Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 20, 1994 TAG: 9404200113
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: SARAJEVO, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA LENGTH: Medium
The slaughter in Gorazde carried on unhindered. The last few foreign relief workers trapped in the city reported scenes of suffering and destruction in the U.N. ``safe haven'' abandoned to a brutal fate.
Four field workers for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, huddled in a basement shelter with the last four U.N. soldiers in Gorazde, ventured above ground during a lull in the shelling and reported ``a scene of desolation, debris everywhere and gaping holes in apartment buildings.''
More than 200 shells tore through the refugee-thronged city center before noon Tuesday, the aid agency workers told colleagues in Sarajevo, noting that about a dozen bodies lay on the pavement outside one shelter that took a direct hit.
As artillery shells rained down on the defeated Muslim enclave at the rate of more than one per minute, the roof was blown off the city's hospital; that facility is packed with the wounded from 20 days of siege.
Serb nationalists who have vanquished Gorazde by cinching an artillery noose and herding tens of thousands of inhabitants into the center relentlessly fired on the penned-in civilians in an assault U.N. officers condemned as serving no imaginable military purpose.
``Sniper fire has increased and is contributing to the general air of panic,'' said U.N. Protection Force spokesman Maj. Rob Annink.
In Washington on Tuesday, the Clinton administration said it would seek European and Russian support for new military and diplomatic pressure against Bosnian Serb forces, including wider air strikes against military targets and stiffer economic sanctions against their allies in Belgrade.
And in Russia, President Boris Yeltsin warned the Bosnian Serbs to keep their promises to Russia and halt the assault on Gorazde.
Russia - which has resisted stronger Western action in Bosnia - has been a key Serbian ally and had won what appeared to be a major foreign policy coup for itself by temporarily achieving advances in the Balkans peace process. The latest Bosnian Serb outburst has become a major embarrassment for Russia.
In Gorazde, Tuesday's attack persisted despite another promise by Bosnian Serb leaders in nearby Pale to hold fire and let a small peacekeeping force into the ravaged enclave.
Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, had assured the U.N. civilian affairs chief a day earlier that his forces would abide by an agreement that was already vastly scaled back from previous U.N. proposals for helping Gorazde.
It would have allowed the deployment of about 260 troops and Bosnian Serb-escorted aid convoys after a cease-fire that never materialized, Annink said.
``It was just a scrap of paper, and its worth was only that of the people who agreed to it,'' he said of the latest unfulfilled promise. ``The other side does not keep to its word.''
Evacuations to relieve the crowded, starving enclave cannot be carried out until the Bosnian Serbs stop attacking the people whom relief agencies want to remove for their own safety.
The rebels, whose campaign for Greater Serbia has lately careened out of any outside power's control, still hold more than 100 U.N. troops hostage and have been moving them around in secret, apparently using the peacekeepers as human shields against further air strikes.
Some of the captives are believed to be held at the rebel barracks at nearby Lukavica, where about 50 armed Serbs stormed a U.N. weapons collection site and intimidated French troops into relinquishing stored weapons, Lt. Col. Richard Pernod said.
About 30 French troops were on duty when the rebels showed up in force to demand return of their weapons, said Cmdr. Eric Chaperon.
U.N. officials said three days earlier, after Serbs moved a tank to another weapons collection site to demand its arsenal, that the peacekeepers were under orders to use force to prevent Serbs from seizing the weapons.
by CNB