Old Foes Now Protectors in Bosnia’s War

Antonia Jurisic spent four days huddled in the basement with her family as shells and bullets screamed through the streets above. Finally there was a knock on the door. It was the Croatian army. The battle has been lost, the soldiers said. Get out now.

Frantic with fear, the family raced out of the house with the clothes on their backs, away from the Muslims who had been their allies through more than a year of war and into the arms of their Serbian enemies, who sheltered them during a freezing night on a nearby hillside.

“Some of the old and weak people who couldn’t leave were left behind, they couldn’t believe this was really happening,” Jurisic recalled. “Half an hour after we left, the (Muslim) moujahedeen came in and just slaughtered them. The soldiers told us they heard ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and then they heard screaming. They were being massacred.”

A soldier of the HVO, the Bosnian Croat army, who had been helping Croatian civilians fleeing nearby Travnik toward Serbian lines surrendered himself to his former Serbian enemies.

“When I saw what the Muslims were up to and how well-armed they were--they were ready to kill us, and they were our former allies--I would rather surrender to Serbs and let them kill me,” recalled the soldier, Zeljko Duic, a bus driver in Switzerland before the war.

“Naturally, I was very afraid. But when I saw the way the Serbian soldier addressed me, I had some confidence. He said, ‘Welcome to the Republic of Serbska. You will be treated according to the Geneva Convention and you will be treated correctly in this territory, because you have surrendered without fighting Serbs.’ They kept their word, and we came out safe.”

The fighting around Travnik over the last several days has marked something of a turning point in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s war, an uneasy stew of violence where it had already been hard enough to distinguish vanquisher from victim. After more than 14 months of pleading for international aid against a wave of pitiless Serbian--and more recently Croatian--”ethnic cleansing” that has driven their population into small pockets seeking U.N. protection, Bosnia’s Muslims in recent days have regrouped and begun striking back--with a vengeance.

In Travnik and its surrounding villages, about 9,000 Croatians have been driven from their homes by Muslim fighters. Croatian officials say at least 400 have been killed and 500 wounded, many of them civilians, in the recent fighting.

The first refugees who streamed into Croatia in cars, buses and trucks early Thursday told stories of Muslims who had turned against their neighbors in Travnik over the last two months. At least eight witnesses told of a Croatian family slaughtered by Muslim forces in view of their Muslim next-door neighbors. Other spoke of hearing the Muslims chant slogans calling for the revival of the Ottoman Empire.

“The Serbians have always engaged in ethnic cleansing, the Croats started it and now, unfortunately, the Muslims are engaging in it as well,” said Bosnian Muslim aid worker Faris Nanic. “The Muslims are trying to fight for something that might be called a space for living. The ethnic cleansing the Muslims are doing now is a kind of answer to the ethnic cleansing that was done earlier (by Croats) in Mostar.”

Diplomatic analysts say most of the recent Muslim-Croat clashes were spawned by the Vance-Owen peace plan, which would have divided Bosnia-Herzegovina into nine ethnically based provinces and one mixed area around the capital, Sarajevo.

When the Serbs of Bosnia rejected the plan, blocking its implementation by the international community, Croatian forces began a push toward regions of central Bosnia that had historically held a peaceful mix of Croatian and Muslim communities but that were designated Croatian areas under Vance-Owen.

The Muslims regrouped and tried to hold on to what they could, several analysts said.

“The Muslims were damned if they were going to be dominated by Croats, while the Croats were happy to claim what they saw as a well-deserved prize,” one analyst said.

In addition, months of Serbian victories in eastern Bosnia were sending thousands of Muslim refugees flooding into communities that had long existed with a delicate ethnic balance. But suddenly, there were outbreaks of suspicion, then violence, in the communities that had existed in harmony for years.

“Against this backdrop, it can only get worse,” one diplomatic source said.

Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic said in an interview Thursday that his government’s forces are fighting to liberate supply routes for aid convoys.

He denied that Muslims have forced Croats from their homes in Travnik. To the contrary, he said, Croatian forces had urged civilians to leave their homes so that they could be resettled in Croatian-dominated Herzegovina.

“It looks like it is coordinated with the (Serbs) and looks like the population is practically being transported to Herzegovina,” he said.

U.N. officials in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, reported a cease-fire in Travnik on Thursday and sporadic fighting in Mostar. Vitez, south of Travnik, was reported to be under siege, and Bosnian Croatian forces there were said to be digging in along all approaches to the town.

The U.N. military sources said there were exchanges of fire northwest of Travnik, around the villages of Maline and Podstinje. Muslims were also reported to be attacking villages in the area of Novi Travnik and to the east around Busovaca.

The fighting and the ensuing flood of refugees into Croatia has severely strained relations between Croatia and the Muslim Bosnia government.

“We may be forced to break diplomatic relations with Bosnia-Herzegovina if Muslim units continue aggression against Croats,” Croatian Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Seks told Croatian television as the government, meeting in emergency session, accused Bosnian Muslim forces of “genocide” and appealed to the United Nations to intervene.

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, cutting short a visit to China, said the attacks by Muslims in central Bosnia have brought about “unprecedented ethnic cleansing and the complete destruction of Croat villages around Travnik.”

Bosnia’s Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic arrived in Zagreb, apparently for talks with Tudjman.

Croatian officials said that most of the first wave of Croatian refugees from Travnik, about 1,500 of whom arrived early Thursday, will move into 2,000 former Croatian army housing units in Mostar and an additional 5,000 units in Capljina, also in Croatian areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Now, the government is faced with the problem of housing the 7,500 more refugees who are believed to be en route. Most of its facilities are taxed already by 526,000 refugees, about 200,000 of them Muslims who fled Serbian ethnic cleansing.

Seks, the deputy prime minister, said the Croatian government will review its treatment of the Muslim refugees.

“It is unthinkable that while we are taking care of their families here, their brothers, fathers or husbands in Bosnia are committing crimes against our people,” he said.

Travnik Offensive

Bosnia’s Muslims are striking back with a vengeance, particularly in Travnik and areas to the south.