15,000 Bosnian Troops Converge For Offensive U.N. Peacekeepers Unable To Confirm Where It Might Start

More than 15,000 government troops converged north of Sarajevo on Wednesday, as their leaders said they were ready to break the three-year-old Serb siege of the Bosnian capital.

U.N. peacekeepers, restricted in movement by both sides, reported the troop movement but could not confirm when or where an offensive might begin.

A government attempt to break the siege would likely engulf Sarajevo and other Muslim enclaves in ferocious warfare with the Bosnian Serbs who surround them, and possibly lead to hundreds of civilian deaths.

“We have said very clearly that we cannot live through another winter of siege,” Bosnia’s foreign minister, Muhamed Sacribey, said in Vienna. “Draw your own conclusions.”

Sarajevo’s mayor, Tarik Kupusovic, was blunter.

“It is time to act after three years of siege,” he told reporters. “We are ready for the liberation of the city.”

Bosnia President Alija Izetbegovic went further Wednesday, saying he might ask U.N. forces to leave the shattered republic if peacekeepers try to stand in his military’s way.

Peacekeepers “cannot act against the interests of Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Izetbegovic said. “If that became the case, their stay here would be terminated.”

Lt. Paul D’Orsonnens, a Canadian peacekeeper based at Visoko, said 15,000 men or more had gathered around Ilijas, some seven miles north of Sarajevo, and were fanning west toward Visoko.

Maj. Gen. Dragomir Milosevic, commander of Serb forces around Sarajevo, said any government offensive would result in an immediate counterattack in which the government “apart from losing soldiers would also lose territory.”