Battles Rock Sarajevo as Conflict Widens

Widening its military offensive, the Bosnian government Friday appeared to be making gains as it battled separatist Serbs up and down the hills that ring Sarajevo in a risky bid to open a lifeline to this dying city.

The Serbs responded by unleashing a barrage of mortars and bombs on apartment buildings and hospitals in the Bosnian capital. At least nine people were killed in 24 hours, including two patients blown up as they lay in their hospital beds. Dozens were wounded.

It was the heaviest and most widespread fighting in and around Sarajevo since relentless Serbian shelling in 1993 left the city in ruins. It marks a new and potentially decisive phase in Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II, with attempts to reach a peaceful solution all but abandoned.

Food and medicine continued to run out here and in Bosnia’s five other Muslim enclaves after Serbs blocked aid convoys and shut off electricity and water to Sarajevo.

U.N. peacekeepers, whose mandate is to provide humanitarian aid, have not been able to break the Serbian blockade.

Saying it could no longer wait for the world to save Sarajevo after a 38-month siege, the Bosnian government Thursday attacked Serbian positions north and west of the capital in a push toward the city. On Friday, government troops began pushing from inside Sarajevo.

The United Nations said the Bosnian government has apparently cut off two crucial roads used by the Serbs as supply routes--one that runs north to central Bosnia and another that leads south from the Bosnian Serb army garrison Lukavica to their stronghold of Pale.

“The Bosnian government, I think, is the owner of new ground tonight,” U.N. military spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Coward said.

The escalating Bosnian crisis effectively hijacked this week’s summit of the world’s most powerful industrial nations, the Group of Seven, that was supposed to focus on financial reforms during its three-day run in Halifax, Canada.

President Clinton in Nova Scotia vowed to do his “dead-level best” to win congressional funding for a rapid-reaction force to strengthen the beleaguered U.N. Protection Force and insisted that reinforcement would be aimed at breaking the stranglehold that Serb nationalist rebels have had on Sarajevo.

The U.N. Security Council early Friday approved the European-led rapid-reaction force in a vote long delayed by demands from U.S. Republicans that the United States not help pay for it.

A heavily armed force of 12,500 troops, mostly British and French, Clinton said, “would permit the U.N. to fulfill its mandates, including the opening of Sarajevo, and I believe that has the best chance of opening Sarajevo without other adverse consequences to the Bosnians.”

The G-7 nations--the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and host Canada--are those most deeply involved in the troubled U.N. Protection Force in the Balkans and those for whom the consequences of the conflict have been most disruptive.

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Clinton’s comments during a break in Friday’s deliberations confirmed that the Bosnian crisis, which the President termed “the most complex problem in foreign policy today,” had commanded much of the attention of the influential leaders meeting in Halifax.

Clinton said he disagreed with Republican leaders of the U.S. Congress who want the United States to unilaterally lift a U.N. arms embargo hampering the Bosnian government defenses--a move European allies staunchly oppose. The President asserted that the U.N. presence had sharply reduced civilian casualties and kept the starved and encircled population alive throughout protracted--and so far fruitless--diplomatic interventions.

“The arms embargo would be an instrument of genocide if the U.N. mission weren’t keeping more people alive,” Clinton said, responding to an accusation by Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic that preventing weapons from reaching the Muslim-led government forces makes them easy prey for the heavily armed Serbian nationalists.

Clinton and other G-7 leaders, apparently having conferred on the arguments against lifting the embargo, noted that the 130,000 civilian death toll of 1992 in Bosnia had dropped to about 3,000 last year, largely due to the protective presence of the U.N. peacekeepers.

The President’s impassioned support for the rapid-reaction force was the strongest indication from the White House so far that it would help rescue the U.N. mission, which has been paralyzed for months by Serb nationalist rebels. The gunmen, who have besieged much of multiethnic Bosnia in pursuit of a “pure” Serbian state, have taken peacekeepers hostage as shields against North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes and blocked humanitarian aid deliveries to the 2.8 million Bosnians now dependent on the outside world to feed them.

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In Friday’s fighting, the Serbs fired mortars and rockets at civilians. Their shelling devastated a city block next to the Bosnian president’s headquarters in the center of Sarajevo. Serbs used a 300-kilogram rocket-propelled aircraft bomb to do the damage, Coward said.

A total of 13 shells fell on Sarajevo’s principal hospital, the hillside Kosevo medical complex, staff members said. Two patients were killed, and seven patients and nurses were wounded.

One man was decapitated by the blast. His headless corpse, barefoot and in striped pajamas, lay in a bed along what used to be the window of his third-floor hospital room as police inspected the blood-soaked site. Another 29-year-old man bled to death after his leg was blown off. Huge holes were gashed into the walls of the ward.

“There is such great hatred to kill civilians--patients,” said Dr. Dzovad Cengic.

“We are very frightened--when we are operating on a patient, bleeding, we have to worry as well about our own lives,” said Dr. Sacira Lacevic. “Probably [the offensive will exact] a high price. We aren’t sure who will survive and who won’t.”

Civilian casualties might have been higher were it not that many Sarajevans were hiding in underground shelters and basements. Military casualties were not being revealed but were expected to be high. Reporters saw numerous camouflaged ambulances and small vans arriving at hospitals.

Five French U.N. soldiers were among the wounded.

The army launched artillery and infantry attacks before dawn. Fighting continued through most of the day, eventually spreading along a 60-mile confrontation line around Sarajevo.

Coward said the offensive seemed designed to relieve pressure on Sarajevo by driving Serbian troops back, eliminating their sniper positions and giving army troops better vantage points around the city. This would lead to opening supply lines into the once-cosmopolitan city of 300,000.

“Whether the Bosnian army actually believes it can break the siege completely is another matter, and I think we’ll all have to watch and wait,” Coward said.

Thus far, the large and highly mobile army seemed to be playing to its strengths by hitting the overextended Serbs on numerous fronts. But the government army is essentially an infantry force, and siege-busting would require the heavy weaponry that the government army does not have but that the Serbs inherited from the old Yugoslav national army.

“Nothing is impossible,” a senior U.N. official said. “Could they do it? If they invested everything and didn’t worry about the costs [in lives], then perhaps they could. But they’d need a bit of luck.”

Although morale is said to be sagging among the Serbs, the battle for Sarajevo--arguably the most important prize of the war--is one that they would not be prepared to lose.

The United Nations, which has seen its peacekeeping mission here crippled, humiliated and marginalized, urged the warring parties to “show restraint” and “spare the civilian population.”

Instead, the Serbs used U.N. light tanks they commandeered a couple of weeks ago to fire on government positions, and the government army threatened to shoot Ukrainian peacekeepers if they didn’t turn over 40 heavy weapons under U.N. guard.

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The peacekeepers complied, and the government army made off with howitzers, mortars and a couple of tanks, Coward said.

The current escalation in the Bosnian war was triggered in part by a worsening humanitarian crisis in Sarajevo and other Muslim enclaves. The Serbs, who have always harassed U.N. aid convoys, have blocked them altogether since NATO air strikes destroyed Serbian munitions dumps in late May.

Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Halifax, Canada, contributed to this report.