The Washington Post
December 28, 1992
VITEZ, Bosnia – It was, as a British officer might say, a cracking good show.
During a recent patrol near the northeast Bosnian city of Tuzla, a convoy of British Warrior armored fighting vehicles was ambushed by Serb militia forces. The Serbs opened fire with everything they had — mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy weapons.
The Serbs never made a dent. The 45 tracked British Warriors in Bosnia weigh 30 tons each, have reinforced armor plating, are armed with 30mm rapid-fire cannon and can race across the countryside at more than 50 miles an hour. The next best thing to being in a bunker on a Balkan battlefield is to be in a Warrior.
The Serb grenades ricocheted off the British armor, making “poing” sounds and leaving, at worst, small burn marks on the white paint identifying the Warriors as being under United Nations command. Instead of firing back, the British plowed ahead and did not stop until they reached the local Serb militia headquarters.
“We got out and shook their hands,” said a British military spokesman. “The Serbs couldn’t believe it; they were amazed.” There was no immediate explanation of why the Serbs opened fire on the clearly marked U.N. vehicles, but Serb commanders have explained such incidents in the past as regrettable accidents, or as the understandable reaction of Serb militiamen believing they were under attack.
Nevertheless, that engagement — in which Serb pride was the only casualty — may have been the best demonstration yet that the U.N. troops most at risk in Bosnia’s bloody factional war may not be as vulnerable as some Western leaders contend.
“We must be very careful we don’t needlessly put young men and women who are there in harm’s way more than they are,” said President Bush last week after discussing possible Western military intervention in Bosnia with British Prime Minister John Major.
Major reluctantly joined Bush in supporting Western enforcement of a U.N. “no-fly zone” over Bosnia that could lead to the downing of Serb aircraft there, but he has argued vigorously for a long grace period before the flight ban would take effect and for other Western constraints as well.
Major’s contention — as well as, to a lesser extent, that of the French — has been that the destruction of Bosnian Serb aircraft, or their bases, could provoke Serb militia forces to launch revenge attacks against British and French ground troops helping deliver U.N. humanitarian aid to suffering Bosnian civilians.
But British troops operating near the frontline here seem more than a bit bemused by such hand-wringing. Veterans of the Persian Gulf War and sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, they don’t quite understand what the fuss is about, and they especially don’t like politicians portraying them as frightened, defenseless Boy Scouts.
“We don’t feel so vulnerable,” said the spokesman, who asked that his name not be used. “We could give {the Serbs} a nasty headache if we wanted.”
Indeed, officials of Bosnia’s embattled Slavic Muslim-led government and some Western diplomats in the region argue that the continued focus on the vulnerability of U.N. relief troops is merely an excuse to put off intervention. “There’s this myth that the day you shoot down a Serb jet these 10-foot-tall, man-eating Serbs will slaughter all the innocents,” said one Western diplomat in neighboring Croatia. He noted that the Serb nationalist forces that now control about 70 percent of Bosnia seized much of that territory in a well-camouflaged spring blitz against poorly armed Muslims and Croats, and that since then they have shown litte discipline or cohesion.
“The West is looking for excuses to not intervene,” said Besim Spahic, the Muslim mayor of Zenica, a city 15 miles northwest of this British staging base and about 40 miles north of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “The Serbs are wise. With their threats, they try to keep the West from intervening.”
Muslim advocates of intervention propose Western air strikes against Serb air bases, artillery batteries and other military targets in Serb-held Bosnia, and perhaps on their support bases in neighboring Serbia as well.
This, the argument goes, would allow the Muslim-led government’s lightly armed ground forces to engage the Serbs on more even terms. All the U.N. relief troops would have to do is hunker down and curtail their civilian aid operations. Bosnian government leaders have said repeatedly that they would gladly swap the relief operation for Western military intervention against the Serbs.
The main threat to British and other U.N. ground forces would come from heavy artillery fire, according to the military spokesman. The front line is about nine miles from the base here at Vitez, well within range of the Serbs’ 155mm howitzers, and an accurate salvo could cause heavy casualties.
But British officers here say that in a hostile situation, the Serbs would have to be precisely on target with their first shot, because their batteries would likely be silenced before a second or third round could be fired. The British army, like the U.S. Army, has advanced radar and thermal-sensing equipment that can quickly locate smoking artillery pieces and target them for retaliation; Serb artillery could then be taken out by air strikes, military officers say.
“The Serbs would be pretty stupid to take us on,” boasted one British soldier as he relaxed here at an off-hours cafe where the video machine was playing an action movie called “Beasts of War.”
