Word: serb
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...Srebrenica succumbed, the Bosnian government in Sarajevo lambasted the U.N. for being "a passive witness and accomplice in tragedy" and urged the Security Council to authorize the deployment of NATO ground troops to stem the Serb tide. That was not to be. When the Council finally met in emergency sessions on Friday and Saturday, it stopped short of anything resembling Bosnia's request. What emerged was an agreement to declare Srebrenica a safe haven, a warning to Serbs to advance no farther, and a tightening of sanctions on Belgrade including the freezing of Serbian assets abroad...
Earlier in the week, the Council, at U.S. insistence, had postponed yet again a resolution that would have toughened economic sanctions against Serbia and, it was hoped, would have persuaded its President, Slobodan Milosevic, to pressure his Bosnian Serb acolytes into signing on to the Vance-Owen peace plan. Washington did not want to force an anti-Serb vote that might discomfit President Boris Yeltsin, who faces Russian nationalists generally sympathetic to the Serb cause in a referendum April 25. The U.N. looked set to content itself with its early decision to assign NATO to enforce a long-declared...
...British government, wary of anything that might invite Serb attacks on its peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia, dismissed the Iron Lady's appeal as "emotional nonsense." By Friday, however, the emotion had apparently spread to Washington. President Bill Clinton had begun to talk tougher too, expressing his "outrage" at events in Bosnia and warning that it was time for Western nations to consider taking stronger measures, including those "that previously have been unacceptable." Clinton's advisers and the Pentagon were debating the pros and cons of arming the Muslims or even flying U.S. air strikes against Serb artillery positions and lines...
...event, the consensus once again was for something less than militant action. The Serb assault on Srebrenica forced nothing more than what had been all but agreed upon -- and pushed off -- earlier in the week. The Council did what it has done so often to such poor effect: it drew a line in the blood- soaked soil of the Balkans and defied the Serbs to step over it. They lost no time in obliging. On Saturday a vanguard of 60 Canadian blue helmets en route to Srebrenica from Tuzla and an aid convoy from Belgrade failed to cross Serb lines...
...dilemma confronting the U.N. was acute. Although Srebrenica had been declared a safe haven by the Security Council, the propensity of the Serbs to pour artillery fire onto civilians spoke in favor of a speedy evacuation. But with an important Muslim foothold at stake, there was also the risk of abetting, albeit unwittingly, the Serb goal of ethnic cleansing. The Bosnian authorities themselves were not pressing for a mass exodus, save for 500 badly wounded soldiers in need of hospital treatment. Said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokeswoman Sylvana Foa: "They are very frightened, because they know...