Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Shrugging off three separate nato air strikes -- including the largest air raid in Europe since World War II -- Bosnian Serbs continued their advance on the Bihac area of northwestern Bosnia. The besieged region, home to 180,000 people, was designated a United Nations "safe area" last year, and is strategically critical. Its capture would enable Serbs to link the territory to a Serb-controlled area of Croatia and the Yugoslav border, forming a part of what they envision as a "Greater Serbia." NATO and its member governments continued to debate an appropriate response, even as Serb forces swept forward, ready...
Serb forces lined up their heavy guns last week and blasted their way toward Bihac, the last of the lands in the northwest held by the Bosnian government. Then Yugoslav-made jets from a Serb airbase in Croatia joined in the attack. NATO fighter-bombers roared across the Adriatic from Italy to bomb the base, punching a few craters into the concrete runways, but carefully avoiding Serbian planes or soldiers. Two days later, when the Serbs failed to get the message, NATO planes hit two of their antiaircraft installations in Bosnia with missiles...
That did not stop the Serbs either. So U.N. military and civilian officials pleaded in rapid succession with Serb and Muslim leaders in Bosnia and with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. NATO officials in Brussels interrupted Thanksgiving Day to discuss a new U.S. proposal to defend Bihac, while U.N. officials claimed -- then unclaimed -- that they had mediated a cease-fire. When the Serbian artillery continued to pound Bihac on Friday in defiance of more U.N. warnings, NATO jets flew again, but darkness fell and the planes did not drop their bombs...
Despite the heat they've taken overBosnia, NATO countries today moved to strengthen their mandate by broadening the organization's importance and scope and put the Bosnian tragedy into the political history books. NATO foreign ministers approved a U.S. proposal to study expanding the alliance to include central and east European countries. Today Secretary of State Warren Christopher placed the blame for Bosnia on the United Nations. "NATO has done very well in what it was asked to do," he said. And NATO Secretary-General Willy Claes said that in the future, NATO "will look very carefully . . . to the roles...
...such, the U.S. should immediately end the arms embargo against the Bosnian (and Croatian) forces--unilaterally if necessary--and step up NATO airstrikes to protect U.N.-designated safe havens. But the U.S. must not commit its own forces to this conflict. We should help the Bosnians in their civil war, but we cannot fight their war for them...