Serbs Grab Back Heavy Weapons Near Sarajevo

After pummeling the helpless town of Gorazde while a paralyzed world looked on, Bosnian Serb renegades grabbed back 18 heavy weapons from U.N. peacekeepers Tuesday in an ominous sign that the deadly bombardment of Sarajevo could resume at the rebels’ whim.

The devastation in Gorazde carried on unhindered. The last few foreign relief workers trapped in the vanquished city reported scenes of suffering and destruction in the U.N. safe area abandoned to a brutal fate.

Four fieldworkers for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, huddled in a basement shelter with the last four U.N. soldiers in Gorazde, ventured above ground during a lull in the shelling and reported “a scene of desolation, debris everywhere and gaping holes in apartment buildings.”

More than 200 shells tore through the refugee-thronged city center in late morning, the aid agency workers told colleagues here, noting that they saw about a dozen bodies strewn on the pavement outside one shelter that took a direct hit.

In Washington on Tuesday, the Clinton Administration said it will seek European and Russian support for new military and diplomatic pressure against Bosnian Serb forces, including wider air strikes against military targets and stiffer economic sanctions against their allies in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital. But it remained unclear whether new threats and economic measures would induce the Serbs to forfeit territory won by force and return to the bargaining table.

And in Russia, President Boris N. Yeltsin issued a sharply worded statement warning the Bosnian Serbs to keep their promises to Russia and halt the assault on Gorazde.

Russia--which has resisted stronger Western action in Bosnia-Herzegovina--has been a key Serbian ally and had won what appeared to be a major foreign policy coup for itself by temporarily achieving some advances in the Balkan peace process. The latest Bosnian Serb outburst has become a major embarrassment for Moscow.

In Gorazde, the rebel attack persisted Tuesday despite another promise by Bosnian Serb leaders in nearby Pale to hold fire and allow deployment of a small peacekeeping force into the ravaged enclave.

As artillery shells rained down on the defeated Muslim enclave at the rate of more than one per minute, the roof was blown off the city’s hospital; that facility is packed with the wounded from 20 days of siege.

Serbian nationalists who have vanquished Gorazde by cinching an artillery noose and forcing tens of thousands of inhabitants into the center relentlessly fired on the penned-in civilians in an assault U.N. officers here condemned as serving no imaginable military purpose.

“Sniper fire has increased and is contributing to the general air of panic,” said U.N. Protection Force spokesman Maj. Rob Annink.

Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, had assured the U.N. civilian affairs chief a day earlier that his forces would abide by an agreement that was already vastly scaled back from previous U.N. proposals for helping Gorazde.

It would have allowed Bosnian Serb-escorted aid convoys and the deployment of about 260 U.N. troops after a cease-fire that never materialized, Annink said.

“It was just a scrap of paper and its worth was only that of the people who agreed to it,” he said of the latest unfulfilled promise. “The other side does not keep to its word.”

Evacuations to relieve the crowded, starving enclave cannot be carried out until the Bosnian Serbs stop attacking the people whom relief agencies want to remove for their own safety.

The rebels, whose campaign for a Greater Serbia has lately careened out of any outside power’s control, still hold more than 100 U.N. troops hostage and have been moving them around among secret locations in an apparent plot to use the peacekeepers as human shields against further air strikes.

Some of the captives are believed to be held at the rebel barracks at nearby Lukavica, where about 50 armed Serbs stormed a U.N. weapons collection site Tuesday and intimidated French troops into relinquishing stored weapons, according to Lt. Col. Richard Pernod.

About 30 French troops were on duty when the rebels showed up in force to demand the return of their weapons, said Cmdr. Eric Chaperon.

U.N. officials said three days earlier, after Serbs moved a tank to another weapons collection site to demand its arsenal, that the peacekeepers were under orders to use force to prevent Serbs from seizing the weapons.

“They were simply overrun,” Chaperon told journalists. “If they had fired, it would have been a massacre.”

By grabbing the antiaircraft guns that were warehoused in February under the NATO ultimatum, the Serbs have sent a warning that a renewed drive to defeat Sarajevo could begin at any time.

They have also defiantly flouted the standing North Atlantic Treaty Organization order for punitive air strikes against any heavy weaponry within a 12-mile radius of Sarajevo.

The seizures represented another escalation of the campaign of harassment and humiliation of U.N. forces conducted by rebels who have been dangerously emboldened by the peacekeeping mission’s reluctance to stop the savagery inflicted on Gorazde. The Serbian nationalists appear to be gambling that NATO also lacks the stomach to take them on.

There were reports late Tuesday that the Bosnian Serbs may have relented some in their seizures of guns and detentions of U.N. personnel.

Reuters news service quoted Chaperon as saying that the Bosnian Serbs had returned many of the guns and pledged to free many of the detained U.N. teams. There were few details, and the report could not be independently confirmed.

Last week, Bosnian Serbs retaliated for token NATO air strikes by kidnaping U.N. troops, mining and blockading U.N. patrol posts and refusing to talk to officials of the peacekeeping force.

Since the civilian chief of the mission, U.N. special representative Yasushi Akashi, refused to authorize air strikes after British soldiers were deliberately targeted by the Serbs and one was killed, the rebels have stepped up their harassment and intensified attacks on Gorazde and in other battle zones along Bosnia’s nearly 700 miles of active front lines.