Retired U.S. Soldiers To Train Muslims

Retired American soldiers soon will start training Bosnian Muslim soldiers to prepare them for when NATO peacekeepers leave, The New York Times reported today.

Bosnian officials in Sarajevo agreed last week to the Clinton administration plan, the Times reported, citing U.S. military officials.

Under the plan, the Bosnian government will hire the retired military officers to train the troops in Bosnia and possibly a NATO country such as Turkey, Pentagon officials told the Times.

On Sunday, several thousand government, Serb and Croat troops withdrew from their front-line trenches and bunkers across central and northeastern Bosnia, beating a deadline to create buffer zones between the forces.

The withdrawal came five days before the Jan. 19 deadline for creation of 2-1/2-mile buffer zones along former front lines throughout Bosnia.

The deadline is part of the U.S.-brokered peace agreement signed last month, under which Bosnia is to be partitioned into two ethnically based entities and a 60,000-man NATO-led peacekeeping force deployed.

“This is a tremendous beginning,” Maj. Alistair Ross, a NATO spokesman, said in Okrvglica, a frontline village 120 miles northwest of Sarajevo. “It’s too early to say the peace will hold, but what we’re seeing today hasn’t been achieved in almost four years of war.”

The buffer zones are off-limits to all military personnel other than the peacekeepers.

Locating and deactivating mines is a critical task of the peacekeepers, and its urgency was underscored Sunday when two vehicles in the NATO force ran over mines.

In one case, three soldiers from a Scandinavian battalion were injured, one seriously, when an antitank mine exploded under their armored personnel carrier near Maglaj. In the other case, a U.S. armored vehicle hit a mine near Gradacac, but no one was injured.

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