Word: balkanizing
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Pentagon efforts to keep the number of U.S. troops in Bosnia below 20,000 are raising eyebrows on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers are discovering that an army of civilians, contracted privately, has been deployed to augment the G.I.s. Brown & Root Inc., a Houston engineering firm, will supervise Balkan workers on projects like building pipelines and sewerage systems and is prepared to undertake the solemn task of readying the bodies of U.S. fatalities for shipment home. The Army's increasing dependence on civilian help is leading penny pinchers to wonder whether it is still necessary to budget $7 billion annually...
...BALKAN SHORTCOMINGS...
...Serbs remain disturbed by the entire business. Last month several U.S. lawmakers got a similar reaction from Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. Over espresso and pastries, Milosevic told them that Americans "are looking for trouble," says Republican Representative Jim Ramstad of Minnesota. Milosevic, widely blamed for igniting the Balkan wars, has some unexpected allies. Retired top U.S. military officers who until recently were responsible for the Balkans say the plan may embolden the Bosnians to seize land now held by the Bosnian Serbs. Boyd suggests it would be better to leave well enough alone, saying both sides...
...sides to release their prisoners by Friday. Bosnian government officals say that Serbs have not lived up to their end of the bargain by offering only to release 200 Muslim prisoners. At issue for the government are the some 24,000 Muslims unaccounted for in 3 1/2 years of Balkan war. Many are believed to have been executed by Serbs and burried in mass graves near Srebrenica and the Lucovica mines, and Muslim officials hope to use Serb prisoners as a bargaining chip to learn the fate of those missing...
...nature of the NATO mission--policing long, snakelike "zones of separation" between the warring factions--means that troops will never be far out of mortar and artillery range. Any Balkan soldier who chooses to will easily be able to fire a couple of shells at them. After doing so, however, he will have to move quickly to avoid being hit by NATO's sophisticated counter-artillery fire. A senior Army planner says, "We would expect to return artillery fire at the location where it's coming from almost before the round hits the ground...