U.N. Deplores Bosnia Politics, Suspends Aid

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees called off a massive relief mission for Bosnia on Wednesday, charging that all factions in the brutal conflict here have “made a mockery” of the humanitarian effort by using aid as a weapon.

Life-saving deliveries to Sarajevo, the capital, and to the vast areas under rebel Serb control have been indefinitely suspended, and relief workers will be withdrawn because their lives are increasingly at risk, High Commissioner Sadako Ogata announced through her office in Geneva.

The action indefinitely cuts the West’s costly, irregular lifeline to more than 1.6 million Bosnian civilians who depend for their very survival on the U.N. agency’s food, medicine, blankets and other necessities to tide them through deprivation inflicted by the raging Balkan war.

“While our efforts have been directed at the victims of this brutal conflict, all parties have been mixing politics with humanitarian relief,” Ogata complained. “The political leaders on all sides have made a mockery of our efforts, and I deeply regret that their behavior has obliged me to take this decision.”

The announcement was made as Serbian gunmen refused for the fourth day running to allow a food convoy to pass their barricades into desperately hungry Muslim communities in eastern Bosnia, and while the Sarajevo leadership refused to deliver relief goods to the capital in protest.

Bosnian Croats also have been hampering humanitarian convoys destined for central Bosnia, joining Serbian foes in a deadly effort to starve the predominantly Muslim defenders of an integrated Bosnian state into submission to their quest for ethnic partitioning.

At least 20,000--mostly Muslim civilians--have already been killed in the 11-month Serbian siege of the republic; Sarajevo officials insist the true death toll is 10 times that figure when those missing and presumed dead are included.

Ogata’s order for a nearly complete pullout from this ravaged country followed a two-day inspection tour of Serb-held areas by Jose Maria Mendiluce, the agency’s special envoy to the former Yugoslav federation, who won no credible assurances from the rogue government here that it would assist or even allow efforts to restore the prewar order.

Mendiluce was invited here by the rulers of this lawless Serbian stronghold, who made an appeal on humanitarian grounds for stepped-up assistance from the U.N. agency in rebuilding hundreds of thousands of houses and apartments destroyed by their rebellion and in feeding those still left in the ravaged war zone.

Banja Luka and the once-multiethnic territory of northwestern Bosnia have been exposed to one of the most savage and thorough exercises of “ethnic cleansing,” the forced displacement of non-Serbs to create “ethnically pure” enclaves for future annexation to the republic of Serbia.

The Serbian gunmen ruling this region refuse to allow it to be referred to as Bosnia, insisting instead that they are now leaders of the proclaimed independent “Serbian Republic.”

The U.N. agency pulled its foreign relief workers out of Banja Luka in December to protest attempts on their lives by opponents of any U.N. presence that might interfere with further ethnic cleansing. Local authorities succeeded in thwarting the planned deployment of 1,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops assigned to escort aid through this region to all needy communities.

Predrag Radic, Banja Luka’s self-styled mayor, told Mendiluce in talks here that local Serbian forces would be willing to provide security for relief operations on condition that the U.N. agency provide the rebel army with gasoline.

The United Nations in May imposed wide-ranging economic sanctions on Serbia in an attempt to dissuade the nationalist regime in Belgrade from continuing to arm and supply rebel forces laying waste to Bosnia. The local rebels’ gas shortage is one of the few indications the sanctions are biting.

While Mendiluce conceded that his agency’s mandate calls for provision of help to all those in need, irrespective of ethnic origin or behavior of political leaders, he warned the Serbian occupational authorities just before Ogata’s announcement that they were flirting with a withdrawal of foreign assistance if their forces persisted in disrupting aid to captive communities.

“We cannot operate in one area and not the other,” he said of his agency’s battle to feed Bosnian civilians.

“This has been a continuous exercise of arm wrestling, and after 15 months our arms are tired,” Mendiluce told reporters accompanying him. “This is a very, very sad war in which the logic of hate and paranoia has contaminated everyone.”

More than 3.2 million people in the shattered successor states to Yugoslavia depend on the U.N. agency for food. Half are in areas of Bosnia disrupted by fighting or ethnic cleansing, while others are refugees from the conflict being assisted in the five other republics of the former Yugoslav federation.

Food alone for the Balkan war victims costs $1.5 million per day, atop the $600 million budgeted this year for the U.N. agency’s staff and operations here, Mendiluce said, adding, “If you make the calculation, you can see (the concern) about how long the international community can provide this enormous volume of assistance that despite being enormous is still not enough.”

He warned that he sees no hope of any negotiated settlement of the armed conflict if the political leaders cannot even agree to allow an impartial aid mission to relieve the suffering of civilians.

“There are limits to what we can do. We have been feeding a town for 10 months now while waiting for a political settlement,” he said of the oft-disrupted relief effort to Sarajevo, where 380,000 have held out against the Serbian siege aimed at driving them from their homes.

Fierce artillery attacks on western suburbs of Sarajevo intensified Wednesday as the Serbs tried to gain control of more of the capital. Escalating violence was also reported along the full length of the meandering, 1,000-mile Bosnian front line.

The U.N. aid agency was joined in its attack on the Balkan combatants’ lack of respect for human rights by the other leading aid agency active in the region, the International Committee of the Red Cross.