The Washington Post
September 17, 1992
PALE, Bosnia – After five months of waging aggressive war, Serb nationalist forces here claim to have carved their own independent state out of Bosnia. For now, it looks more like a state of insecurity.
Throughout Serb-held Bosnia, hit-and-run attacks by Slavic Muslim guerrillas have made secondary roads impassable. On main roads, Serb militiamen warn motorists to drive fast because of Muslim snipers. Traveling through what Serb separatist leaders here call their autonomous republic consists mostly of scurrying between fortified towns and hamlets as the Serbs discover that conquering territory is sometimes easier than defending it.
Serb military power here is still formidable, but it is divided among competing regional politicians, monarchist warlords, ex-communist officials and marauding vigilantes who distrust their nominal political leaders and despise each other. “Everybody is on shouting terms with everybody else,” said Milos Vasic, a journalist with the independent Belgrade magazine Vreme. “The political structure is collapsing . . . into a sort of 16th-century chaos.”
A Belgrade-based Western diplomat agreed, saying: “In spite of their military success, the Serbs have a ragtag, demoralized army that is scared of winter and running out of supplies. The ‘republic’ they have created is not viable.”
When Bosnia’s three-sided factional war broke out in April, Muslim town after Muslim town fell to Serb militia forces, which now control about 70 percent of the former Yugoslav republic. But the initial impression of an unstoppable juggernaut may have been premature.
Bosnia’s Slavic Muslim-led government, along with Muslim communities all across Bosnia, were largely unarmed and no match for the Serb blitz, which was spearheaded by the Serb-controlled Yugoslav army operating from neighboring Serbia. Now the Muslims are fighting back ferociously and withstanding Serb sieges of their key strongholds — Sarajevo, Gorazde, Bihac, Tuzla. Over the last month, Muslim-led government forces have even scored some significant advances against the Serbs.
A similar scenario unfolded in last year’s Serb-Croat war in Croatia. Heavily armed Serb insurgents — also backed by the Yugoslav army — racked up easy initial victories, but after a few months Croatian government forces regrouped and slowed the onslaught. A U.N.-brokered cease-fire in January halted the fighting — freezing in place local Serb control of more than a quarter of Croatia — and many diplomats and observers here say the truce saved the Serbs from certain defeat.
Now Serb nationalist leaders in Bosnia are seeking a similar truce that would formalize their conquests. “We have no reason to prolong the fighting,” said Biljana Plavsic, a senior Bosnian Serb leader. “We would really like to settle the situation.”
Radovan Karadzic, president of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb republic, holds the same view, saying in a recent interview: “All we need to do now is negotiate a settlement . . . to sit down and make peace.” Karadzic, leader of a Serb community that made up 31 percent of Bosnia’s prewar population, said he would even be willing to return some captured land in return for peace. “We now control 70 percent of the land,” he said, “but we only claim 64 percent as ours.”
But making that territory secure for local Serb civilians is another matter. Much of it has become a perilous no man’s land of deserted villages, shattered homesteads and barren fields. Towns hunker down at night under curfews and behind rings of sentries and layers of roadblocks and barricades.
During the day, there is little economic activity throughout the region, aside from black-market transactions for gasoline and heating oil. At roadblocks, ill-disciplined militiamen pester foreigners for cigarettes, food or gasoline. Many factories have been destroyed; others have shut down because nearly every adult Serb is at war. With farmers at the front, their cows wander about freely on the roads.
The supplies the Bosnian Serbs do get — for both civilian and military use — must come from neighboring Serbia, which may be a very slim reed to lean on as U.N. economic sanctions bite deeper into its economy and that of the new Yugoslav state it controls. Even in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, gasoline and heating fuel are tightly rationed, and the chief topic of conversation is the coming winter. It will be even colder for the Serbs of Bosnia.
Like many advancing armies, the Bosnian Serbs conquered territory far faster than they could establish reliable supply routes to it, and fragile road corridors from Serbia to the key cities of Banja Luka in northern Bosnia and Pale, the Bosnian Serbs’ provisional capital near Sarajevo, cannot be fully defended.
The supply line from Belgrade to Banja Luka — the largest city in Serb hands — follows a hazardous route that zigzags along dirt tracks and farm lanes with detours through corn fields. At its narrowest point, the supply corridor is just a few miles wide. To the north, militia forces organized by Bosnia’s Croat minority can bombard it at will; to the south, Muslim guerrillas can strike at its softest spots. The tenuousness of the route was demonstrated this weekend, when Muslim ambushes temporarily closed the Banja Luka road and the previously unthreatened road to Pale as well.
Morale here is being weakened further by a growing fear among Bosnian Serbs that they may be abandoned by their chief patron and protector, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, as a means of freeing Serbia from the noose of U.N. sanctions. Milosevic has been accused by the international community of trying to construct a “Greater Serbia” stretching westward across Bosnia to incorporate Serb-held lands in Croatia, but diplomats in Belgrade say he is quite capable of compromising that scheme for the sake of political survival at home.
There is also a growing sense of paranoia stemming from the fact that the Bosnian Serb program of expelling non-Serbs from territory they control is not yet complete. Although Serb forces have driven hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats from their homes and lands all across Bosnia, many thousands remain behind, and local Serb authorities worry that if they had weapons, they could form a potent force behind the front lines.
“We’re all scared here,” said Vojo Kupresanin, a hard-line Serb nationalist leader in Banja Luka. “For each of us, every night is a big question.”
Everywhere, grass-roots support for the war is showing signs of eroding. Before the fighting and expulsions and atrocities began, Bosnian Serbs lived peacefully and prosperously with their Muslim and Croat neighbors; now the war has reduced many to living like paupers. “I blame both my leaders and the Muslim leaders for making the people fight,” said an elderly Serb named Mirko as he boarded up a shattered glass door in the eastern city of Visegrad. “It shouldn’t have happened.”
For the most part, though, Serb militia commanders remain convinced of the justice of their cause and continue to recycle the rhetoric of Pale and Belgrade that they are fighting a desperate war against Islamic fundamentalism. The Muslims, they say, are not just trying to set up an Islamic state in Bosnia, they want to create an Islamic empire stretching from Bosnia to the Middle East.
At the front-line town of Rogatica the other day, the local Serb commander initially refused to talk with three foreign journalists and angrily made the point that they should not have come to his headquarters. Then he agreed to talk. Then he grabbed a reporter’s notebook and riffled through it, saying: “If you write lies, I will kill you.” Then he invited the reporters to lunch.
