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- THE WEEK, Page 23WORLDSeeking Wiggle Room
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- Yugoslav bosses look for a way out short of actually stopping
- the war
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- The first week of U.N.-imposed economic sanctions did nothing
- to halt the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Serb forces
- have seized more than two-thirds of the territory and are
- bombarding the capital, Sarajevo. But the cutoff of trade,
- including oil, did make officials in the rump state of Yugoslavia
- squirm publicly.
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- In Montenegro, the only former federal republic that
- remains linked with Serbia and thus also subject to sanctions,
- President Momir Bulatovic implied that those ties may be a
- mistake. "We cannot endure months of sanctions," he said.
- "Change is possible."
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- Serbian officials pounced on a U.N. report on the
- situation in Bosnia to back their demand that sanctions be
- lifted immediately. The report, issued by Secretary-General
- Boutros Boutros-Ghali, pointed out that Croats were also
- grabbing Bosnian territory. It suggested that Serb forces in
- Bosnia and their commander, General Ratko Mladic, were outside
- the control of the government in Belgrade. The Serbs argued that
- they were therefore being unjustly blamed by the U.N.
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- Nonsense, replied Western diplomats in Yugoslavia. The
- Serb-dominated federal army left behind 80,000 Serb troops when
- it made a show of pulling out of Bosnia in May. Belgrade armed
- them and dispatched Mladic to command them. If Serbian President
- Slobodan Milosevic wants to call them back, the diplomats say,
- all he has to do is whistle.
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