Muslim Refugees Flee Fierce Serb Attacks

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  Terrified Muslim villagers fled fierce Serb attacks northeast of Sarajevo, while Muslim-led government troops braced to confront Croat forces pouring toward a battle zone to the west Saturday.

U.N. relief workers said Muslim refugees fleeing into the battered central town of Olovo and Bosnian army officers reported massacres, rapes and mass detentions by Serb soldiers.

To the west, British peacekeepers spotted 37 Bosnian Croat militia vehicles, including heavy artillery and 10 troop-carrying trucks, moving into the Gornji Vakuf area, about 40 miles west of Sarajevo.

The troops were on the move just a day after Croatian and Bosnian government officials agreed to seek a halt to all offensive actions in hopes of launching Croat-Muslim peace talks within a week.

Many refugees reaching Olovo on Friday wept as they recounted their suffering to field workers of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said spokesman Ray Wilkinson.

Olovo, about 20 miles northeast of Sarajevo, is on the front line dividing territory of Bosnian Serb nationalists and the Muslim-led Bosnian government. It has been bombarded repeatedly, and the U.N. relief agency has been unable to deliver food there for two months, Wilkinson said.

Wilkinson said 300 refugees had arrived in the past few days, fleeing nearby villages attacked by Serbs.

Bosnian army officers told relief workers that the villages of Crna Rijeka, Ravni and Zubeta were abandoned and burned, Wilkinson said. They also reported large-scale detentions of able-bodied men, he said.

David Fillingham, a spokesman at the U.N. Bosnia Command in Kiseljak, said troop movements by Croats around Gornji Vakuf was “indicative of plans for the assault.”

Croat and government forces were allied early in the war, which started when Bosnia’s Serbs rebelled over independence from Serb-dominated rump Yugoslavia. Their alliance collapsed as Serbs and Croats began cooperating on plans to partition Bosnia.