BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA: Sarajevo Won’t Budge on Its Borders

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 30 1995 (IPS) - The Bosnian government will not accept any land transfers as part of a peace deal with Bosnian Serbs, Bosnia’s foreign minister told IPS Monday.

Two days before beginning a new round of U.S.-brokered peace talks with his Serbian and Croatian counterparts in Dayton, Ohio, Muhamed Sacirbey refused to consider giving up government-held lands to the Bosnian Serbs as part of a peace deal.

Debate has centred in recent weeks on whether the Bosnian government would give up the eastern “safe area” of Gorazde or land in the narrow Posavina corridor to a Bosnian Serb entity, the Republika Srpska, which is expected to control 49 percent of the Bosnian republic.

But Sacirbey dismissed both proposed land transfers.

“To give up Gorazde…would be to make the peace process a party to ethnic cleansing,” Sacirbey argued. “We would not do that.”

He said that Sarajevo opposes the idea of transferring population between government- and Serb-controlled zones, in a war that already has been marked by huge transfers of ethnic groups.

Instead, “we emphasise that Bosnia-Hercegovina must be given a vision of the future which de-emphasises these borders and population transfers,” the foreign minister said. He urged U.S. and European Union (EU) envoys to support a unified Bosnian republic, albeit one with a Republika Srpska “entity” included.

The Bosnian government’s insistence not to give up any further land has, however, complicated matters for U.S. negotiators. The U.S. team, led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, has sought agreement between the government and Serb separatists for a few small exchanges of land on each side.

Land talks will be part of the Dayton discussions beginning Wednesday, the third round of U.S.-brokered talks since Oct 8. In two previous rounds in Geneva and New York, the two sides agreed to form a joint, if weak, Bosnian presidency, parliament and judiciary while remaining within a united republic.

They agreed to a division of land in which a Bosnian-Croat federation would control some 51 percent of Bosnia, while the Bosnian Serbs would control 49 percent — almost exactly the amounts they have now following recent Serb losses.

But mediators have hoped that the Bosnian government might give up land near Posavina or Goradze. Posavina would connect the Republika Srpska to its ally, Serbia, while Gorazde would provide more territory around the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, which is almost wholly surrounded by Serb-held land.

The Bosnian government’s refusal to accept the land transfers is only one area where Sarajevo is moving apart from Washington. Sacirbey also has said he would refuse to negotiate with “war criminals” — including Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic — although he says he will go to Dayton unconditionally.

The Bosnian government also has indicated it may seek U.S. support to build up its weapons base after a peace pact. Although Washington has offered tentatively either to disarm all Bosnian parties or build up the Muslim-led government side, even that discussion has drawn fire within the U.S. Congress.

In any case, Sacirbey said no disarmament process would be valid if the other countries in the region, notably Croatia and the rump Yugoslav state, were not also disarmed. If no regional disarmament takes place, he insisted, then the United States should support “building up our forces so that we could be a deterrent.”

In recent weeks, such a stance from the Bosnian side has led Holbrooke and other envoys to complain about Sarajevo’s “hard- line” stance on the peace process. But Sacirbey denied his government has been unhelpful, blaming instead envoys whom he refused to identify.

“I am troubled by the efforts of some mediators, who are already trying to take some heat off themselves by quoting that ‘all sides’ are hardening their positions,” Sacirbey said. “We have not changed, nor are we hardening, our position.”

But the Bosnian envoy’s stance, which reflects in part the Muslim-led government’s improved position on the battlefield, has run counter to Washington’s efforts to secure a quick agreement.

With elections coming up next year, President Bill Clinton’s administration is eager to minimise any debate that could make U.S. involvement in a Bosnian peace more costly.

Already, Clinton is facing opposition from the Republican right wing here to his plans to deploy some 20,000 U.S. troops as part of a 60,000-soldier North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) force to police the peace.

To steer Sarajevo over to its side in securing a peace agreement the Serbs could accept, Washington has stepped up its own efforts to determine the fate of some 8,000 missing Muslim men and boys believed killed by the Bosnian Serbs.

U.S. spy satellites and other sources purportedly offer evidence of mass graves around Srebrenica, a Bosnian “safe area” that fell in July. Since Srebrenica’s fall, several thousand Muslims have been missing, amid reports they were rounded up by Serbs under Mladic’s command and killed.

Sacirbey said Monday that the killings, and reports of atrocities underway now in the Serb-held town of Banja Luka, require action from the United Nations and NATO.

U.N. spokesman Joe Sills added that “we now need to get in there” to find out what happened to the missing Muslims after Srebrenica fell. But the Serbs have not allowed U.N. or Red Cross monitors into the enclave.

“I think the evidence is getting very close to conclusive” that the missing Srebrenicans were massacred, Sills said.

BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA: Sarajevo Won’t Budge on Its Borders

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 30 1995 (IPS) - The Bosnian government will not accept any land transfers as part of a peace deal with Bosnian Serbs, Bosnia’s foreign minister told IPS Monday.
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