Bosnian Serbs Block U.N. Relief Convoy

Bosnian Serbs on Sunday turned back a U.N. convoy carrying food and medicine to a Muslim town in eastern Bosnia that has been surrounded by Serbs for 10 months.

It was another setback for relief agencies facing mounting hostility from leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Muslim community who say not enough is being done to stop the republic’s civil war or to help 200,000 people trapped in pockets in the east.

Officials in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, and Tuzla are themselves blocking further aid to their residents to protest the failure to get supplies to the east. U.N. officials have criticized that move for intensifying public anger aimed at U.N. operations and warned that stored food could spoil.

For the second day, heavy fighting around Sarajevo prevented aid flights from landing at the airport outside the besieged capital.

Fighting also raged in southwestern Croatia, and Serbian and Croatian leaders in that former Yugoslav republic repeated competing claims to territory as they prepared for talks at the United Nations this week.

The Croatian army began an offensive on Jan. 22 to regain control of at least some of the Serb-held Krajina region in the southwest, one of the areas seized by Serbian forces in 1991 after Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia. The latest combat was the first since a truce took effect early last year.

The 10 trucks in the U.N. convoy to eastern Bosnia tried to reach Cerska, which reportedly is a refuge for up to 40,000 Muslim Slavs. The convoy left Belgrade, capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia, on Sunday morning and got only as far as Serb-held Zvornik on Bosnia’s border with Serbia.

Bosnian Serbs refused to let the convoy pass, saying they had insufficient advance notice, said a spokesman for U.N. aid operations in Belgrade. The convoy was to stay overnight in Loznica in Serbia and make a new attempt to reach Cerska today, the spokesman said on condition of anonymity.

Distribution centers in Sarajevo were quiet as the city’s 380,000 residents entered the third day of what authorities have called a hunger strike in solidarity with hungry and ill Muslims trapped in eastern Bosnia.

The city council, backed by Bosnia’s Muslim-led government, announced Friday that until convoys reached eastern Bosnia, it would stop distributing the food aid that has kept Sarajevans alive during a 10-month-old siege.

Fighting and the Serbs--sometimes soldiers, sometimes unarmed women and children--have often blocked U.N. convoys to eastern Bosnia, the scene of some of the worst atrocities and fighting since Bosnian Muslims and Croats voted for independence nearly a year ago.

Serbian warriors recently allowed 6,000 Muslims to flee the Cerska area for nearby Tuzla, where relief agencies said many of the refugees arrived in terrible condition, suffering from hepatitis, head lice and frostbite.

Leaders in Tuzla, 50 miles north of Sarajevo, declared Saturday that the city’s residents would join the capital’s protest fast.

U.N. aid official Jose Maria Mendiluce held talks Sunday in the Serb stronghold of Pale, east of Sarajevo, to try to arrange more convoys to the east.

Radovan Karadzic, the leader of Bosnian Serbs, denied that Serbs blocked convoys, except when Muslims tried to smuggle in “terrorist groups,” the Bosnian Serb news agency SRNA said.

Karin Landgren, a Swede taking over U.N. aid operations in Bosnia, said 2,300 tons of food and medical supplies were in warehouses in Sarajevo and at the airport. In addition to the spoilage problem, she said an artillery shell damaged one warehouse Saturday and “alerted us to the danger of letting stuff pile up.”

She reported initial agreement on allowing medical evacuations from the city, where some badly wounded people have lain for months without proper treatment or artificial limbs.