Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fair assessment because any step toward peace in the agonizing 41-month-long Bosnian war is significant and hard won. But the search for an actual settlement is still likely to be a long one. Even as the diplomats put the final touches on their agreement, NATO warplanes were blasting Serb military targets in Bosnia for the second straight week. And the principles the parties were able to agree on in Switzerland could sink under the weight of the many issues on which they disagree...
Despite the focus on peace, the war in Bosnia has pulled in a new belligerent: NATO. As the official protector of the four remaining U.N.-declared safe areas, NATO retaliated with air power last month after a Serb mortar shell killed 43 people in Sarajevo. On Aug. 30, the alliance launched heavy attacks on Serb military storage areas, ammunition plants, missile sites and radar and communications centers around Sarajevo, the Serbs' capital of Pale and other parts of Bosnia. NATO then warned Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic that he had to pull his heavy weapons back from the city...
Nevertheless, NATO officials stoutly deny that they are participants in the war. They are trying to calibrate their air attacks carefully enough to permit them to claim that they are still peacemakers and are not fighting Mladic's Bosnian Serb army. "I do not consider myself to be taking sides," says Admiral Leighton Smith, the NATO commander in the region. The 300 or so artillery pieces and tanks ringing Sarajevo--the weapons Mladic has been told to pull back from the 12.5-mile-wide U.N. exclusion zone around the city--have not been targeted. For now, that would...
...territory the Muslim-Croats seized in the past three days brought the division of land the two sides now control even closer to the 51-49 split agreed to in the negotiations," reports national security correspondent Douglas Waller. Before the NATO offensive, Waller notes, Serbs held approximately 70 percent of Bosnian territory. Pentagon officials tell Waller that Croat-Muslim forces now hold a significantly greater chunk of Bosnia. "Thursday, the CIA and Pentagon had revised their percentages for what the sides held to 55 percent for the Bosnian Serbs and 45 percent for the Muslim-Croats. Today, Pentagon officials...
Defense Secretary William Perry today denied Russian claims that NATO bombings around Sarajevo have resulted in children's deaths. He said had seen "no evidence of any civilian casualties" after a personal review of over 100 targets struck by Allied fire since the raids began on Aug 30. Perry said the accuracy of the airstrikes in Bosnia was so good it surpassed even the performance of Allied bombers in the Persian Gulf War. "Of course Serb television is always reporting that civilians are being killed," Alexandra Stiglmayer reports from Sarajevo. "But they never give any numbers of how many were...