Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, January 7, 1994                   TAG: 9401070102
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: OVCARA, CROATIA                                LENGTH: Medium

U.S. ENVOY VISITS CROAT MASS GRAVE

On a more practical level, that official, Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, warned that the United States may use its Security Council veto to maintain the economic blockade of the Yugoslavian federation of Serbia and Montenegro until Belgrade hands over those accused of atrocities.

And John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state, announced that the United States will give $25 million more toward the expenses of the international tribunal set up to try them.

Albright flew here in a white U.N. helicopter to spend about half an hour peering at an isolated scrub-covered garbage dump at the corner of a plowed field a few miles outside the town of Vukovar. She was accompanied by Shattuck and Peter Galbraith, the Clinton administration's ambassador to Croatia.

The site, now ringed by coils of shiny steel razor wire and guarded day and night by a platoon of armed Russian peacekeeping troops, is believed to contain the bodies of some 200 Croat patients who disappeared from Vukovar Hospital on Nov. 20, 1991, and were probably killed by the Serb forces who had just captured the town from the Croats after a fierce siege that reduced most of it to rubble.

Since its discovery in October 1992, when a test dig turned up the bodies of eight or nine Croats, all of them apparently shot, the local Serbian authorities, who have incorporated Vukovar into their breakaway state known as the Republic of Krajina, have systematically blocked the United Nations from digging up the rest of the grave area, although another attempt is to be made next April.

The Ovcara grave is one of 98 probable mass grave sites in the former Yugoslavia that have been identified by the War Crimes Commission that the Security Council set up to start gathering evidence of atrocities. The graves are believed to hold thousands of victims of ethnic massacres by warring Serb, Muslim, and Croat factions.

Albright said her reason for coming to the suspected grave now was to draw attention to the Clinton administration's policy of advancing human rights and its determination to bring Yugoslav war criminals to justice.