Blasts Shake Foundation of Bosnian Peace Plan

The first blast jarred 60-year-old Zuria Brodlic from his small bed onto the cold concrete floor. The second blast threw patrolling U.S. Army soldiers to the ground and covered them with glass, bricks and debris.

Within 45 minutes, nine houses belonging to Muslim families around this village in northeastern Bosnia-Herzegovina were blown apart. The Nov. 9 incident was the latest in what Western officials call a systematic, covert campaign to disrupt attempts by refugees to return to their prewar homes.

While more than 200 houses have been destroyed in the past couple of months, frustration over the blocked returns erupted into a new level of violence last week. Several hundred Muslims, some armed, tried to resettle the deserted village of Gajevi on the edge of Serb-held territory; armed Bosnian Serb police officers drove them out, killing one Muslim man and seriously wounding three others. U.S. troops eventually restored order after two days of firefights.

Gajevi was significant because it showed the volatile level to which the refugee dispute is escalating. Omerbegovaca was significant because, benefiting from U.S. protection, it had evolved into a rare example of potential success--until now.

Together, both villages show how unlikely it is that the central tenet of the U.S.-brokered peace agreement--the right of the displaced to return home--will ever be achieved. And both episodes also illustrate the increasing peril faced by U.S. troops nearly a year after they arrived in Bosnia to separate the warring sides.

“The biggest problem we face is how we resolve the resettlement issue,” said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John Abizaid, assistant division commander of American forces here.

“If war starts again in Bosnia, it will be over resettlement.”

Neither Omerbegovaca nor Gajevi seems worth going to war over.

Omerbegovaca, where Brodlic was sleeping in his newly repaired home on the night of the most recent blasts, is a string of jagged ruins along a muddy forked road just south of the strategic, Serb-controlled city of Brcko.

Emptied of its all-Muslim population by the Bosnian Serb army in May 1993, it sat abandoned until, a few months ago under terms of the peace agreement, an experiment in resettlement began. The U.N. refugee agency approved a handful of families like Brodlic’s who could prove they were rightful owners. Muslim contractors were given building materials and began patching together tiled roofs and inserting glass in gaping window frames. Slowly, Muslims returned.

And then the explosions began.

Night after night, homes that were in the process of being repaired by Muslims were targeted in Omerbegovaca and nearby Brod and Disdaruza, all suburbs of Brcko.

Elsewhere in Bosnia, the pattern was similar. Near the hard-line Bosnian Serb city of Prijedor, 94 homes were blown up after a list of Muslims requesting permission to reoccupy them was given to Bosnian Serb police. About 60 Serb-owned homes were torched in a town under Bosnian Croat control.

And in Gajevi, site of last week’s rioting, antitank mines were used to destroy several homes.

The explosions in the Omerbegovaca area nearly claimed American victims. It was just before midnight, and a platoon on patrol had moved to within 20 yards of one of the houses when it blew up. Dazed men were thrown to the ground in a haze of smoke and dust as branches and bricks flew through the air.

“I was sure we had casualties--it was so close,” said 1st Lt. Kelly Eiland, who was at the turret of his Bradley fighting vehicle at the time of the blast. “We had rubble coming down on our heads.”

James Hunter, a young sergeant from Nashville, swiftly loaded nine of his troops into the Bradley, then hopped on top and clung for dear life as it speeded, in reverse, out of “the kill zone.”

One soldier was wounded.

Returning later to Omerbegovaca, a “crisis-reaction team” inspected the site and found one house where the explosives had failed to detonate. That was a major break. Until then, NATO had had few clues to go on in its investigation of the explosions. The Bosnian Serbs were claiming that the Muslims were blowing up their own houses to make the Serbs look bad; the Muslims labeled such a claim preposterous.

What the Americans found were eight 18-ounce blocks of dynamite, meticulously spaced along the load-bearing wall to create maximum damage and wired to a timing device. The dynamite bore lot numbers traced to the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army, Capt. Thomas Boccardi said.

The discovery “changed the course of the investigation,” said Capt. Rob Rooker of the crisis-reaction team. “We realize this is deliberate . . . well planned and well executed. We can now tell this was definitely professional, by people coming in coordinated from much higher. These are not just angry neighbors.”

Meanwhile, the explosions have had a chilling effect on the refugees who were daring to come home.

“There is no safety here,” Brodlic said, wearing rubber boots against the mud and a hat against the chill. “The Americans are trying, but this is a very large area.”

In fact, the Americans are only a short distance away, encamped at an observation post that monitors all road traffic into Omerbegovaca. But no set of monitors can permanently control the vast, overgrown fields that abut the houses.

Brodlic and his friend Osman Krejinovic, 59, continue to repair the fences and walls of their dilapidated, heavily damaged brick and stucco homes. They sleep at night in a cold back room, taking turns keeping watch. They do not consider it secure enough yet to bring back their wives.

“I was living in a garage” during the war, Brodlic said. Krejinovic added: “You come home, it is as if you have wings. You can do, you can put up with anything.”

Gajevi is one of four sites that Muslim officials of the Bosnian government have targeted for resettlement despite advice to the contrary from officials with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The confrontation there last week came perilously close to all-out warfare, say U.S. officers.

Other sites include Mahala, where about 15 Muslim families are living, and Jusici, a village being reclaimed by Muslims that NATO sources say is of strategic military value. Located on a high ridge, it has a clear view of the main north-south road in the Serbs’ Republika Srpska and could be used to direct artillery to cut off that road, NATO sources say. Serbs are reported to be furious that Muslims have retaken the town.

The tension over resettlement only threatens to worsen and will occupy U.S. military attention for some time. Roughly half a million Muslims were living in towns now on the Republika Srpska side. They were either killed or expelled, and many of those who survived want to go back.

In all, an estimated 2 million people were displaced in the war. About 10% have been able to go home, but only a handful have been able to go home if it meant crossing new ethnic lines.

As adamant as Muslims are to come home, Serbian villagers, similarly and heavily influenced by their own government’s propaganda, adamantly oppose allowing such returns.

“We will not let them come here,” Ruza Vlacic, 50, said near her home in Serb-controlled Koraj, just one hill over from Gajevi. She had watched from a distance as the Muslims seemed to approach in what she was sure would be an attempt to expel her from her own war-gained home. It terrified her.

“We don’t have anywhere else to go. We will fight. We’ve come to the end.”

For the Bosnian government, which appears to be manipulating much of the sentiment for its own end, the goal is to extend its territory, half of which war awarded to the Bosnian Serbs. The Serbian leadership, meanwhile, is determined to maintain its ethnically pure state.

“The question is, how do you reconcile the Serb biological line with the Muslim drive to the Drina?” said one senior NATO officer, referring to the river that forms the eastern border of Republika Srpska. “There is no problem more capable of unhinging the peace.”