Croats, Muslims Battle in Bosnia, Block Aid Routes

Truckloads of fighters rumbled north from this Croat military stronghold Monday to take on Muslim troops in central Bosnia, where a deadly expansion of the Balkan conflict has taken at least 150 lives in the past few days.

Fierce artillery battles between the formerly allied Muslims and Croats have exploded along a new fault line defined by a Western-mediated peace plan that U.N. officials are nonetheless trying to salvage by forcing Bosnia-Herzegovina’s rebel Serbs to sign.

Fighting and “ethnic cleansing,” by which all sides are uprooting thousands of civilians, have flared in the area over the past three days as international attention has been focused to the east, on the plight of Muslims in the vanquished town of Srebrenica.

Mortar barrages and machine-gun fire have raked vital aid routes, prompting the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to suspend all humanitarian relief convoys until further notice.

Lifesaving supplies to more than one million of Bosnia’s displaced and hungry, including the weary and wounded refugees being ferried out from Srebrenica, have thus been cut off.

“We have some 150 people killed in the Saturday-Sunday period and reports clearly show evidence of ethnic cleansing in one form or another on both sides,” said Shannon Boyd, spokeswoman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission headquartered in Zagreb, Croatia. “It is very, very tense everywhere.”

British peacekeeping forces in this Croatian garrison town said they feared that the death toll was much higher. Muslim-Croat fighting along the vital road linking Travnik, Vitez, Busovaca and Kiseljak has been so intense that even the heavily armored British of the Cheshire Regiment have been confined to their base near Vitez, a British officer said.

“We’ve not seen this kind of across-the-board flare-up during past phases of Muslim-Croat fighting, which leads us to believe this is a final push by both sides to take areas they feel the so-called peace plan deprives them of,” the officer said. “It’s quite out of control.”

The officer was referring to the proposal crafted by U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance and Lord Owen of the European Community to carve Bosnia into 10 ethnic provinces for distribution among the Serbian, Croatian and Muslim leaders all vying for power.

The leader of Bosnia’s Croatian community, Mate Boban, agreed to the partitioning when it was first proposed because it grants his increasingly nationalist forces control of nearly one-third of Bosnia, although Croats account for only 17% of the population.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic grudgingly accepted the peace plan under pressure from Vance and Owen, but the Serbs have steadfastly rejected it on the grounds that they would have to give back nearly half of the 70% of Bosnia they have seized.

In an effort to force Serb compliance, the U.N. Security Council voted over the weekend to impose harsher economic sanctions on the Bosnian Serbs’ patrons in Serbia and Montenegro--the two states forming the rump Yugoslavia.

U.N. officers and aid officials contend that the flaws of the Vance-Owen plan extend far beyond the Serbs’ refusal to accept it. They see the map drawn by the mediators as the catalyst for the new clashes in central Bosnia, as Croats fight for control of areas currently under Muslim leadership but designated as Croatian by the peace plan.

According to the Vance-Owen map, Tomislavgrad would be the political seat of a vast province enclosing all of the current areas of conflict in central Bosnia.

Croatian attacks on Muslim properties, like Sunday’s bombing of the ancient mosque in Vitez, have spurred vicious retaliation in what U.N. officials in the region now fear is an unstoppable cycle of aggression.

Croatian Radio claimed that six soldiers of the Bosnian Croat army, the HVO, had been “assassinated” in Kiseljak. The incident, believed to be in retaliation for the killing of Muslim troops in Vitez, has not been confirmed by U.N. forces in the area, but it sparked widespread mobilization by both sides in apparent preparation for a wider clash.

“Both the BiH (Bosnian government forces) and HVO are going house to house conscripting men. . . . The choice is a gun in the hand or a bullet in the head,” one U.N. field team reported to headquarters.

U.N. military observers confirmed heavy outgoing mortar fire from Kiseljak and Zenica, two predominantly Muslim towns that have been the scenes of the latest clashes. They also reported sighting Muslim mercenaries and heavy weaponry supplied by Iran infiltrating the volatile mountainous region north of the staunchly Muslim city of Jablanica, also designated by Vance and Owen to fall within a Croatian province.

“We can only speculate on what is going to happen in this region, but all indications are that this is only the beginning,” said the British officer.

HVO commanders here refused to discuss the latest outbreaks of violence, but camouflage-clad fighters were gathered by the hundreds at the town’s military transport center to board buses and open trucks ferrying reinforcements to the lengthening front line.

Delivery vans converted into mobile gun mounts and painted with the red checkerboard shield of the Croatian forces could also be seen careening toward the volatile heart of embattled Bosnia.

Aid agency officials in the Croatian port of Split complained that the unchecked fighting is hampering their efforts to get food and medicine to those trapped beyond the newest battleground. All humanitarian relief goods destined for the Tuzla region, flooded with 200,000 refugees, must pass through the slender government-held central region to avoid crossing dangerous front lines into Serb-held territory.

“We’ve had to suspend all convoys until further notice on security grounds,” said the U.N. refugee agency’s Robyn Ziebert. “But we are going to have to reassess moment by moment because the supply situation is desperate.”