Serb Rebels Threaten to Block Aid to Muslims Until Embargo Is Ended

Cut off by his former patrons in Serbia, the desperate leader of Bosnian Serb rebels has threatened to retaliate by blocking vital aid to Muslim enclaves.

“Even a bird will not be able to fly across (areas held by the Muslim-led government) until the world forces Yugoslavia to lift its economic sanctions against us,” warlord Radovan Karadzic told an assembly of Bosnian Serbs.

Serbia, hoping to end crippling international sanctions punishing it for inciting the war in Bosnia, froze all but humanitarian aid to Bosnian Serbs a month ago, severing the lifeline that had sustained the rebels’ 29-month-old war.

“No one in the world expected Yugoslavia to introduce . . . sanctions against us,” Karadzic told the assembly in Pale on Thursday. He said this gave Bosnian Serbs the same right to impose sanctions against others.

U.N. aid officials predict a humanitarian disaster if Karadzic carries out his threat to cut off food, water, gas and electricity to the republic’s Muslims and Croats.

It was the Bosnian Serbs’ rejection of an international peace plan that touched off Serbia’s embargo. Serbia hopes to end the U.N. sanctions against Yugoslavia by backing the Bosnian Serbs into a corner and forcing them to accept the plan.

Bosnian Serbs have rebuffed the plan because it would require them to relinquish about a third of the 70% of Bosnia they seized during the war, with the remainder going to a Muslim-Croat federation, which has accepted the proposal.