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- <text id=93TT1436>
- <title>
- Apr. 12, 1993: Death by Well-Intentioned Rescue
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Apr. 12, 1993 The Info Highway
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 17
- WORLD
- Death by Well-Intentioned Rescue
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>A dozen die in the crush of evacuation by U.N. trucks
- </p>
- <p> After months of surviving bullets and hunger, Bosnia's
- Muslims faced a new and particularly cruel deathtrap--the lure
- of escape. At least 12 were killed, nearly all of them women and
- children, in the tumult of evacuating some 4,300 civilians from
- the besieged town of Srebrenica by two United Nations truck
- convoys. Desperate to escape a Serbian blockade, loads of as
- many as 180 people swarmed aboard the transport vehicles
- designed to carry sacks of food, unwittingly crushing to death
- the small and weak in the process. Others died of suffocation
- during the eight-hour journey to Tuzla. Horrified U.N.
- officials, already smarting under accusations of abetting the
- Serb aim of ethnic cleansing by evacuating Muslims, temporarily
- called off further convoys. There was nothing to dissuade them
- from their pessimism in the rejection by the Serb nationalist
- parliament in Bosnia of the Vance-Owen peace plan, approved not
- only by other factions but, conditionally, by their own leader.
- </p>
- <p> Meanwhile in Sarajevo, in the first war-crimes trial
- growing out of the bloody civil war, two ethnic Serbs were
- sentenced by a Bosnian military court to death by firing squad.
- One of them, Borislav Herak, admitted to murdering 35 Muslims,
- 12 of them women he raped first.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
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