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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Shells Land Near Marketplace In Sarajevo; 37 Killed, 80 Hurt U.S. Blames Bosnian Serbs And Urges Nato, U.N. Military Action

Roger Cohen New York Times

Two shells slammed into the central Sarajevo market area on Monday, killing at least 37 people and injuring 80 in the most devastating single attack on the Bosnian capital since a similar shelling incident 18 months ago led NATO to vow that the city would be protected.

Limbs and flesh were splattered on storefronts, and bodies fell to pieces as they were lifted into cars. After 40 months of Serbian siege and bombardment, the scene was familiar but the hysteria among an exhausted population still intense.

The United States blamed the Bosnian Serbs for the attack and U.N. officials in Sarajevo suggested that the 120mm mortar that caused most of the damage was fired from Serbian positions south of the capital.

In Washington, a senior administration official said the United States had urged the United Nations and NATO to respond militarily to the Sarajevo attack.

The official said two options were being looked at in particular: a NATO airstrike or an artillery response from 155mm guns, with a 15-mile range, controlled near Sarajevo by the new Rapid Reaction Force.

“There may be mitigating factors, like the bad weather, that delay a response,” the official said. “Our position is you have to be true to your commitments and we made commitments to help defend these enclaves.” But by late Monday it was unclear what measures were being actually planned.

Monday’s shells landed less than 100 yards from the open-air Markale marketplace, where 68 people were killed and more than 200 wounded by a mortar attack on Feb. 5, 1994.

After the marketplace attack last year, NATO was successful for about a year in stopping the Serbian bombardment by threatening airstrikes on guns near the city. But the attacks resumed this summer without triggering retaliation.

The attack on Monday again posed delicate problems for the western alliance, which feared a spiral of tension and reprisals that could derail the new American peace initiative.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the Clinton administration’s chief negotiator on the Balkans, arrived in Paris on Monday to discuss the American peace plan and vowed to press on despite the shelling.

Shortly after the shelling, Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, made an unusually conciliatory statement about the American peace proposals. “As far as we know,” he said, “the American initiative takes account of the minimum interests of the Serbian side, and I hope that our parliament will accept this offer.”

Serbian officials said the statement followed a meeting between Karadzic and the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, in Belgrade late last week. For several months, Milosevic has been pressing the Bosnian Serbs to pursue their interests through diplomacy rather than war.

Earlier this month, after watching helplessly as the Serbs overran the designated “safe areas” of Srebrenica and Zepa, NATO reaffirmed its commitment to protect Sarajevo and three other vulnerable, mainly Muslim cities - Gorazde, Tuzla and Bihac. It also suggested that any future airstrikes would be more sweeping than the often pinprick bombings previously carried out in Bosnia.

But the Bosnian war has been marked by forceful rhetoric from western govenments that is followed by hesitation and confusion in the face of attacks such as the shelling on Monday.

The shelling on Monday submerged the central Kosevo hospital in a blood-soaked wave of dead and dying. Later, the hospital itself was hit by a shell, wounding two patients.

French President Jacques Chirac, who will meet Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic today, said that he would propose the demilitarization of Sarajevo as a means to ensure that such attacks do not occur again.

“Only such a demilitarization would guarantee that the Bosnian capital is not subject to a renewal of today’s drama,” said Catherine Colonna, the president’s spokesman.

But a demilitarization of Sarajevo appears highly unlikely in that the city is the capital of the Bosnian state, a stronghold of the Bosnian army, and a symbol - albeit beleaguered - of Bosnian sovereignty. The Muslim-led government has no inclination to disband its forces in the capital.

The Serbs, as they have in the past, suggested that these forces had attacked their own civilian population on Monday in order to arouse international sympathy and drag NATO into the war. “This is a classic act of Islamic terrorism,” said Miroslav Toholj, a Bosnian Serb official.

The United Nations said that the shell that caused most of the deaths was fired from the south, where both the Serbs and Muslim-led government forces have positions. But Alexander Ivanko, a spokesman, said, “Most of the positions located in the south are Bosnian Serb positions.”

The Bosnian Serbs, who made up a third of Bosnia’s prewar population and are fighting for their own state in Bosnia, have regularly bombarded civilians during the war. But they have blamed all the most devastating shelling incidents - including one in Tuzla last May in which 70 people died - on Muslims allegedly prepared to kill their own people in order to secure western military support for their war effort.

Haris Silajdzic, the Bosnian prime minister, responded to the attack with outrage, calling for NATO airstrikes and an end to any peace negotiations until the alliance’s real readiness to protect the Bosnian capital is clarified.

“The government has decided to propose to the presidency that it consider the suspension of further activity in the peace process until the obligations and role of NATO are clarified,” Silajdzic said.

Much of the western diplomatic and military activity over the past three months has been devoted to getting U.N. soldiers out of Bosnian Serb territory in order to make the threat of NATO airstrikes more credible by removing potential hostages.

But about 90 U.N. troops are still in the eastern Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which is surrounded by the Serbs.

The troops are due to leave later this week.

Izetbegovic, whose relations with Silajdzic have been strained, decided to visit Paris despite the attack. He arrived on Monday for talks with Holbrooke. But the president’s initial tone was more bellicose than compromising, saying his government had decided “to use all means” to put an end to the onslaught.