erupted almost a year ago.
They reported that more than 500 civilians were killed as Bosnian Serb soldiers took Cerska. They said that 19 hamlets had fallen to the Serbs in the last three days.
A plaintive radio account from Cerska, monitored by the staff of the U.N. refugee agency, said Bosnian Serbs "are moving freely around the town. They are burning houses, killing a lot of occupants, robbing their possessions. Dead bodies all over, and nowhere to go. People cannot move. People from Cerska are crying for help and begging to be taken out alive."
Sarajevo Radio said the Serbs were shelling routes used by those trying to flee Cerska, observing, "The roads are crawling with injured and dead."
At U.N. peace talks in New York, meanwhile, Bosnia's Muslim president called holding the negotiations "incompatible" with the Serb assault, although he did not pull out of the discussions.
Although ham radio reports exaggerate atrocities in the Balkans civil war, Lyndall Sachs, a U.N. aid agency spokeswoman in Belgrade, said, "Even if a small part of it is correct, the situation is desperate."