Mostar, in central Bosnia, a long and bitter strug-
gle between Croats and Serbs began in 1992; the
Serbs were defeated by a tactical alliance between
Bosnian Muslims and Croats; once the Serbs had
been ousted, the victors turned on each other.
Such was the tangle of disintegrating Yugoslav
alliances and alignments.
The most dramatic evidence of the savagery of
the war to reach the West was the siege of Sarajevo.
During the first winter of the war in Bosnia in
1992 the civilian population of Sarajevo was
exposed to Serb gunfire; essential medical and food
supplies were dwindling. Apartment blocks, hotels,
schools and hospitals were shelled and even
mourners in graveyards were killed. The main
thoroughfare of Sarajevo became a snipers’ alley.
Had it not been for the UN convoys, which
brought in a minimum of relief, the 415,000
inhabitants would have starved. Television journal-
ism once again demonstrated its powerful influ-
ence over events. Pictures of devastation and
carnage shocked people in the West, who became
increasingly impatient at their governments’ appar-
ent inability to stop the slaughter. Reprehensibly
the West continued to enforce the UN arms
embargo on all the republics. The effect of this was
to block military supplies to Bosnia’s Muslims,
while the Bosnian Serbs, despite the embargo,
continued to secure plentiful arms from neigh-
bouring Serbia; the Croatians obtained theirs clan-
destinely from the West. The embargo was so
obviously one-sided that the conflict could only
have ended if the Bosnian Muslims, the principal
victims of aggression, had accepted that their
struggle was hopeless.
While the Serbs carried out the ethnic cleans-
ing of the lands their troops had conquered –
hundreds of thousands of refugees were driven
into Croatia and beyond to Austria and Germany
- governments in the West continued to insist
they could only try to alleviate the humanitarian
consequences of the conflict; the public was told
that NATO air strikes would prove ineffective;
intervention would mean sending in a large army.
This was unthinkable: Bosnia was not the Gulf;
no vital Western interests were at stake. This
meant that the war would only stop when the
Croats, Serbs and Bosnians agreed to end it.
Izetbegovic, it was implied, should accept the sit-
uation and allow his republic to be partitioned.
But the Muslims held on amid the daily killings
in Sarajevo and in three eastern Bosnian towns,
Srebrenika, Zepa and Gorazde, enclaves sur-
rounded by Bosnian-Serb territory soon to
become infamous as ‘safe areas’.
The atrocities being committed by all parties,
though largely by the Serbs and Croats, had by
now so outraged public opinion that the Western
governments, after more than two years of war,
recognised that they had to be seen to be doing
something more. In April 1993 Srebrenika, and
later Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihac, Zepa and Gorazde –
all towns in Bosnia – were declared by the UN to
be ‘safe areas’. It was assumed that this meant
they would be under UN protection, but the UN
had no intention of intervening to defend them
by force: in international law ‘safe areas’ were not
the same as ‘safe havens’; only the latter had a
legal right to be properly defended. The public
could not have been expected to understand such
an arcane point, but the sense of outrage grew
when the ‘safety’ of these areas proved to be a
sham. Only Gorazde was to remain in Muslim
hands. Nevertheless, economic sanctions against
Serbia and Montenegro were tightened and
increased the pressure on Milosˇevic ́. May 1993 at
last saw a glimmer of hope: Lord Owen’s advo-
cacy and Serbia’s bankrupt state combined to
persuade the Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian
presidents to put their signatures to a plan to end
the fighting. However, this was later repudiated
by the Bosnian Serbs. It was evident that
Milosˇevic ́ could no longer control his former fol-
lowers in Bosnia.
The fighting raged on throughout 1993 and
- The Bosnian Muslims, who had managed
to acquire some weapons, fought back. When a
Serb mortar shell hit the market in Sarajevo in
February 1994, adding sixty-nine more deaths to
the 10,000 already killed during the siege,
Western governments expressed their outrage.
President Clinton again called for NATO inter-
vention from the air but Britain and France still
resisted. Further excuse for not using force
against Serbia was raised: traditionally Russia was
Serbia’s friend and a confrontation between the
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