Word: serb
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...should the Bosnian Serbs be seen as the moral equivalents of their fathers and grandfathers, who tied down 30 Axis divisions a half-century ago. That analogy -- another of the cliches that help rationalize Western dithering -- could hardly be more misleading. It disgraces the heroism and patriotism of the Yugoslav partisans in World War II. It exaggerates the number and prowess of the Serb forces in Bosnia today, as well as their local support. For them patria is a Greater Serbia in which Croats, Albanians, Hungarians, Macedonians and Slavic Muslims are subject to second-class citizenship, if not "ethnic cleansing...
Finally, all the talk about the Serb forces controlling the hilltops like latter-day Chetniks implies an invidious comparison between what the Nazis were trying to do in the 1940s and what the United Nations ought to be doing today. Hitler was bent on conquering Yugoslavia, while the West should be saving the remnants of that country from the consequences of the end of communism...
...they moved through the hinterlands of the former Yugoslavia last week, TIME correspondents found believable evidence everywhere. In the northern village of Trnopolje they visited the "Fraternity" elementary school that Serb militia forces have turned into a detention camp for 4,000 people, mostly Muslim men. Half the captives live outdoors in makeshift lean-tos; they all ^ get the same dirty water and use the same three toilets. One inmate, Hajudin Zubovic, a 28-year-old miner, told how a dozen or more prisoners at a ceramics factory in the area had been forced to stand...
...considerations would merely be speculative were it not for one final, compelling point: the outside world's Yugoslavia policies to date have abetted strife at least as much as they have contained it. Foreign leaders failed to warn Serbia off. Concentration on humanitarian efforts plays into the hands of Serbs who want to create as many refugees as possible -- and who perhaps mean to pursue the tactic to "cleanse" other Serb-minority territory closer to Hungary, Albania, Greece and Turkey. Faced with Western inaction, Turkey and Iran are watching the nearby anti-Muslim pogrom more and more anxiously...
Incredibly, Yugoslavia's year-old civil war got even worse last week. The shelling, rocketing and machine-gun fire raking Sarajevo intensified as desperate Bosnian forces tried to break out of the siege that the Serb militia had locked around the city. Artillery and mortar rounds hit the airport so constantly that humanitarian relief flights were suspended for three days and U.N. officials warned that they might back the aid effort with military muscle...