Sarajevo Bus Line to Resume With Patrols

A new bus line between Sarajevo and the Serbian suburb of Ilidza, shut down for a day when sniper fire wounded two passengers, will probably resume today after French military police agreed to increase patrols along the four-mile route, a U.N. humanitarian relief official said Thursday.

City authorities and U.N. officials, who on Wednesday helped revive the service abandoned at the onset of the war, want to prevent “those against a unified Sarajevo” from sabotaging one of the few links between the predominantly Muslim city and outlying Serbian areas, the official said.

The announcement came hours before another bus was hit by sniper fire at the same location in Ilidza on Thursday night.

One woman was slightly wounded in that attack, which apparently involved a private bus traveling to Sarajevo. The source of the two attacks has not been determined, though NATO officials believe that they originated from Bosnian Serb positions.

“It is immensely important for the city to have this bus service,” said Kris Janowski, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which has provided fuel and spare parts for the municipal buses. “We want to see as much contact between people as possible.”

The inclination to swiftly reinstate the bus line, the first public transit service in Bosnia-Herzegovina connecting former enemy territory, reflects a growing determination among Sarajevo city officials to push forward with provisions in the Bosnian peace accord that ensure travel between all areas of the city.

At the same time, NATO’s cautious response to the sniping, which occurred in the so-called zone of separation that its peacekeepers control, has shed light on the military alliance’s aversion to involvement in life-and-death issues in the still-dangerous Bosnian capital.

NATO officials have not only refused to provide military protection for the buses--the French military police denied late Thursday night that they had even agreed to the additional patrols--but NATO has classified the Wednesday sniper incident as a criminal case that falls outside its military mandate.

Although NATO is investigating the shooting, officials did not react with alarm to the apparent violation of the demilitarized zone, saying the restrictions on military activities apply to tanks and heavy weapons, not to isolated machine-gun fire.

“It is a police matter,” said Lt. Col. Mark Rayner, a spokesman for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led Implementation Force, or IFOR. “You can’t expect troops and police to go on every street corner and to be able to prevent a sniping every time it occurs, I am afraid. I don’t think you will ever achieve that in many places in the world.”

IFOR spokesman Maj. Tom Moyer said that a NATO vehicle was only 400 yards from the bus that was hit by sniper fire Wednesday, but that NATO soldiers were prevented from approaching the bus by Bosnian Serb police.

The soldiers--who were Americans--did not resist the police, deferring to the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, he said.

“It was a tense situation,” Moyer said. “The IFOR vehicle was not the only vehicle stopped. Every vehicle that came near the bus was stopped.”

Critics complain privately that IFOR peacekeepers are slipping into the same trap as their U.N. predecessors: defining their mission so tightly that they ultimately render themselves irrelevant.

“They don’t want to deal with anything that could get them into trouble,” said an official from an international organization in Sarajevo. “They have narrowed down their responsibility to virtually nothing so they can’t be accused of not doing their job.”

Moyer denied the charge, saying IFOR’s mission is to create a secure environment in Bosnia so that local authorities--including the Bosnian Serb police in Ilidza--can do their jobs.

“We have been barking up the tree that police need to be more involved, and then they finally do it, and we get beat up for it,” Moyer said. “I feel like I am in a Catch-22. The police finally do something, and everyone asks how come IFOR was not involved. The police had the situation under control.”

Police authority and other security issues featured in the Dayton, Ohio, peace accord are likely to be discussed at an urgent meeting--scheduled to begin Saturday in Rome--of the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia as well as representatives from several other European countries and the United States.