Word: zepa
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...West's wavering attempts to contain it. On Friday, July 21, the NATO allies announced a bold new plan to deter Serb aggression. In the days that followed this call to arms, Ratko Mladic, the commander of the rebel Bosnian Serbs, seized and "ethnically cleansed" one "safe area," Zepa, and intensified a brutal assault on another, Bihac. Meanwhile, an eventuality that the U.N. and NATO had dearly hoped to prevent--a widening of the Balkan war--seemed by Friday to have occurred, as Croatia joined the fighting. Not a very good record for any week, much less one that...
...Tuesday Bosnian Serbs finally occupied the eastern enclave of Zepa, which they had been attacking since June, and promptly ejected 5,000 women, children and old men because they were Muslim. The Serbs then looted and set fire to the town. The refugees reached Bosnian government lines exhausted and dazed, but apparently without suffering the sort of atrocities the Serbs had inflicted on the 42,000 residents of Srebrenica two weeks before. (A U.N. commission accused Mladic and Radovan Karadzic of genocide last week.) The New York Times reported Bosnian claims that the Serbs had used some sort...
...After Zepa fell, Mladic increased his merciless pressure on Bihac, an isolated U.N. safe area in the northwest. Coordinating efforts with Serb rebels from neighboring Croatia and antigovernment Muslim irregulars, he attacked the so-called Bihac pocket, a cluster of towns and villages that shelters more than 160,000 people, mostly Muslims. He and his allies, totaling about 25,000 men, rolled up a third of the pocket and drew to within two or three miles of the main U.N. camp at Coralici, where 1,300 poorly armed Bangladeshi peacekeepers are holed...
Given NATO's apparent resolve, why weren't the Serbs deterred, and how did all this happen? First of all, at the emergency meeting in London on the 21st, the allies simply wrote off Zepa, even though it remained in Bosnian Muslim hands. Then it became clear, despite what Washington was suggesting, that the agreement reached at the London meeting was only an outline. The NATO plan contained no specifics, and U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had made no promise to delegate his control over air strikes until he heard the full details of what the alliance proposed...
Barnes reports that no one yet knows the fate of the 10,000 Muslim men who have been missing since the fall of the safe areas of Srebrenica and Zepa: "Some of them certainly have been killed. But a lot are probably still hiding in the woods and are reluctant to come out." The reason? "Muslims have been killed by Serbs dressed as U.N. peacekeepers, so they are afraid to come out and are hiding even from legitimate U.N. and Red Cross agents...