A ‘Cleansed’ Bosnian Town Watches, Waits

This town has that distinctive “cleansed” look familiar to the surrounding regions of northern Bosnia--subdued, idled, strangely patient. Like a crow on a bare limb, it waits and watches.

Some people move about, but many stores are closed. One man, responding to a request for directions, wears an automatic pistol fit snugly in a holster on his belt. He is a civilian.

Through one corner of the town Wednesday, a wooden wagon passed, pulled by two horses, one gray, one brown. The remnants of two Muslim families, six women and four men, were loaded into the wagon. There was also a plastic bag of ripe tomatoes, some loaves of bread, soda pop bottles filled with water and a few more plastic bags, stuffed with clothes, some blankets and pillows.

A few local cars whizzed by, but none paused to look. The “cleansed,” after all, have been a common enough spectacle here.

And by now, the signs suggested, the climactic push of the “ethnic cleansing” broom was under way. All but finished, in fact, in Sanski Most.

“We are going to Fajtovci,” said the man holding the reins. “We come from Modra.” Modra is a village so small it does not show on a detailed map. Fajtovci is to the west, across the Una River, a temporary refuge. “Then maybe we go to Germany. To Slovenia, maybe.”

The women, three very old and three in their 30s, began to cry, the circles under their eyes glistening.

“Yes,” the man said of the wagonload of possessions, “this is everything.”

“Everything,” several others said at once. “House--gone. Everything--gone.” Two husbands were gone as well, they said. One of the women said her husband was in the Serbian prison camp at Manjaca. She had left her three children behind--perhaps with neighbors, but it was not clear--evidently because she thought they would be safer. Another of the women had left two children.

The reins slapped the rumps of the horses, and the two families headed west, toward the river.

The two families in the wagon, however fragmented, were evidently lucky to be moving under their own power. Across a wide region of northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to relief officials, tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims have been gathered up, ready for expulsion by Bosnian Serbs, who are driving to complete an “ethnically cleansed” corridor across the area.

As the Serbian forces work to clean out the final section of this corridor, they have demanded that the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.N. peacekeepers in neighboring Croatia assist their efforts by evacuating as many as 28,000 Muslims from Sanski Most, Bosanska Krupa and perhaps dozens of smaller towns--including villages such as Modra--throughout the region.

So far, U.N. refugee officials are resisting, but the outcome of the standoff is far from certain.

“We’re trying to throw as much light on this as possible,” said Ron Redmond, a U.N. official newly arrived in Zagreb from Geneva. “We’re doing everything we can to stop it.”

The pressure has been applied to the Sector North command center of the U.N. peace force, which controls the Croatian territory adjacent to the newly cleansed Bosnian area. And the pressure has mounted rapidly.

“It started two days ago,” said Charles Kirudja, a Kenyan who is the civil affairs coordinator for Sector North. “They said first they had 10,000 people they wanted to move. Then it was 20,000; then, on the latest information we’ve gotten by radio, it is now 28,000. And I can tell you that if we take out these 28,000, then the next time it will be 40,000 or 60,000.”

The demands are coming, Kirudja said, from the Serbian leadership of Bosanski Novi, the city that so far forms the western boundary of the Serbian “cleansing” push. The immediate Serbian strategy, according to U.N. observers, is to clear Muslims from areas southeast of the Una River, from Bosanski Novi in the north to Bihac in the south.

This action, if completed, would give the Serbs an open corridor across northern Bosnia and would link territory the Serbs took last year in eastern and western Croatia.

The action would also work to push tens of thousands of Muslim refugees into a corner of northwestern Bosnia called the Bosanska Krajina, where they would be surrounded by Serb territory.

This region, now about 85% Muslim, has been economically strangled for the last 15 months, with roads blocked, telephones cut and electricity either shut off or in sporadic supply.

The city of Bihac, with a population of 70,000, has been under daily attack since June 12, with Serb militiamen lobbing artillery and mortar shells into the center of the city, firing from commanding positions in the surrounding hills. The city has been slowly running out of food, and so far only a few shipments of medical supplies have gotten through.

Recent indications suggest that the Serbian push has been nearing Bihac. The road between Bosanski Novi and Bosanska Krupa, a town about 20 miles northeast of Bihac, was closed Wednesday. Guards manning the roadblock described the area ahead as “the front.”

U.N. officials also say that the Serbs are hurrying to expel Muslim refugees, with the assistance of U.N. refugee workers if possible, in advance of any action taken by the United Nations, where the Security Council is debating an authorization for the use of force to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches Bosnia.

No U.N. resolution has been proposed, however, that would encompass action to block “ethnic cleansing,” and the U.N. peacekeepers and refugee workers have so far been left to their own devices in working out a way to avoid becoming pawns in the Serbian plan.

“We have told them (the Serbian officials) that we are not in the business of helping to create refugees, but to help them,” said the angry Kirudja, standing behind his desk at the U.N. peacekeepers’ Sector North office in Topusko, Croatia. “We don’t know what we are going to do about it.”

In the meantime, he said, the Muslim residents of the region “are suffering. They were ordered first to sign loyalty oaths to the Serbian administration. If they did not, they were taken away to camps. If they did, they were then asked to ‘voluntarily’ sign over their property, to prepare to leave and promise not to come back.

“They are afraid, they are desperate and they have lost all their possessions. They have nowhere to turn and no one to take them.”

Certainly there seemed little help for them in Sanski Most. When inquiries were made on the street, near the center of town, for directions to a factory grounds where refugees were said to be housed, five men arrived, coasting up on bicycles within a minute, to see what the strangers wanted in town.

“Why don’t you people just ---- off,” said one of the men. “We don’t need you Westerners here. We don’t want your interference.”

A less hostile member of the group suggested that the police station might provide information.

“Don’t even bother with that,” said one of the men on the bicycle. “Just get out of town.”

‘Cleansing’ by Force

Direction in which Muslim civilians of northern Bosnia are being pushed by Serb forces, according to United Nations officials.