Aid Convoy Reaches Bosnia City as Serbs Lift Blockade

U.N. relief workers brought food and medicine to the starving and devastated northern Bosnian town of Maglaj on Sunday, after Bosnian Serb gunmen abandoned a barricade from which they had been blocking humanitarian aid deliveries for months.

Cheering Bosnians, some in tears, lined Maglaj’s streets as the convoy rolled in, according to news reports from the city.

“We thought this day would never come. We have suffered so much,” said Sophia, a 55-year-old Muslim woman who could not hold back her tears.

U.N. troops and aid workers confirmed their worst suspicions upon arrival in the ruined enclave where more than 100,000 Muslims had been surrounded and thrashed by artillery fire by both Serbian and Croatian nationalist rebels.

“There are no buildings left in Maglaj,” said Peter Kessler, the U.N. refugee agency’s spokesman in Sarajevo, conveying reports from convoy drivers who described the town’s devastation.

The U.N. witnesses compared the destruction to that of the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar, where a three-month Serbian artillery bombardment in 1991 flattened the suburban community into a moonscape of jagged ruins.

Nine trucks loaded with 80 tons of food and other vital goods reached Maglaj in midafternoon. Three of the trucks traveled on to the nearby village of Tesanj.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization warplanes roared overhead, ready to strike in case of any moves by Serbian forces.

It was the first ground convoy since Oct. 25 to get into the town, whose population has been swollen to five times its original size by Muslims driven out of surrounding villages. It was only the second aid delivery in nine months.

A U.N. relief official who visited the desperate enclave two months ago reported widespread malnutrition and emaciated women and children. Some wore bandages covering wounds suffered while trying to retrieve air-dropped food parcels from surrounding woods that were booby-trapped with mines and raked by snipers.

Doctors arriving with the convoy were to help the sick and wounded, Kessler said, and nine people were evacuated for further treatment.

The Bosnian Serb gunmen loyal to nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic appeared to have fled the barricade south of Maglaj because they had become vulnerable to counterattack now that Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats have reconciled.

Muslims and Croats, who account for two-thirds of Bosnia’s 4.4 million prewar population, had initially fought together against the Serbian insurgency that began in April, 1992. But the erstwhile Bosnian allies took to fighting each other for what scraps of territory were left after Serbs had conquered 70% of Bosnia, and international mediators seemed resigned to an ethnic partitioning of the country.

State-controlled Croatian Radio reported that Serbs had begun pulling back from the Maglaj roadblock late Saturday, after Croatian forces that had earlier allowed them safe passage through Croat-held territory issued an ultimatum for the Serbs to leave.

Croatian nationalists had in some areas, such as Maglaj, suspended their conflict with the Serbs to allow the better-armed faction to pummel Muslim civilians in areas the Croats wanted to take for their own ethnically pure state.

But Croatian political leaders in Bosnia and in neighboring Croatia agreed March 1, under pressure from U.S. diplomats, to reconcile with the Muslims and give up aspirations of carving out a Croatian ministate within Bosnia.

Instead, the Croats have been promised economic assistance from the United States and other Western countries in exchange for their cooperation in efforts to rescue as much of Bosnia as possible for an emerging new federation.

U.S. officials concede privately that Bosnian Serbs are unlikely to join the union, making an ethnic partitioning inevitable. But they and other Western mediators contend that ethnic division and capitulation to the Serbs’ land grab are preferable to more bloodshed.