Word: zepa
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Desperate Bosnian government soldiers in Zepa, the second Muslim "safe area" to come under Serb attack, commandeered 370 U.N. peacekeepers' weapons and threatened to take them hostage unless NATO staged airstrikes to protect the town.Rebel Serbs, who perfected the "human shield" tactic in previous standoffs with international troops, said they would respond to any NATO airstrikes by shooting at Ukrainian peacekeepers in a base they already control. (NATO planes made a show of flying over Zepa for several hours Sunday but the U.N. has not requested their presence since.) The Serbs, who pressed to within a mile of Zepa today...
TIME's Edward Barnes reports that special Muslim units have infiltrated Serb-held territory surrounding the town of Zepa, the so-called Muslim safe area under attack, and have temporarily hamstrung the massive Serb assault with a series of guerrilla attacks. The Serb campaign against the "safe areas," begun in earnest with the assault on Srebrenica last week, has already driven 30,000 women, children and elderly refugees from that city. But Ministry of Defense sources in Belgrade told TIME that the Bosnian army special units have become the major stumbling block to the Serb capture of Zepa, an isolated...
Just days after conquering Srebrenica, theBosnian Serb armyshelled the town of Zepa, ten miles to the southwest, one of the last Muslim areas left in eastern Bosnia. French President Jacques Chirac called for immediate armed intervention to retake and protect the safe areas, saying "It is essential that we put a stop to this." But TIME'S Massimo Calabresi reports from Bosnia that theU.N. appears ready to abandon two other safe areas as well. "The end is in sight" says one highly-placed source. "If they want to take Zepa, they can and we can't stop them...
...none of this would be necessary. At Sarajevo airport, the commanders of the rebel Serb forces and the Bosnian army signed a cease-fire agreement aimed at "a cessation of armed attacks" throughout the country on Sunday. They also agreed to demilitarize the encircled Muslim towns of Srebrenica and Zepa...
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in Bosnia is growing increasingly worse. After a year of aggression, Serbs now control roughly 70 percent of Bosnia. They are ruthlessly shelling the capital of Sarejevo and the besieged towns of Zepa and Srebrenica, intentionally directing artillery at hospitals, churches and schools. The forces surrounding these Muslim holdouts only sporadically allow access to humanitarian aid convoys...