The Washington Post
January 17, 1993
ROGATICA, Bosnia – The Serb commander with a double-pump shotgun and a crooked moustache did not waste his breath when asked how many reporters could accompany a U.N. relief convoy to the trapped Muslim town of Zepa.
“None,” he barked.
Commander Rajko Kusic did not want to chat about it, nor did the dozen or so frontline soldiers at his roadblock. These were battle-hardened men, accustomed to settling arguments with guns. Night was falling, and the mountain road was deserted.
“The people of Zepa don’t need journalists,” Kusic said.
Kusic was unmoved by a U.N. official who said Bosnian Serb leaders had agreed to let journalists accompany the convoy. He brushed aside a journalist who tried to show him a letter authorizing the visit. Under threat of arrest, the journalists left Kusic’s icy hilltop and the convoy proceeded without them. But further down the road, other Serbs prevented the convoy from reaching Zepa.
Bosnian Serb leaders had agreed, amid outrage over the misery in besieged Muslim towns, to let the 16-vehicle U.N. convoy travel to Zepa, where scores of Muslims are reported to be dying from the cold and starvation every day. The Serbs had also agreed to let journalists go along, and so six press cars were following the U.N. trucks.
Kusic’s actions illustrate a recurring problem in Bosnia.
Serb political leaders claim the convoys will be allowed to pass, and that journalists can accompany them, but commanders on the barricades are under little pressure to comply.
Kusic’s roadblock was just one of several obstacles faced by the convoy. A few miles earlier, it was tied up for hours as Serbs searched its cargo.
“You can stay here for one day, one week or one month. This is my territory. I’m in no hurry,” said Maj. Mile Ujic, a local Serb commander in Rogatica, a Serb stronghold in eastern Bosnia, as his men subjected the 80 tons of humanitarian aid to a scrupulous inspection.
Serb soldiers even shook tins of sardines to make sure that bullets for the Muslims were not hidden inside.
The Serbs at Rogatica confiscated about 100 boxes of aid because, they said, the United Nations was carrying more than the authorized amount of relief supplies to Zepa.
The soldiers also refused to let the United Nations carry extra barrels of diesel fuel into Zepa.
After a four-hour delay, the convoy was waved through Rogatica. It made a slow passage through the town’s badly damaged Muslim quarter, which no longer has its Muslim inhabitants.
They have been driven from their homes, and their mosque is a ruin.
A few miles out of town the convoy entered Kusic’s turf.
Flanked by two huge soldiers, dripping with grenades and bandoliers, Kusic was unswayed by a volley of polite arguments: If, as he claimed, the horror stories about conditions in Zepa were Muslim lies, then shouldn’t the Western journalists be allowed in to expose the truth? How could they tell a story they couldn’t see?
“There are many untold stories in Bosnia,” Kusic said.
