BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA: Muslim Assault Complicates U.N. Plans

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 16 1995 (IPS) - The sudden attack by Bosnia’s Muslim-led government against Bosnian Serb separatists has thrown the United Nations’ plans in the Balkans for a loop.

For days, the debate at the United Nations has centred on how to deploy nearly 15,000 British, French and Dutch troops in and outside of Bosnia to enhance U.N. peacekeeping efforts.

But the deployment — approved by the U.N. Security Council early Friday morning — was overshadowed by the government assault launched from Bosnia’s besieged capital, Sarajevo.

Within the first day of the assault, government forces struck out in the direction of the Bosnian Serbs’ self-declared capital, Pale, a Sarajevo suburb. The Bosnian government began a push north of Sarajevo on Thursday, days after amassing some 30,000 troops there.

Although U.N. officials sought to downplay the damage the Bosnian offensive may be doing to their plans, the momentum built by the decision to deploy the British, French and Dutch “rapid reaction forces” has clearly been lost.

“After a year of relative stability, I am now witnessing with great personal anguish the return of war to Sarajevo, with all its tragic and incalculable implications,” Yasushi Akashi, the U.N. envoy to the Balkans, said from Croatia Friday.

Akashi appealed to both the Bosnian government and its Serb foes for an immediate cease-fire around Sarajevo, as well as a complete cessation of hostilities.

But his pleas fell on deaf ears as the government, frustrated by the lack of international support for its embattled population, showed no sign of halting its attacks.

“Letters directed to all the parties will be sent back,” Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey said here. Sacirbey contended that, as long as the Bosnian population remains besieged by the Serb separatists, government attacks should be seen as self- defence.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic made the same point in an official statement. The offensive simply intends “to prevent the further strangulation of our city,” he said.

“A siege is a terrorist act, a military act directed at a civilian population,” the foreign minister said of the Bosnian Serb sieges of Sarajevo and other government-held cities. As such, he said, they must be overcome. “If the United Nations is not willing to do this, who is?”

He argued the government would abandon the offensive only if the 20,000-troop U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) actively defend Bosnian cities, end the sieges and remove the Bosnian Serbs’ heavy weaponry from civilian zones.

“We think it’s hypocritical to ask for a moratorium (on attacks) and allow the siege to continue,” Sacirbey said.

Ironically, the offensive comes just as the United Nations and Europe were trying to convey a hard line towards the Bosnian Serbs by dispatching rapid reaction troops empowered to use more force more readily than the current UNPROFOR contingents.

That was the motivation behind the Security Council’s Friday morning vote to raise the UNPROFOR’s troop ceiling by 12,500 to accommodate the British, French and Dutch soldiers.

Those new troops will act under Chapter Seven of the U.N. Charter, which gives the United Nations leeway to use force for certain “peace-making” purposes. Troops already in the former Yugoslavia operate under Chapter Six rules of engagement, where by they can use weapons only in self-defence.

But the new Bosnian offensive may the force’s deployment. British and French officials, however, have privately warned they might not send in so many new soldiers if fighting is still raging in Sarajevo.

“We have indicated to them that they continue to be welcome to deploy in our country,” Sacirbey said of the new troops. But he resisted any linkage between allowing such troops and halting the government’s own offensive.

The rapid reaction force, he said, “presumably does add some new capacity, some new will, to implement U.N. mandates. But we want to see results.”

Results may be tough to obtain. Although the Bosnian Serbs have released hundreds of UNPROFOR troops they seized after NATO shelled Pale last month, the U.N. soldiers remain hostage to the whims of both the Serb and government armies.

U.N. spokesman Joe Sills noted that, in the current offensive, the government forces have surrounded 15 Russian U.N. troops at one encampment and have also blocked 86 Ukrainian U.N. troops in the besieged “safe area” of Gorazde.

But the Serb side also still holds hostages, Sills added. The Bosnian Serbs are detaining 26 UNPROFOR troops and blocking another 91 from moving out of their posts.

Beyond the problems that so many intricate hostage crises pose for UNPROFOR, the rapid reaction force may prove difficult to deploy simply because its funding remains vague.

When the Security Council debated the measure Thursday night, members could not decide how best to pay for the new force, particularly in light of President Bill Clinton’s insistence that the U.S. Congress also go along.

Washington normally shoulders about 30 percent of peacekeeping costs, but Republican threats in Congress not to appropriate any more money for the Bosnia operation appear to have stopped Clinton, who supports the new deployment, in his tracks.

As a result, in a measure Sills called unprecedented, the Council left the issue up in the air. “(T)the modalities of financing (are) to be determined later,” it said.

What that means, Sills noted, is anyone’s guess. So far, there is no clear sign of who will pay even to equip or transport the troops, the first 2,500 of which are already in Bosnia.