Thieves in the Night

By Kevin Fedarko

Give the Bosnian Serbs at least this much: if audacity were the only requirement for winning a war, they would have routed their opponents long ago. But even the most brazen strategists can sometimes trump themselves. And the Serbs did so last week by launching a raid on a United Nations weapons center in an abandoned factory just west of Sarajevo. The Ukrainian peacekeepers guarding the depot were taken completely by surprise, not realizing the predawn smash-and-grab had taken place until they spotted the Serbs rolling a T-55 tank, two armored personnel carriers and an anti-aircraft gun out the main gate.

! The U.N., however, was not going to tolerate the behavior, and on Friday evening NATO attack planes penetrated the thick cloud cover over Bosnia, trained their Gatling guns on a Serb motorized antitank weapon and blasted it with at least 600 rounds of ammunition. The mobile weapon, which was destroyed, was not among the arms purloined in the Serbs' morning raid. But the target was one of dozens of large Serb guns that have been spotted around Sarajevo, in clear violation of the U.N.-imposed heavy-weapons exclusion zone that has kept the Bosnian capital virtually free of shelling since February. The symbolic NATO strike did the trick. Within two hours, Momcilo Krajisnik, speaker of the self-styled Bosnian Serb parliament, had phoned U.N. officials in Zagreb to say that the stolen weapons would be returned. By the next day they had been handed back.

The move to steal the arms in the first place reflected not only the Serbs' defiance but also their desperation at recent battlefield advances made by their enemies the Bosnian Muslims, who have been helped by a new arms pipeline through Croatia. Even worse, the Bosnian Serbs appeared to have been abandoned by one of their staunchest allies -- Slobodan Milosevic, President of Serbia. On Thursday, Milosevic severed all political and economic ties with the Bosnian Serbs, accusing them of "insane political ambitions." Milosevic's move was ostensibly in retaliation for the Bosnian Serbs' refusal to sign the latest U.N.-brokered peace plan. But his action stems less from his own outrage at Serb aggression -- one that he, more than anyone, has nurtured and fed -- than hope for relief from the international trade embargo that has choked his country's economy.

NATO and the Clinton Administration hailed the air strike as a successful demonstration of allied resolve. But the Bosnian Serbs apparently remain determined to keep fighting -- and to refuse the peace plan that both Croatia and Bosnia have now endorsed. On Friday three Serb mortar rounds were fired at Sarajevo -- the first such attack on the city in months. "We are prepared to be hungry, naked and barefoot," declared Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. "But we must fight for our freedom."

With reporting by James L. Graff/Vienna and Ann M. Simmons/Washington