Bosnian Serbs Renege on Hostage Deal, Seize 2 More Peacekeepers

When the U.N. Protection Force bowed to Bosnian Serb demands for a substitute hostage as the price for freeing a gravely ill Jordanian peacekeeper, mission officials sacrificed principle for what they described Tuesday as overriding humanitarian aims.

But as has increasingly been the case when the U.N. forces here have tried to appease gunmen who bargain with human lives, humiliating capitulation backfired, bringing more humiliation.

Bosnian Serbs grabbed a Spanish captain delivered to Banja Luka on Monday as a substitute hostage for the sick officer, as well as a Czech major assigned to handle the hostage trade. The bedridden Jordanian army major with a congenital heart disease would not be released, the U.N. hierarchy here was informed, unless senior U.N. officers negotiated directly with the Banja Luka Serbs.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” U.N. spokesman Paul Risley said of the botched exchange, which left five U.N. officers imprisoned at the airfield in Banja Luka, instead of the original three.

Resolute protests from the U.N. force commander were fired off through fax machines to Bosnian Serb headquarters in the Sarajevo mountain suburb of Pale, condemning in “the strongest possible terms this blatant, inhumane act of imprisoning and denying medical attention to an unarmed military observer,” said the mission’s chief of communications, Michael Williams.

Bosnian Serb Gen. Milan Gvero, chief of staff in the rebel army, responded that there was nothing headquarters could do.

The Jordanian took a turn for the worse late Tuesday, U.N. spokesman Alex Ivanko reported, expressing fears that the officer would not long survive captivity in which he was being denied food and needed assistance to walk.

The latest act of Serbian defiance underscored the thorough collapse of U.N. authority in the Balkan conflict and added momentum to the groundswell of pressures for an end to the disastrous peacekeeping mission in which hundreds of other U.N. troops are in Serbian captivity, thousands are blocked and cut off from supplies, aid deliveries have been routinely thwarted and the only course more dangerous than staying in Bosnia-Herzegovina might be that of trying to get out.

U.N. officials concede privately that their position has become untenable in Bosnia, where 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers are prevented from carrying out any of the humanitarian and security work for which they were deployed.

More than 1,200 Bangladeshi soldiers are trapped in the embattled Bihac pocket in northwest Bosnia. They are confined to quarters with no heat, suffering shortages of food and winter coats, sharing scarce sleeping bags and having to defend themselves with only one gun for every four soldiers.

Twenty Canadian soldiers who had been guarding weapons collection sites have been jailed by their Serbian captors in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilijas, where they have been denied regular food and communication with their commanders.

On Monday, in the purportedly U.N.-protected “safe area” of Gorazde, Bosnian Serb gunmen subjected a U.N. patrol to a three-hour artillery barrage inside an area that had been proclaimed a weapons-exclusion zone.

Serbian commanders also denied permission for all 32 supply convoys requested Tuesday for U.N. troops scattered throughout Bosnia, although the first delivery of relief goods to starving Muslims in the besieged Srebrenica safe area was allowed through a day earlier.

Arrival of the desperately needed food cache set off fierce fighting among the 40,000 residents and refugees of Srebrenica, said Peter Kessler, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The recent outbreak of provocations against the lightly armed peacekeeping force has whipped up a frenzied debate in countries that contribute troops over whether the stymied and vulnerable U.N. forces, known as UNPROFOR, should be withdrawn.

“UNPROFOR is at the end of its tether,” French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told European ministers at a security conference in Budapest, Hungary, warning that France is likely to withdraw its troops unless there is significant progress toward a negotiated solution to the conflict within the next few weeks.

Juppe also cautioned the newly hawkish U.S. Congress against resuming talk of breaching a U.N. arms embargo that has been hampering the defenses of the Muslim-led Bosnian government. He said France is positioning itself to withdraw in that event.

British officials likewise appeared to be laying the groundwork for a pullout.

“One has to look at the overall picture and recognize there are major problems of delivering aid,” British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind said after discussions here with top officials at U.N. headquarters. “If that continues, it would render UNPROFOR’s task impossible.”

Rifkind declined to say whether he would recommend a British retreat, noting that he needed to discuss the situation with government leaders in London.

Bosnian Serb attacks on the Bihac enclave continued Tuesday, according to U.N. spokesmen.