Croatia May Widen Bosnia War

Defense Minister Gojko Susak vowed Thursday that Croatia will send troops to seize back Serbian-occupied territory if the government calculates that the teetering Bihac pocket in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina is about to fall.

His warning was the most ominous indication since a Serbian assault on Bihac intensified three weeks ago that the international community’s failure to protect the purported U.N. “safe area” could be the catalyst for a wider Balkan war.

Croatian territory that has been under Serbian nationalist occupation for the last three years has been used by the rebel forces as a staging ground for attacks on neighboring Bihac, as well as for provocations against troops of the U.N. Protection Force.

Susak’s warning of an imminent rekindling of the unfinished war with Serbian rebels in the Krajina region came as U.N. officials reported that heavy machine-gun and small-arms battles have erupted along hundreds of miles of long-dormant front line in Croatia. Fighting around Bihac continued to rage.

The Bihac offensive waged by Bosnian Serbs with collaborating Krajina rebels has spurred fears that the nearly one-third of Croatia seized by Serbs in a 1991 rebellion will be lost forever with the fall of Bihac.

“Croatia will not wait for Bihac to fall,” Susak told reporters at a news conference. “We are well informed about the situation there, and if Croatia estimates that Bihac will fall, Croatia will intervene before that.”

“We are not far from the time when Croatia not only will be able to but will take action,” added Croatian army Chief of Staff Gen. Janko Bobetko, who noted that the U.N. mission has failed to provide the protection promised Bihac by a U.N. Security Council designation of the enclave as a safe zone.

Serbian nationalists from both Bosnia and the Krajina region have continued to bombard Bihac with heavy artillery, and hand-to-hand combat has reached within half a mile of the enclave’s sole hospital, U.N. spokesman Alex Ivanko said.

Bosnian Serb rebels also stepped up the intensity of an apparent campaign to drive U.N. troops out of the region with an unprecedented cross-border kidnaping incident.

Gunmen loyal to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic infiltrated a U.N.-patrolled area of Krajina adjacent to the Bihac pocket and forced seven Ukrainian soldiers at gunpoint back into Serb-held Bosnia.

Serbs also fired two wire-guided missiles into the Interior Ministry building in Sarajevo, wounding four people, and denied passage to dozens of U.N.-escorted aid convoys.

And Sarajevo airport remains closed to humanitarian relief flights by the surrounding Serbian forces, which recently positioned surface-to-air missile systems near the runway.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned during a failed peace mission to Sarajevo on Wednesday, when Karadzic refused even to talk to him, that the U.N. mission might have to be withdrawn unless the fighting and harassment stop.

But Karadzic loyalists have lately shown their eagerness for a pullout of the U.N. forces, who were deployed to protect vulnerable civilians from the rebels’ assaults.

Boutros-Ghali attempted to pressure the Muslim-led Bosnian government to capitulate to the Serbian terms for peace, but Sarajevo officials have refused, fearing a surrender will lead to further “ethnic cleansing” and brutality at the hands of the emboldened Serbs.

Despite the peacekeepers’ rapidly deteriorating influence, U.N. mission officials refuse to call in NATO air strikes to rein in the rampaging Serbs for fear the heavily armed rebels will exact revenge against the nearly 500 U.N. hostages they are holding as human shields. Thousands of other troops of the 24,000-strong Bosnian deployment are also within easy reach of the rebels.

The international community’s inaction in Bosnia has heightened fears in Croatia that its own future is in peril if it continues to put faith in U.N. promises to facilitate a peaceful reintegration of the Serb-occupied region.

Gen. Anton Tus, chief military adviser to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, argued that the Bosnian and Croatian Serb forces are clearly working in concert to create a united Western Serbia from their occupied territories. Tus insisted the Serbs should be stopped.

“We cannot let Bihac fall. We must act before this can happen,” Tus said.

“If the Bihac pocket falls, it would have strategic significance for both the political and military options” open to Croatia for recovering the Krajina, Tus said.

He noted that with Bihac’s important rail, highway and river connections, the rebels would gain an iron grip on the land they have conquered in both countries.

“The international community, especially the United States, is wrong in its refusal to prevent the occupation of the Bihac area and aggression launched from the U.N.-protected areas,” Tus said.

Susak and other military officials have said they were prepared to send troops into Krajina two weeks ago when the Croatian Serb rebels were preoccupied with the assault on Bihac, but held back at the urging of U.S. diplomats who feared that would reignite the Serb-Croat war and possibly spread throughout the Balkans.

“Another war in Croatia would have all the incivility of Bosnia but many times more firepower,” one Western diplomat warned.

Tus said he believed that the Croatian leadership was “relying too much” on the advice to take no military action against the Krajina rebels and to put its faith in the U.N. peacekeeping mission that has been deployed here for 32 months.

If the combined Bosnian and Croatian Serb attack force succeeds in overrunning the Bihac region, its 200,000 predominantly Muslim residents would likely be driven en masse into Croatia or central Bosnia. In either case, such a huge influx of refugees would provoke a humanitarian catastrophe for and political crises in Zagreb and Sarajevo.

Tus said the Zagreb leadership needs to seriously re-evaluate the advice it is getting from the West, especially from Washington.

The general said he opposed direct military intervention into the Krajina region, but supported urgent action to “tie down” the Serbian rebels so they cannot wreak havoc around Bihac.

Just such distractions along the 400-mile front line between Krajina Serbs and government forces were reported by the U.N. Protection Force on Thursday.

In one five-hour period Wednesday, a U.N. observation post recorded 33 mortar rounds fired by Croatian troops across the U.N.-patrolled separation zone that runs the length of the front line, Ivanko said. Altogether, 129 “cease-fire violations” were reported that day in what U.N. officials characterize as the most serious escalation of fighting in the Krajina in months.