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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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THE WEEK, Page 18WORLDAnother Cease-Fire In Bosnia -- Too Late?
New offensives have gobbled up much of what little was left
If they ever go into effect, cease-fires in what was once
Yugoslavia tend to be a passing fad; roughly 30 have come and
gone since the civil wars began in June 1991. Nonetheless,
leaders of the Serb, Croat and Muslim communities of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, conferring in London through intermediaries
(they refused to talk face-to-face) arranged one more truce,
which was supposed to begin this Sunday evening. Even on the off
chance that it holds, will there be enough of Bosnia left to
call a country? The answer probably is no.
While world attention has centered on Sarajevo, the Serbs
and Croats who already control most of Bosnia have been taking
over more of what had been left outside their grasp. A Serb
offensive in northern Bosnia last week linked two pieces of
territory to form the "Derventa corridor" -- a continuous belt
of Serb-held territory running all the way from Serbia proper
through the town of Derventa to Serb-populated zones of Croatia.
At the Croatian end, the Serbs fired a 155-mm artillery shell
that slammed into a soccer stadium crowded with refugees on the
Croatian side of the Sava River, killing 13 people and injuring
60. In eastern Bosnia, Gorazde was the only sizable town still
in Muslim hands, and it was under Serb assault and siege, its
streets reportedly littered with corpses. Fighting around the
southern town of Mostar, the chief objective of a recent Croat
offensive, also intensified. Sarajevo went without power or
water for 48 hours after Serbs blew up power lines. Though
service was restored, the shutoff illustrated how tight a vise
the besiegers have clamped on the city.
Two incidents raised the possibility of U.S. and Western
involvement in the fighting, if it resumes. Four Yugoslav planes
buzzed two American warships in the Adriatic. Though no shots
were fired, three of the planes turned back only after American
radar had locked on to them -- a preliminary step to shooting.
In Sarajevo a Canadian member of the United Nations
peacekeeping force exchanged fire with a Serbian sniper, who was
killed. Some Western officers fear that similar incidents could
trigger a kind of unplanned, back-door military intervention.
But the Western powers are still determined to avoid deliberate
intervention, and soon nothing may be left for intervention to
save anyway. Mladen Klemencic, a military analyst in the
Croatian capital of Zagreb, speculates that the Serbs agreed to
a cease-fire because they "are satisfied with the military
results they have achieved. They have their corridor, so their
job is finished."