Serbs

UNITED NATIONS -- President Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader of the Bosnian government, will address the General Assembly this week, and advisers are pressing him to use the opportunity to propose a territorial compromise with the Serbs.The official aim of Mr. Izetbegovic's trip is to explain why the Muslim-led Bosnian Parliament last week rejected the latest version of a peace plan that would split the country into three ethnic states.Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia's representative to the United Nations, said yesterday that he also expected Mr. Izetbegovic to "launch some new ideas when he explains our position to the General Assembly on Wednesday."

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia -- Grooming the next battlefield for Yugoslavia's roving civil war, Serb police arrested ethnic Albanian activists, seized ballot boxes and harassed U.S. election monitors yesterday in a vain attempt to disrupt an independence vote in Serbia's restive southwestern province of Kosovo, adjacent to Albania and Macedonia.Despite intimidation by heavily armed Serbian police and Yugoslav federal troops patrolling in armored vehicles, Albanians flooded to secret polling places to vote for a president and Parliament committed to independence from the Serbian republic.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- As Bosnian Serb soldiers halted their attack on the besieged city of Gorazde last weekend, they didn't exactly leap to comply with a NATO ultimatum to retreat or else.Not only were they slow to move their men and artillery, but they blocked convoys of food and first aid. While pulling back, they destroyed homes and burned a water purification plant. Even now, United Nations officials say, a few Serbian soldiers remain in the heart of the city, a zone they were supposed to have evacuated by Sunday.

SOMETIMES it is important to read between the lines.Take Bosnia, for example: Never has the high art of euphemism been honed with more enthusiasm or more lethal results.Perhaps President Clinton, a man whose mind is full of glittering surfaces, would dream up a more rational approach to the Balkan war if he were not distracted by the rhetorical obfuscations. The president is a man of great intelligence and short attention span: Shiny words attract him, hither and yon, the way a silver rattle distracts a toddler.

WASHINGTON -- In what is believed to be the most comprehensive U.S. assessment of atrocities in Bosnia, the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that 90 percent of the acts of "ethnic cleansing" were carried out by Serbs and that leading Serbian politicians almost certainly played a role in the crimes.The CIA report, based on aerial photography and what one senior official called "an enormous amount of precise technical analysis," also concludes that while war crimes were by no means committed exclusively by Serbs, they were the only party involved in a systematic attempt to eliminate all traces of other ethnic groups from their territory.

Momcilo Cvijanovic and Joe Kerekovic should have much in common.Both are middle-aged immigrants from the former Yugoslavia. Both speak Serbo-Croatian. Both are engineers.But Mr. Cvijanovic was born a Serb and Mr. Kerekovic a Croat, and in the past two years of civil war in their former homeland, that has made the two men very different.Yesterday, the two engineers were in Baltimore for a Slavic-American forum convened by the Rev. Ivan Dornic on how to help end the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Nearly all the Serbian guns ringing the Bosnian capital are out of action, United Nations officials said early this morning after a frantic day of diplomatic meetings, maneuvering behind the scenes and hoisting rusty cannons out of snowbanks."

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Bosnian Serb tanks thundered into the rapidly collapsing city of Gorazde yesterday, just hours after United Nations officials had proclaimed victory in negotiating a cease-fire with the rebels.Triggering mass panic in the largest government-held enclave in eastern Bosnia, the Serbian invasion pressed on despite a call by the U.N. Protection Force for more air strikes against Serbian heavy weapons firing on the city, designated a U.N.-protected safe area."The Bosnian Serbs possess the capability to proceed at will into Gorazde," Chinmaya Gharekhan of India, the special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General, said last night in New York.

This man who is a Serbian Yugoslav recites his litany of the awful hurts of World War II as if they happened yesterday.And as you listen, you realize that in the long history of animosity between Serbs and Croats, the 1940s were yesterday."

SARAJEVO, Yugoslavia -- Leaders of Yugoslavia's large Muslim community have made a dramatic shift in their policy, suddenly distancing themselves from Croatia's President Franjo Tudjman and offering what they said was a "historic agreement" to their traditional enemy -- the Serbs.The offer was made last week at a meeting between Muslim and Serb politicians in the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Officials from the republic then flew to Belgrade to propose the plan personally to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.