Word: bosnian
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Last week was one of the most remarkable in the 41-month-old Bosnian struggle. On Monday the Serbs committed their atrocity. Then from Wednesday through Fri day, NATO conducted the largest combat operation in its history, finally pounding the Serbs after endless bluffing. By Friday, a diplomatic breakthrough had occurred, with all parties agreeing to meet in Geneva this week for preliminary peace talks. After years of war and "ethnic cleansing," the brutal dialectic of aggression, retaliation and reconciliation seemed to have been telescoped into a matter of days. There is still a long...
...massive response. But previous NATO bluster had led Serbs and Muslims alike to conclude that the alliance was all bark and no bite. Even after the shell had hit Sarajevo, vacillation appeared to be the likely outcome as the U.N. insisted on sifting the evidence to make sure the Bosnian Serbs were indeed the culprits. Then bad weather and a protective shift of British peacekeepers further delayed the nato attacks. As the hours ticked away, it seemed as if the West had once again issued an empty ultimatum...
When the response finally came, however, it was just what NATO had threatened. Shortly after 2 a.m. Wednesday, the first sortie of planes began bombing Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo. Artillery units of the rapid-reaction force, a multinational contingent assigned to protect U.N. convoys and peacekeepers, joined the attack. nato planes also struck Bosnian Serb targets near Gorazde and Tuzla, two other U.N. "safe areas." The warplanes focused first on the Bosnian Serbs' sophisticated air-defense network. Then they turned to ammunition depots and factories in Lukavica and Vogosca, surface-to-air missile sites throughout Bosnia, and the Bosnian...
...groundwork for last week's raids had been laid two months earlier, when the U.N. "safe havens" of Srebrenica and Zepa were overrun by the Bosnian Serbs. The inability of nato and the U.N. to prevent the fall of either town, despite their pledges to protect it, galvanized the allies' resolve to ensure that nothing like that would happen again. "The fall of Srebrenica was a blow to the credibility of the West, and we are the leader of the West," said a senior State Department official. "If we didn't respond with U.S. leadership, the situation was going...
Another wave of NATO bombardment today failed to persuade Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army commander, to withdraw about 300 tanks, mortars and other heavy weapons from around Sarajevo. The general's defiance immediately generated international rumors that a rift had emerged between Mladic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who is negotiating a peace settlement on all Serbs' behalf. But foreign affairs correspondent Marguerite Michaels reports that Mladic is acting in full concert with his patron. "The Serbs are doing something very interesting, which is to draw attention to the fact that the U.N. is not being neutral...