Serbs Accused of ‘Blackmail’ on Refugees

A U.N. official said Tuesday that Serbian officials and militia irregulars had “blackmailed” him into shipping 7,000 Muslims out of a town in northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina last week, setting what he called “an alarming and dangerous precedent” that could affect the 400,000 Muslims still in the area.

Jean-Claude Concolato, who heads the liaison office for the U.N. refugee agency in Zagreb, said in an interview that he was “outraged” by the events in Bosanski Novi last week, which he said forced his office to become an unwilling partner in the Serbian program of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia.

“The blackmail was very simple,” Concolato said. “They said, ‘You take them out, or the responsibility for what happens to them is on your hands.’ ”

Concolato, a veteran U.N. refugee official, had been negotiating with the local authorities in Bosanski Novi, he said, to ensure the safety of the local Muslims, who once made up about 9,000 of the town’s 16,000 population.

Serbian officials, he said, held about 500 Muslim men prisoner in a football stadium, and militiamen were running an interrogation center in the Hotel Una in the town’s center, where, he was told, Muslim prisoners were questioned and tortured.

“The negotiations were very difficult,” Concolato said. “The mayor, Milan Basic, refused to designate the men being held as prisoners of war. He called them ‘local criminals.’ We were told if we wanted to guarantee the safety of the Muslims, we . . . would have to be responsible for getting them out.”

On July 19, he said, a Muslim man was killed by a sniper, and on the following night, two bombs exploded in the district where most of the Muslims had gathered.

“It was an agonizing decision,” Concolato said, “but we had to make it. If we did not, the Muslims were going to start leaving on their own, and with a great deal of loss. They would start going across the mountains on their own or try to swim the river. It would have been very costly, in terms of lives.

“It was a shameful operation,” Concolato went on. “I repeat it--a shameful operation. The only pride I can take in it--if pride is a word you can use in connection with this--is that we did not leave behind a single person. We took everyone.”

Concolato said the entire region of Cazinska Krajina--the extreme northwest corner of Bosnia between the towns of Bosanski Novi and Bihac--is currently under Serbian pressure, with regular mortar attacks now raining on Bihac. Other U.N. officials confirm his assertion.

“There are 400,000 Muslims in this area,” he said. “They make up almost 80% of the population. Either we stop this policy now, or the international community will have to swallow 400,000 more Muslims from the area. It is an enormous crisis under way.”

The 7,000 Muslims taken from Bosanski Novi were transported by U.N. soldiers to camps in Croatia, Concolato said.

In effect, he said, the action put the United Nations--both refugee officials and the peacekeeping force--in the position of not only creating refugees but of becoming a partner in Serbia’s “ethnic cleansing.”

“All we can do,” Concolato said, “is make so much noise about it, to scream so loudly, that this will be the first and last time it happens.”

The U.N. official’s outrage comes on the eve of an international conference in Geneva called by the U.N. refugee agency to deal with the humanitarian crisis caused by the conflict in the former Yugoslav republics.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says 2.2 million people have been made homeless by the conflict, and the problem of what to do with them has become a major dispute in Europe.

German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, whose country has taken in more than 200,000 refugees, has said he wants the meeting in Geneva to deal firmly with the problem, and he has suggested a quota system to parcel out the refugees among European Community states.

France and Britain, while contributing to the relief operations around the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, want to focus on providing shelter for the refugees closer to their homes and are opposed to a quota system.

At the same time, there is a growing feeling among some observers here that the reluctance of Western Europe to get involved in the conflict will simply worsen the refugee problem and create even larger problems in the future.

“The refugee problem is the symptom, not the cause,” one U.N. official said.