Renewed Fighting Threatens U.N.’s Yugoslavia Mission

Fighting in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina on Friday left scores dead and threatened the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers that was to have begun in earnest this week, officials said.

The mission of the 14,000-strong U.N. force is to enforce a Jan. 3 truce in the ethnic warfare that has left as many as 10,000 people dead since Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia last June.

The truce, which has been violated almost daily but without a major conflagration, was breached Friday by unusually wide-scale clashes between the Serb-led forces and Croatian units in the Serb-held region of Baranja and the Croatian stronghold of Osijek.

The commander of the U.N. forces, Maj. Gen. Satish Nambiar, told reporters in Belgrade that the situation was “serious,” but refused to say whether it could delay deployment of peacekeepers, which officials hope to complete by April 25.

Tensions were running high in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose disputes have involved a volatile mixture of Muslims, Serbs and Croats. The republic announced in January it plans to leave what remains of the Yugoslav federation. Many Bosnian Serbs are unhappy at the decision.