A Year After Bosnia’s War Began, a Peace Parley Fizzles

In a tragically fitting conclusion to a year that savaged Bosnia’s land and soul, rival military commanders broke promises to meet Tuesday and consider an end to the war that has uprooted half the population and left as many as 200,000 dead.

The Muslim-led government boycotted U.N.-mediated peace talks in protest of a rebel Serbian offensive against the stricken city of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina.

There local authorities again blocked a U.N. effort to evacuate women and children, the elderly, the ill and the injured, in hopes that the human hostages would deter a final assault.

The Bosnian Serb commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, also failed to descend from his mountaintop headquarters into the capital his nationalist forces have pounded into rubble. His non-appearance bolstered U.N. fears that the Serbs had agreed to attend only to buy time to wipe out the last Muslim enclaves in the almost vanquished east.

On the first anniversary of the start of the deadly siege of Sarajevo, slim hopes of a breakthrough to peace were shattered by the warlords’ intransigence, and the evolving failure of a 10-day truce was underscored by the persistent crackle of sniper fire.

Although the Serbian rebellion against Bosnian independence began weeks earlier in scattered rural locales, much of the world regards April 6, 1992, as the opening offensive in what has become the most vicious and deadly conflict to befall Europe since World War II.

It was a year ago that Bosnian Serbs, armed and encouraged by the Serbian regime in Belgrade, fired on demonstrators marching in support of ethnic tolerance and moved their tanks and artillery to the hills overlooking this once-serene and integrated city.

The yearlong siege has created a ghastly vista of urban ruin: Charred hulks of apartment buildings flank Sarajevo’s eerie streets. Windowless trams and crushed cars stand frozen where mortars struck them. Curtains--the only reminders of habitation--billow out of empty high-rise offices.

Few venture out on foot into the now infamous “sniper alley” that is the sole thoroughfare connecting the 10-mile-long chain of neighborhoods that make up Sarajevo, a narrow reed of an ancient city that seldom strays more than a few blocks from the Miljacka River.

The armed Serbian uprising that has wrecked this city and plunged most of the republic into bitter communal war has driven more than 2 million Bosnian civilians from their homes--nearly half the prewar population of 4.4 million--and left 200,000 dead or missing, according to government figures released this week.

Almost every Bosnian family has been touched by the death and destruction, yet the embittered commanders of the warring factions all refuse to stop fighting.

The Serbian gunmen bent on taking territory for Belgrade’s centuries-old dream of a Greater Serbia have already conquered 70% of the republic and expelled non-Serbs, but they covet holdout enclaves like Srebrenica that stand in the way of an ethnically pure state.

Muslim Slavs and those Serbs and Croats still loyal to the Sarajevo government’s aim of preserving an ethnically integrated republic have been forced into three predominantly Muslim pockets cut off from one another and covering less than 10% of Bosnia’s land.

Muslims accounted for 44% of the population, and tens of thousands--if not hundreds of thousands--of Bosnians from other ethnic communities continue to stand by their side in the battle against segregation.

But after months of unmitigated suffering, fear and resentment have taken root, prompting Bosnian Croats and government forces to match the Serbian nationalist extremism with their own desperate acts.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees had planned to begin evacuating thousands of civilians from Srebrenica on Tuesday, but local Muslim commanders defied orders from Sarajevo to let the terrified women, children and elderly flee. Srebrenica is encircled by heavily armed Serbs, and its defenders fear that a massive departure will effectively cede the town to its attackers.

To protest intensified shelling of Srebrenica, the commander of Bosnian government forces, Gen. Sefer Halilovic, refused to take part in the Sarajevo peace conference on neutral, U.N.-controlled territory near the airport. Instead, the government sent a letter claiming that the assault on Srebrenica made talk with the enemy “immoral.”

The commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia, French Gen. Philippe Morillon, brushed off the failure of the peace conference that was his answer to the plight of Srebrenica, claiming, “this meeting today is a very important one, even if one side is not represented.”

But war-weary Bosnians and relief officials lamented the lost chance to shore up an all-but-dead truce declared 10 days ago and violated more times than U.N. monitors can count.

“This meeting today was crucial to us,” said the U.N. refugee agency’s exasperated special envoy, Jose Maria Mendiluce.

Without a reliable cease-fire and the Serbs’ agreement on a peace plan drafted by mediators Cyrus R. Vance and Lord Owen, the U.N. refugee agency and the massive U.N. peacekeeping force are unlikely to forestall the expected conquest of Srebrenica for long, or the death or expulsion of the nearly 60,000 Muslims taking refuge there.

“These bloody politics continue while we slowly die,” said a young Sarajevo woman named Tanja, seeking a way out of her besieged city to have surgery to remove a piece of shrapnel embedded in her right lung. “If this war is ever over, I don’t think anyone will trust any of these politicians again.”