Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Serbs Blast Zagreb As Croats Continue Advancing Bomb Attack Revenge For Major Losses; U.S. Citizens Urged To Leave Croatia

Los Angeles Times

War reached this European capital Tuesday as rebel Serbs fired cluster bombs into the heart of Zagreb in deadly revenge for a fierce Croatian army offensive that was swiftly driving Serbs from a four-year stronghold.

The Croatian government late Tuesday said it had successfully recaptured part of the land seized by rebel Serb separatists in their 1991 war of secession. But earlier, Serb rocket attacks on the capital killed five people, wounded 120 and sowed terror in a city that had thought itself safe.

Labeling the attacks on Zagreb as “savage,” U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith said the midday bombings amounted to “a declaration of full-scale war.”

He ordered families of U.S. Embassy officers to abandon the country and arranged escorts for U.S. citizens who were also being urged to leave. He warned again of a wider, quickly escalating Balkan war.

On the second day of the heaviest fighting in Croatia since the 1991 war left 10,000 dead, Croatian MiG jets again struck at a bridge connecting Croatian Serb territory with potential reinforcements in BosniaHerzegovina.

Battles were reported around and in the town of Okucani, a Croatian Serb headquarters, through much of the morning until Croatian troops took control at midday.

With the seizure of that ground, the Croatian army seemed to have achieved its goal of wresting control of a transnational highway blocked by the Serbs and of ejecting them from a U.N.-protected enclave established under 1992 peace accords.

The area is known as Western Slavonia and most of the fighting was centered 60 to 70 miles southeast of Zagreb.

“Croatian Serb forces stopped giving organized resistance,” according to a statement from President Franjo Tudjman’s office.

No reliable information on casualties in the countryside was available. But both U.N. and European Union observers expected them to be high. More than 5,000 Serb refugees, walking and on tractors, were fleeing south to Bosnia.

But in Zagreb, the psychological damage may even outlast the considerable physical damage from Tuesday’s bombings.

One of at least five shrapnel-loaded missiles hit about a block from the U.S. Embassy in the center of Zagreb, where personnel fled to bomb shelters. It heavily damaged a police headquarters and shattered and torched cars for more than a block. Three people were killed at the site, city officials said.

The attack underscored in swift, dramatic fashion the fears that the war would escalate. It panicked and stunned a population that has felt it has lived in an oasis in war.