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- THE WEEK, Page 14WORLDIn the Balkans, Ceaseless Savagery
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- International concern rises amid shocking reports of death camps
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- Incredibly, Yugoslavia's year-old civil war got even worse
- last week. The shelling, rocketing and machine-gun fire raking
- Sarajevo intensified as desperate Bosnian forces tried to break
- out of the siege that the Serb militia had locked around the
- city. Artillery and mortar rounds hit the airport so constantly
- that humanitarian relief flights were suspended for three days
- and U.N. officials warned that they might back the aid effort
- with military muscle.
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- The unrelenting savagery produced television images that
- shocked the whole world: terrified babies tied to bus seats, the
- funeral of two toddlers killed by snipers, a sudden --
- apparently intentional -- mortar attack on the mourners. Then
- came persistent reports of torture and starvation in detention
- camps and more terrible television images, this time of
- skeletal, bruised men behind barbed wire.
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- More than 2 million former Yugoslavs have been forced to
- flee for their lives in this war. They were uprooted by the
- atavistic policy of "ethnic cleansing" on conquered territory,
- enforced most fiercely by the Serbs but also by Croats and
- Muslims. Refugees are only a by-product in most wars. In this
- one they are the calculated objective.
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