Word: bosnian
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Secessionist Serbs in Bosnia raised the stakes in their tense standoff with U.N. and NATO forces, downing a U.S. F-16 on routine patrol; Bosnian Serb forces said the jet's lone pilot survived and was in their custody, an assertion the U.S. was unable to confirm. At the same time, the Bosnian Serbs -- under pressure from their erstwhile patron, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic -- released 121 of the more than 370 U.N. peacekeepers they had been holding hostage. U.S. envoy Robert Frasure met with Milosevic to discuss possibly suspending economic sanctions against Serbia in return for the release...
Calling the Bosnian Serbs "outcasts and international pariahs," the Clinton Administration offered to help redeploy existing peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-a seeming shift in a U.S. policy that heretofore said U.S. ground troops would be used only to enforce a peace treaty among the warring factions or evacuate peacekeepers. With critical voices rising in Congress, Clinton quickly characterized the use of American troops as a "remote, highly unlikely event" that would take place only if peacekeepers needed to be rescued...
Mounted on a United Nations armored combat vehicle blocking the entrance to Sarajevo's Marshal Tito Barracks, a 12.7-cal. machine gun points in the direction of Bosnian Serb forces just 220 yds. away. The gun is menacing but can almost never be used, and it serves less as a weapon than as a symbol of the paradox faced by the peacekeepers in Bosnia: they are soldiers forbidden to function as soldiers. "You are not allowed to act like a fighting force and return fire," says Guillaume Grouzelle, a French chief corporal whose job it is to guard the barracks...
...freckled 26-year-old physicist from Toulouse, Grouzelle serves with one of the three French battalions deployed in Sarajevo. On this particular morning his thoughts are with the 51 members of the unit who were taken hostage by Bosnian Serbs six days before. "I don't know any of them personally," he says, "but I think a lot about them. I believe they must feel very unprofessional...
...Unprofessional" is the euphemism that peacekeepers resort to when they want to say something negative about their mission. Every soldier, from private to commander, is forbidden to offer his opinions to journalists. But the troops have many reasons for frustration. The Bosnian Serbs torment them, humiliate them, take them hostage. Meanwhile, the Bosnian Muslims revile them for standing by when women and children are shot. They must stand by, however, since as impartial "peacekeepers" they are forbidden to take sides...