Word: serb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Doboj falls, the corridor will fall too. This is the most critical part of the line," says the local Serb commander. "We will never give it up." Under the Vance-Owen peace plan, Doboj (pronounced dough boy) would be handed back to the Muslims, an event that the Serbs insist will never happen. "This is our last stand," says a Serb who came here a year ago as a refugee from a Muslim town in southern Bosnia. "To take away the corridor is to kill us as a people. We would rather die fighting here...
These men are no freak sect, out of touch with the Serb mainstream. They are the mainstream. The deputies of the Bosnian Serbs' self-appointed parliament proved that last week: they showed the same intransigence as the men in the trenches when they effectively rejected the Vance-Owen plan. No matter that the bosses from Belgrade coaxed, wheedled, pleaded and finally threatened; the deputies rudely turned their backs on compromise. Their bellicose stance was a rebuke not only to the meddling international community but also to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who dared urge them...
Ljuba Mikerevic, 34, walks from a bunker built of old cartridge boxes packed with dirt and covered with logs and sod in the middle of the Serb lines to his home every four days. It is about two miles down the steep hill past two military checkpoints, a dozen gutted homes and a file of soldiers walking in the other direction. Mikerevic is lean, with a dark mustache and hair that is turning prematurely gray. His rifle swings easily from his shoulder. At home his wife and two young girls, ages six and three, are waiting in the cramped apartment...
...Colonel Lika -- a nom de guerre -- who commands one end of the Serb salient, is absolutely convinced that the Germans are really behind the war. "We are completing a war against German expansion and the creation of a new world order," he says. "The Croats and the Muslims are the tools of a new German expansion and they can be sacrificed." He is not alone in this conviction. "This is a war against Germany and the Pope," insists another fighter. "Germany wants a warmwater Adriatic port." Never mind that this makes no logical sense. Though many who express this view...
There is no unified command: the Serb army is more a loose federation of fighting units, each with its own agenda and objectives. The units often decide tactics on their own and rely on their own stockpiles of food and ammunition. Field officers operate with a great deal of independence from the political leadership and think little of overriding the high command's orders when they are inclined to do so. Many soldiers have the same attitude toward their officers as the officers do toward the politicians. A frontline colonel admitted he commands only as long as the men listen...