Tons of U.S. Relief Supplies Land in Sarajevo

U.S. planes boosted the international mission to rescue starving Sarajevo by flying in tons of food and supplies Friday, but a European Community envoy failed to persuade the warring factions to resume peace talks that could end the ever-broadening Balkan conflict.

It was the first full day of a humanitarian airlift to Sarajevo made possible by the deployment of more than 1,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops to secure and defend the airport.

Eleven planeloads of aid landed on the single runway of Butmir Airport, which had been closed for nearly three months by Serbian forces ringing the city and attempting to drive out its last 300,000 residents with an incessant barrage of artillery fire.

While relief activity got into full swing in Sarajevo, California businessman Milan Panic returned to his native Serbia to take up the post of Yugoslav prime minister and vowed to end the war that has cast his homeland into global disrepute.

More than 700 Canadian troops who had been delayed by local fighting en route from their base in Croatia arrived to bolster the airport operation as the American, British, French, Greek and Scandinavian flights began converging on the facility that has yet to be repaired and fully protected.

Sporadic shooting was heard in central Sarajevo as well as in the high-rise apartment villages near the airport, including at least one instance of antiaircraft fire, according to sources in the volatile capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“There is sporadic shooting, but I wouldn’t say it is worse than normal,” one U.N. mission employee reported by telephone.

The food now arriving in bulk is expected to ease the suffering of those still holding out against the Serbian siege that began after a Feb. 29 referendum in Bosnia-Herzegovina endorsed independence, angering those Serbs who wanted to stay aligned with Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

But an attempt by the European Community to cure the illness of war, rather than treat its symptoms, stalled over conditions imposed by both sides in the conflict.

EC mediator Lord Carrington, a former British foreign secretary, spent five hours talking with Bosnian government leaders who won foreign recognition of their country in April, as well as with the leader of Bosnia’s rebellious Serbs.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, who is Muslim, told Carrington that talks on the future of the republic could resume only after a firm cease-fire--defined as one holding at least seven days--and when the Serbs’ heavily artillery had been turned over to U.N. forces to prevent further attacks.

Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic was quoted by the SRNA news agency he controls as saying that “the only chance” for peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina is to press ahead with his plan to cut the thoroughly integrated country of 4.4 million into ethnic cantons. He has laid claim to 70% of the republic’s territory and said he intends to see it annexed to Serbia.

“I’m deeply dispirited,” Carrington told reporters after his meetings with the rival leaders.

He was shown on Belgrade television declining a flak jacket for his tour through the city that, day and night, echoes with sniper fire, punctuated by the occasional burst of grenades and mortars.

More than 7,500 people--mostly Muslim civilians--have been killed in little more than three months since Serbian rebels began laying siege to territory they want to link to Serbia and form a land bridge to Serb-held areas of Croatia.

Many of the 35,000 missing in the Bosnian fighting are feared dead, and 1.5 million refugees have resulted from the violence and a Serbian policy of “ethnic cleansing” of the areas they hold.

Combined with the homeless created by last year’s fighting in Croatia, there are now more than 2.2 million refugees from the Yugoslav conflict, forming the largest migration in Europe since World War II.

There has been no declaration by U.N. forces operating the airport that it is safe for the incoming traffic, as Serbian guns capable of firing on the airport remain dug in on the surrounding hills. And the last of the Canadian peacekeepers were able to make their way to the airport through rival blockades only after the parade of relief flights had begun landing.

Two U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules planes were among the first to arrive and quickly unloaded 10 tons of food and medicine, as well as forklifts and other equipment for handling the aid.

In Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, the 62-year-old Panic made a sweeping entrance to the homeland he fled more than a quarter-century ago. State-run television dogged his every step and comment, including a meeting with Yugoslavia’s newly appointed president, nationalist author Dobrica Cosic, and a statement to local journalists in which he promised to rescue the country from its “plethora of problems.”

The new federation of Serbia and Montenegro that retains the name of Yugoslavia was already staggering under six-digit hyper-inflation and brewing social unrest when the United Nations slapped on severe and wide-ranging sanctions May 30, in punishment for Belgrade’s bankrolling and prodding of the war in Bosnia.

“I will help Yugoslavia come back to the international scene from which it has been recently eliminated,” Panic told reporters after his 30-hour journey from the United States.

A Belgrade native who founded a Costa Mesa-based pharmaceutical empire after immigrating to the United States in 1956, Panic said he decided to return in hopes of imparting his experience with “capitalist, democratic society.”

“One is entitled to die for an idea, but on the other hand there is no such idea on behalf of which one should kill,” said the bespectacled Panic, nattily dressed and buoyant despite his long journey.

He said stopping the war would be his first priority once he is confirmed as prime minister, but he declined to give details of how he would turn around what has become a nationwide fever of bellicose nationalism.

Panic also dodged questions about his relationship with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who is widely blamed for Yugoslavia’s bloody ethnic conflicts and thought to be the architect of the new Serb-run federation that has brought Panic to his new post.