Word: mladic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Bosnia flares like a midsummer forest fire, defying the West's wavering attempts to contain it. On Friday, July 21, the NATO allies announced a bold new plan to deter Serb aggression. In the days that followed this call to arms, Ratko Mladic, the commander of the rebel Bosnian Serbs, seized and "ethnically cleansed" one "safe area," Zepa, and intensified a brutal assault on another, Bihac. Meanwhile, an eventuality that the U.N. and NATO had dearly hoped to prevent--a widening of the Balkan war--seemed by Friday to have occurred, as Croatia joined the fighting. Not a very good...
...because they were Muslim. The Serbs then looted and set fire to the town. The refugees reached Bosnian government lines exhausted and dazed, but apparently without suffering the sort of atrocities the Serbs had inflicted on the 42,000 residents of Srebrenica two weeks before. (A U.N. commission accused Mladic and Radovan Karadzic of genocide last week.) The New York Times reported Bosnian claims that the Serbs had used some sort of gas attack to rout the last of Zepa's defenders, but details of the assault could not be confirmed...
After Zepa fell, Mladic increased his merciless pressure on Bihac, an isolated U.N. safe area in the northwest. Coordinating efforts with Serb rebels from neighboring Croatia and antigovernment Muslim irregulars, he attacked the so-called Bihac pocket, a cluster of towns and villages that shelters more than 160,000 people, mostly Muslims. He and his allies, totaling about 25,000 men, rolled up a third of the pocket and drew to within two or three miles of the main U.N. camp at Coralici, where 1,300 poorly armed Bangladeshi peacekeepers are holed...
...details of the policy will have to be spelled out soon. As the ministers sat down in London, one safe area -- Srebrenica -- had already fallen and another -- Zepa -- was about to fall. Gorazde was surrounded, under artillery fire. If the Serb commander, General Ratko Mladic, presses ahead with his assault, the U.N. and NATO will then be pledged to strike...
...wave of "ethnic cleansing," sent the rest of the town's 42,000 Muslims fleeing to government lines. U.N. officials collecting the testimony of refugees are convinced that the Serbs committed appalling acts of rape and murder. The Serbs then moved on Zepa, and Mladic staged a surrender ceremony with some Bosnian civilians at an abandoned U.N. observation post outside town. But the government troops there, bolstered by escapees from Srebrenica, refused to go along with the capitulation because the Serbs intended to detain men ages 18 to 55 again...