U.N. Troops Reach Sarajevo, Secure Airport

U.N. peacekeeping troops broke through rebel barricades to reach Sarajevo and secure its airport Thursday as dozens of planes across Europe were loaded with food and medicine for a weekend blitz of humanitarian missions.

The peacekeepers have been deployed to reopen Sarajevo’s Butmir Airport, closed for the past two months by fierce artillery attacks that have transformed the Bosnia-Herzegovina capital into a valley of charred buildings, twisted vehicles and 300,000 shell-shocked and starving people.

A fraction of those holding out against a Serbian siege of the multiethnic city have already received a meager share of the first French military rations delivered to Sarajevo earlier this week.

But sporadic mortar and sniper fire still were hampering distribution of the aid in Sarajevo, and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned that reopening the airport will do little to resolve the overall conflict that has subjected Bosnian civilians to more than three months of rebel terror.

Boutros-Ghali also expressed his concern Thursday that the worldwide focus on the horrors of Sarajevo could divert attention from the rest of the depressing array of problems throughout the republics that once made up Yugoslavia.

In an interview with The Times during an official visit to London, the secretary general warned that the crisis of Sarajevo might serve much like the old European medical practice of creating a tiny, artificial abscess that fixated a patient into forgetting the rest of his or her pains and ills. While not belittling the plight of Sarajevo, he said the world still must think “beyond Sarajevo.”

Boutros-Ghali also announced that he eventually would be sending 1,500 peacekeepers from France, Ukraine and Egypt to replace the Canadian battalion, which is only on loan from the U.N. mission in Croatia.

“The composition of this U.N. force is taking into consideration the composition of the different parts of the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Boutros-Ghali told reporters after a meeting with Lord Carrington, the former British foreign secretary now chairing peace negotiations among the Yugoslav factions.

Although the Bosnian conflict is driven by territorial and political issues rather than by religious differences, it pits the Christian Orthodox Serbs against Catholic Croats and Muslim Slavs.

By sending in Orthodox Ukrainians, Muslim Egyptians and the French, who are predominantly Catholic, the United Nations may be trying to avoid accusations that it is sympathetic to any one side.

The attitude of beleaguered Sarajevans toward the U.N. forces is already one of suspicion. Some see the peacekeepers as too willing to treat aggressor and victim as equals and too little inclined to discover the complexities of their crisis.

The first 300 soldiers of a Canadian battalion assigned to sweep the airport area for mines and reopen it for relief traffic arrived in the morning after an arduous, 48-hour trek through the volatile war zones held by rival militias.

But the bulk of the 1,000-troop contingent dispatched Tuesday from its base in Daruvar, Croatia, was halted outside Sarajevo by gunmen who insisted on searching the convoy, said a U.N. official reached by telephone in Sarajevo.

“It appears they may have to spend the night on the road,” the official said, declining to specify which faction was holding up the armored column.

Bosnian radio broadcasts said the peacekeepers, who were repeatedly stopped by roadblocks and local gun battles along the way, at one point had to assume “combat positions” to persuade guerrillas to let them through. U.N. sources in Belgrade said they could not confirm the radio reports.

While the Canadians set to work to prepare the airport for incoming relief flights, Western governments readied planeloads of supplies and waited for the U.N. signal that the airport was considered safe to approach.

The Pentagon said two American C-130 cargo aircraft left Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany early today bound for Zagreb and then on to Sarajevo.

With the United Nations certifying that the airport is safe, the C-130s will travel without fighter escort, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said.

Williams apparently referred to a report by Boutros-Ghali to the Security Council on Wednesday suggesting that the international airlift could continue at present levels but also indicating that conditions were too dangerous to begin a full-scale operation.

Because of the limited capacity of the Sarajevo airport, Williams said, no more than eight flights per day will be able to land and offload aid. But he suggested that the delivery of aid by U.S. forces, including overland, might be stepped up in the coming days.

“This is just the first step in what will probably be an expanding operation,” Williams said.

Britain has already deployed the first of its Royal Air Force cargo planes to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where the supplies are to be held until given the U.N. green light to fly in to Sarajevo.

The 12-nation European Community, France and Norway sent in relief flights Thursday, taking the risk of landing before the peacekeepers had erected perimeter defenses.

EC officials in Brussels have estimated that $600 million in aid will be needed to supply Sarajevo for the next three months.

Serbs opposed to Bosnia’s declared independence, who are widely accused of being the chief aggressors, agreed to remove their tanks and guns from the airport after the United Nations threatened military force to break their blockade.

Rebel Serbs, aided by Yugoslav army troops and mercenaries from Belgrade, have seized two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina and attempted to starve out Sarajevo in a campaign to link coveted territory with the Serb-dominated remains of Yugoslavia.

At least 7,500 people have been killed in Bosnia since March, and with 35,000 missing, the actual death toll may be much higher.

Another 10,000 people died in Croatia last year, when Serbs revolted against that republic’s independence declaration.

One of the key figures in the Croatian Serb uprising, Mayor Milan Babic of Knin, was seriously injured in an assassination attempt Monday, his loyalists told journalists in Belgrade. They blamed the attack on rival Serb leader Zdravko Zecevic, who replaced Babic as regional political chief earlier this year after Babic quarreled with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic over the need for U.N. troops in Krajina, a predominantly Serbian area of Croatia.

Krajina borders western Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been the scene of some of the most vicious fighting over the past few weeks while world attention has been focused on Sarajevo.

Even if the Bosnian capital begins receiving regular shipments of food and other essentials, the limited U.N. mission at Sarajevo airport is not expected to bring any relief to those on the verge of starvation in other besieged cities.

Radio Sarajevo has reported fierce shelling of the northern Bosnian cities of Tuzla and Derventa, which are Muslim strongholds that lie along a corridor of land the Serbs want to conquer so they will have a bridge from Serbia to occupied areas of Croatia.

Croatian Radio reported renewed attacks on the walled Croatian resort of Dubrovnik. But Serbian media contend that the fighting has been instigated by Croatian national guardsmen who have recently advanced into southern Bosnia-Herzegovina.

During a visit to Washington, German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe called for stronger measures to end the Serbian siege of Bosnia-Herzegovina and hinted that Germany might take part in a naval blockade.

In Washington, meanwhile, Milan Panic, the Belgrade-born Costa Mesa businessman who has been named Yugoslavia’s new prime minister, said Thursday his first priority would be to “stop the fighting” in Bosnia-Herzegovina and “work for lasting peace.”

At a news conference called to announce his acceptance of the post, Panic also said he would ensure that no regular Yugoslav army troops are stationed in neighboring republics and would “strongly oppose any activity by irregulars.”

Panic, who holds dual U.S. and Yugoslav citizenship, also vowed to begin “revitalizing” the Yugoslav economy by moving to a free-market economic system and by converting inefficient state-run industries into private corporations.

And he pledged that one of his first acts as prime minister would be to see that “free, fair and democratic elections take place at all levels throughout the country within a matter of months.”

At the United Nations late Thursday, the Security Council’s sanctions committee granted an exemption to the stiff international sanctions on Yugoslavia, including those on air travel, to allow Panic to fly to his homeland.

Times staff writers Stanley Meisler in London and Art Pine and Melissa Healy in Washington contributed to this article.