op 18 front pages-converted - The Watson Institute for International ...

Winter 1992-93. In November, the first United Nations
convoys reached the Bosnian enclave of Tuzla, besieged for
seven months, as well as Srebrenica. Croatia reacting to the
strain, closed its borders to refugees. The ICRC evacuated
1,500 Muslims and Croats from Sarajevo. Reflecting winter
ravages and Serb strangulation, ten elderly patients in a Sarajevo
nursing home died during a two-day stretch (190 had
perished since the previous April). Estimates of 20,000 rapes of
Bosnian Muslims by Serbs in ethnic cleansing strategy were
made public. In February, the Security Council voted to prosecute
war crimes.
The U.N. and 29 foreign ministers launched in December
another round of Bosnian negotiations to end the war. In
January, Vance and Owen introduced a comprehensive peace
plan. That month a Croatian army attack on Serb-controlled
territory along the Dalmatian coast heightened tensions. In
February, the Sarajevo city council boycotted U.N. aid to
protest the lack of supplies reaching Muslims in eastern enclaves.
Citing obstruction by all factions, UNHCR suspended
aid deliveries, reinstating them several days later when its
conditions had been met. The United States, soon joined by
other countries, began airdrops into eastern Bosnia. Conditions
in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia worsened due to
refugee inflows, impacts of international economic sanctions,
and inflation of more than 200 percent a month. In Croatia,
difficulties in meeting the needs of the displaced also mounted.
Spring 1993. Problems of assisting people on location in
eastern Bosnia and of taking them to safety worsened in the
face of escalating military pressure on Sarajevo and the eastern
enclaves. In March, U.N. trucks evacuating Muslims from
Srebrenica to Tuzla returned with Serb evacuees from Tuzla to
Srebrenica. In April, weapons were discovered in United
Nations relief vehicles and at the Sarajevo airport; the U.N.
contended they were planted by foes of the program. Also in
April, the Security Council tightened economic sanctions
against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and in May designated
six enclaves with a population of 1.2 million as “safe
areas.”
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