More Sarajevo Fighting Dims Hopes for Truce

Smoke billowing from a mortar-blasted house in the suburb of Butmir and the crackle of small-arms fire in the fiercely contested Dobrinja district did little to inspire hope Saturday that the latest Balkan cease-fire will bring an end to the savaging of Sarajevo.

Serbian guerrillas bombarding this devastated city from surrounding hillsides and Bosnian government forces retaliating from what they think is safe cover, nestled close to U.N. troops, have carried on with their ferocious shootout while their respective leaders have been professing commitment to a new truce.

If anything, say the harried and heavily armed troops and relief workers dodging Sarajevo’s ubiquitous dangers, the fighting has been worse since Muslim, Serbian and Croatian negotiators penned their names to a cease-fire in London on Friday.

Mortar fire around Sarajevo airport was so heavy in the hours before dawn Saturday that U.N. troops were ordered to shelters for the first time since they took over the facility three weeks ago and opened a humanitarian lifeline for a city that was on the verge of starvation.

The European Community-brokered agreement to halt hostilities for 14 days formally takes effect only at 6 p.m. today. But the fierce exchange of last licks Friday and Saturday threatened to trace the pattern developed around earlier cease-fires in which such terrifying salvos are unleashed that the thirst for retaliation overpowers any intention to abide by the truce.

“The idea of a cease-fire in these parts seems to be to let the parties regroup and rearm,” said Mick Gosney, a Royal Air Force ground engineer who helped shuttle in 30,000 pounds of flour for the hungry holdouts of this encircled capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“You can set your watch by the shooting,” added an equally skeptical Sgt. John Hedges, who has spent 16 days with the U.N. relief mission in Sarajevo. “It starts around half past four each afternoon and takes off through the night. Last night was particularly heavy, I guess in honor of the cease-fire.”

Foreign mediators who have struggled for more than a year to get the Yugoslav combatants to settle old scores with diplomacy instead of bullets have held out Friday’s accord--at least the 15th since a Serbian revolt against independence began here in April--as the last best chance to halt the slaughter that has killed at least 7,500, most of them Muslim civilians.

The accord requires all three ethnic groups to stop shooting and surrender their heavy weapons to U.N. surveillance.

The U.N. Security Council has asked for a report from the secretary general by Monday on the number of extra peacekeepers needed to secure and monitor the weapons stockpiles. But U.N. officers said privately that they are in no position to watch over the guns now, even if the combatants surrender them, because only a few dozen troops are available to cover hundreds of square miles of territory across which the huge arsenals are dispersed.

During a visit to Belgrade on Saturday, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd warned Serbian officials that the international community’s patience with short-lived cease-fires is wearing thin.

Hurd, who is now leading the European Community drive to broker a political settlement among the fractious successor states of Yugoslavia, told Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic that the next few days would be considered a “testing time” for their commitment to a genuine peace.

“I’m not despairing,” Hurd told reporters after his talks with the Serbian leaders, revealing the mix of guarded hope and healthy skepticism that has set in among those who have witnessed innumerable earlier cease-fires shot to pieces within minutes of taking effect.

U.N. peacekeepers, flight crews and aid workers operating amid persistent sniper fire at Sarajevo airport say they are increasingly cynical about any prospect for easing the battles raging around them.

“They’re maniacs here!” declared Ralph Iversen, a U.N. soldier from Norway directing traffic at the noisy and chaotic airport where tanks, armored cars and tankers traverse the crowded tarmac. “This is only my third (peacekeeping) assignment, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Lebanon was a lot safer. These people target everything. They have no respect for human life, or for dead bodies, either. The ditches around these villages are filled with rotting, mutilated corpses.”

From Butmir, the residential neighborhood closest to the airport that until three months ago was a tranquil enclave of tile-roofed villas and family farms, the odor of flesh decomposing in the fierce July sun wafts across the runway to the U.N. encampment.

Sarajevo’s once-serene suburban neighborhoods are testimony to the intractable conflict that is grinding the city into rubble and shredding the ethnic unity and tolerance this integrated republic of 4.4 million once stood for.

The high-rise apartment buildings of Dobrinja are cratered, windowless and missing huge sections of their roofs from the nightly bombardment unleashed by Serbian rebels firing from gun nests that have an unobstructed line of sight from ridges overlooking the airport and its nearby suburbs.

“The Serbs fire from overhead and the Muslims are now pulling in close to our positions for sanctuary,” said Lt. Angus Matheson, a Canadian peacekeeper taking shelter from the scorching midday sun inside a parked armored personnel carrier. “They think the Serbs won’t return their fire if they shoot with us behind them. But they’re wrong. All they’re doing is drawing fire on us.”

Several peacekeepers have been wounded by bullets ricocheting off the runway or from shrapnel flying around the tarmac from mortar rounds that have landed nearby.

“There’s a lot of shooting in the center of town,” said Larry Hollingsworth, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ operations chief at the airport, who had just returned from an armored escort of relief supplies into Sarajevo’s Old Town. “These people have a formidable task on their hands, but we are certainly getting aid out to those who need it.”

He said that 2,800 tons of food and medicine had been distributed throughout the city over the past three weeks and estimated that at least 80% of the 350,000 people left in Sarajevo had received “some kind of handout.”

Hollingsworth said no backups in aid deliveries are occurring, although some neighborhoods, including visible Dobrinja, are still inaccessible to convoys because of heavy fighting.

“I think the relief situation is improving, but whether the political situation is any better, I don’t know,” said the relief official, raising his eyebrows to suggest he thinks not. “Let’s just say we look forward to the silence, if you can believe it will come.”