The Washington Post
December 31, 1992
SARAJEVO, December 30 – There will be a frosty reception for U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali when he visits this besieged city Thursday, and it will have nothing to do with the sub-zero temperatures.
“We do not consider him a friend of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” said Sefer Halilovic, commander in chief of the Bosnian government’s Slavic Muslim-led defense forces. “I am a soldier,” he said. “If I am ordered to meet him, I will, but not gladly.”
Across the shell-cratered street from Halilovic’s headquarters, Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic will not be expressing any thanks either — even though the United Nations has undertaken a diplomatic offensive to try to end the factional bloodshed here and organized a humanitarian airlift to feed this city’s 350,000 beleaguered civilians. “The U.N. has supervised the Bosnian tragedy,” Ganic said. “Their mission has been a complete failure.”
A group calling itself the League of Sarajevo Residents agrees with Ganic, and today it issued an open letter to Boutros-Ghali that dripped sarcasm. “God help you in the New Year as you helped us this year,” the letter said.
Whereas U.N. humanitarian relief troops were once welcomed here in a city reeling under the onslaught of powerful Serb nationalist forces, the past few months have turned gratitude to hostility. In kinder moments, Bosnian officials say the United Nations has been passive in the face of slaughter; at others, they accuse the world body of supporting Serb aggression.
The discord hinges on vastly differing agendas. U.N. peace mediators have sought to arrange a durable cease-fire roughly along current battle lines; Bosnia’s Muslim leaders, fearing that such a truce will freeze in place Serb control of 70 percent of the republic, say they are determined to fight to preserve a unitary state within prewar borders.
The discord flared dramatically this week when a U.N. spokesman in Geneva, Fred Eckhard, announced that a Bosnian goverment force of 10,000 men had massed south of Sarajevo, the capital, and might attempt to break the eight-month-old Serb siege of the city. “The concern is that there may be a major offensive in preparation by the Bosnian government to try to regain lost territory or possibly even to try to liberate Sarajevo,” he said at a news conference Monday.
{Meanwhile, Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic declared in a letter to Boutros-Ghali that Muslim units had begun an offensive in and around Sarajevo Tuesday and that unless peace negotiators intervened to stop it, Bosnian Serb forces would not take responsibility for the “inevitable consequences,” special correspondent Christine Spolar reported from Belgrade.
{In Geneva, Boutros-Ghali said he had no firm information about a Muslim offensive in Bosnia, but he added that a new round of talks Saturday among the principals in the Bosnian conflict may be “the last chance for the peace process” in the war-torn region, special correspondent John Parry reported.}
Eckhard’s disclosure that Muslim forces were massing for a possible attack astonished the Bosnian leadership on two accounts, government officials said. First, if true, the information would be immensely helpful to the Serbs; second, it appeared to put the United Nations on record as opposing any Muslim attempt to break out of an internationally condemned siege.
In fact, Bosnian government officials deny any offensive buildup. In an interview today, Halilovic called the 10,000 figure “stupid and insane,” and he described the Eckhard announcement as “another indicator that {the United Nations} helps the aggressor.” Even U.N. officials here expressed chagrin that such information had been disclosed, and none could recall an instance in which their purportedly neutral organization had publicized data about Serb militia movements.
Said Vice President Ganic: “We would be very happy to exchange information with the U.N. When we ask them about the aggressor {Serb} side, they tell us they don’t have military intelligence. Now, suddenly, they have intelligence.”
At a news conference here Tuesday, U.N. spokesman Mik Magnusson said the the troop information was made public because the United Nations wants to discourage any military action that might jeopardize peacemaking efforts. Asked if that means the world body opposes Muslim efforts to break the Serb siege, Magnusson said, “We would discourage any military activity from any side at any time.”
Bosnian government leaders say they fear that key U.N. members — notably the United States, Britain and France — are so eager to forestall the spread of nationalist conflict in the Balkans that they are willing to abandon the Bosnian Muslims and back a cease-fire legitimizing Serb gains. It is, they say, a policy of containment at the expense of justice. “We are not fighting for a cease-fire,” said Halilovic. “We are fighting for our freedom.”
Last year’s Serb-Croat war in neighboring Croatia — in which Serb insurgents and the Serb-led Yugoslav army seized a third of that former Yugoslav republic — was halted by a U.N.-sponsored cease-fire that has left the Serbs in control of much of eastern Croatia. The truce called for the insurgents to disarm and allow Croat refugees to return to their homes, but the Serbs have not disarmed, and the displaced Croats have not been able to return.
It is into this frozen climate of suspicion that Boutros-Ghali will step from his special plane for a six-hour visit that will be crowded with photo opportunities. He will spend most of his time visiting U.N. troops and is not scheduled to tour this devastated city, as most other high-level visitors have done.
The U.N. chief does plan to visit Bosnian government officials, and Ganic says he will try to explain why he believes that all the U.N. resolutions condemning Serb aggression are worse than worthless, that the long drawn-out diplomatic wrangle over possible foreign military intervention here has simply alerted the Serbs that they had better finish their conquest soon.
“The resolutions were such that {the United Nations} could pretend it was doing something while in fact doing nothing,” Ganic said, adding that most of the blame rests on European Community nations that were supposed to spearhead a Western response.
Ganic, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called on the United States to take charge. “There is something missing here in Sarajevo,” he said. “Americans aren’t present. Americans wouldn’t accept this Middle Age approach of keeping a city under siege.”
