Serb-Backed Troops Flout Deadline on Bosnia Pullout

Despite mounting signs that foreign powers are considering military intervention to protect Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serb-dominated federal army ignored a Tuesday deadline to pull out of the independent state it has systematically laid to waste.

A 2-month-old assault on the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo intensified again Tuesday, even after all parties to the conflict made the show of signing another cease-fire. Sarajevo Radio reported renewed sniper and artillery fire late in the day.

Serbia, although isolated and mired in economic turmoil, has so far been impervious to Western threats of punitive actions.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, the latest in a procession of foreign dignitaries attending Yugoslavia’s bloody death throes, met with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic here to push for the removal of Serb-manned barricades and roadblocks in Bosnia that are preventing aid from being delivered to trapped civilians.

Kozyrev told journalists he will visit the other former Yugoslav republics and then formulate a new plan for restoring peace in the Balkans.

But the Russian Embassy here in the Serbian capital announced later that Kozyrev had left Belgrade for Moscow to take part in a Russian parliamentary session.

Despite the intervention of Russia, which has Slavic heritage and Christian Orthodox religion in common with Serbia, it remains doubtful that the Serbian vigilantes in Bosnia would guarantee safe passage for relief convoys along the desperate roadways manned by heavily armed gangs of rival guerrillas.

More than three dozen trucks carrying food and medicine sent by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees left the Croatian capital of Zagreb bound for Sarajevo, but many previous relief convoys have been attacked by snipers or have fallen victim to highway bandits intent on seizing the supplies for their own fighters.

A rocket and mortar attack Monday on an International Red Cross convoy killed one aid worker and seriously injured two others.

U.N. refugee officials have deplored the violence in Bosnia as an unprecedented bloodletting aimed at terrorizing the civilian population. Army units in the hills that surround Sarajevo have been trying to take the city by blindly lobbing shells into the populated areas below them. Several other major Bosnian cities were cleared with similar assaults over the last two months and then reoccupied exclusively by Serbs.

Serbian guerrilla units--most of them from Belgrade--now control at least two-thirds of the republic of 4.4 million, although Serbs make up less than a third of the population. Slavic Muslims are the largest of Bosnia’s people, with about 44%, and Croats account for 17%.

International relief agencies now estimate the death toll since Bosnia declared independence in March at 2,000, while the number of refugees from the violence-racked republic top 700,000.

A similar territorial war in Croatia last year claimed 10,000 lives and left 600,000 homeless, bringing the number of displaced Yugoslavs to about 1.3 million.

U.N. refugee officials say the refugee wave is the largest to hit Europe since World War II.

Officials in Geneva report that an additional 20,000 Bosnians--most of them Muslims--are driven from their homes daily by the escalating conflict in the multiethnic republic, until recently a showcase for ethnic tolerance and integration.

Tuesday was the deadline set by Sarajevo officials for the withdrawal of federal forces from the republic, which won U.S. and European Community recognition in early April.

Serbian authorities in Belgrade have said they will withdraw about 20% of the 100,000-plus federal soldiers now in Bosnia as soon as a stable truce allows for the removal of the men and their equipment.

But most of the fighting force is expected to be turned over to local Serbian militias, not making much of a dent in the fighting that has plunged Bosnia into chaos for more than two months. Belgrade has also indicated it will keep its tanks, armored personnel carriers and mounted guns in place for Serbian forces staying behind.