July 14, 1996

Two Attacks on Foreigners Raise Tension in Bosnia

By MIKE O'CONNOR

LASENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Two attacks on foreigners, including the shooting of an American working for the U.S. Embassy, have heightened tensions in Bosnia and may also increase concerns that any attempt by NATO forces to arrest Bosnian Serb leaders for war crimes could result in retaliation against foreigners.

The American, a woman whose name was not released, was shot in the back late Friday night while she and her husband were driving between Kiseljak and Sarajevo. She was reported in stable condition after undergoing surgery at a NATO military hospital.

American Embassy officials said that the circumstances surrounding the shooting were not clear and that it was possible the assailant did not know the victim's nationality.

But the second attack, two hours later, was clearly directed against foreigners. An explosive charge was set off under a truck parked in front of the office of U.N. police monitors in this Bosnian Serb-controlled town in northeastern Bosnia.

The explosion demolished the truck and damaged the building, which also contained the living quarters of three monitors -- one Senegalese and two Nepalese. Two of the monitors were slightly wounded.

One monitor said the attack was clearly an attempt by "local extremists" to intimidate them. "They want to scare us, to terrorize us," he said.

The headquarters of the Bosnian Serb military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, is about six miles away. He and the Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic, have been indicted on war crimes charges, and on Thursday the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague issued arrest warrants for them.

The warrants, along with increasingly strong statements by foreign diplomats in Bosnia that the two men must be removed from power if free elections set for September are to be held, have heightened concerns among senior officers in the NATO-led peacekeeping force about retaliatory attacks on their soldiers or on other foreigners.

One officer said Saturday that there was already a strong feeling among his colleagues that the consequences of having NATO forces arrest the two men could be so severe that the arrests would jeopardize the peace rather than strengthen it.

American military officers have predicted that Bosnia Serb forces might begin testing NATO's resolve with small incidents. One said that although NATO forces were prepared to enforce military aspects of the Bosnia peace agreement, they would have trouble containing acts of random violence.

Aside from the fact that the two attacks occurred on the same evening, American military officers said they could see no connection.

The shooting of the American woman took place in an area under Muslim and Croatian control.

Some of the U.N. police monitors who work in Vlasenica said the explosion there might also have been a response to war crimes investigations by the United Nations.

The U.N. monitors' station is near the area where investigators from the war crimes tribunal are exhuming the bodies of Muslim men thought to have been massacred by Serbs after they seized the town of Srebrenica one year ago.

Serbian officials insist that there were no such mass murders of men from Srebrenica and say U.N. efforts to prove there were are part of an international conspiracy against the Serbian people.