Tuzla

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The U.S. mission to Bosnia has encountered its first enemy, and it is neither Serb, Croat nor Muslim. The enemy is winter, blocking military cargo flights with fog and clogging roads with deep snow.Weather forced the cancellation yesterday of 20 flights by aircraft carrying soldiers and equipment. Only two aircraft even tried to land, but they were turned back after groping for the runway at Tuzla's snowbound airfield. No plane has landed since Wednesday.But with more worrisome challenges ahead for the year-long NATO peacekeeping mission, U.S. military officials say they're not worried by the prospect of a few initial delays.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Leave your guns and ideology at home. Bring plenty of money. Any currency will do.Here at the Arizona Market, shopping is the best antidote to war.Named after Route Arizona, the main road leading to the U.S. military headquarters in Tuzla, the market is a cross between a flea market and an experiment in building democracy through free trade. Sprawling over 18 muddy acres, it is the one place in Bosnia where you can buy almost anything you want and, more important, do business with anyone you choose.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- When the mayor first heard that 20,000 American soldiers were on the way, it seemed to be the culmination of a long-running nightmare for this humble, sooty outpost of war.The previous 3 1/2 years had brought a grim procession of air raids, food shortages, shellings, the threat of a chemical attack, huge waves of refugees and the slow torment of isolation.And now?The American hordes were coming, their arrival announced by the roar of every approaching U.S. transport plane.

LUKAVAC, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- In the morning they run nine miles in formation, sounding off like U.S. Marines."Allahu Akbar!" they cry, "Glory to God." In cadence, they shout short, inspirational verse from the Koran, the holy book of Islam. Some days, the imam visits, talking of martyrdom for the jihad.Such is a soldier's life in the Bosnian army's 9th Muslim Liberation Brigade, a strict, secretive unit of home-grownmujahedeen, encamped about 10 miles from U.S. Army headquarters at the Tuzla air base.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- As the first U.S. Army combat troops arrived in Bosnia last night under cover of darkness and fog, an old hand in the Balkans reflected on what perils could await the newcomers.Land mines, of course. And potholes.If the millions of mines do not hinder the Americans, the potholes on the roads will, said Canadian Army Maj. Howard Michitsch, the United Nations Senior Military Observer who has spent the last six months patrolling what now is the U.S. peacekeeping zone.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Leave your guns and ideology at home. Bring plenty of money. Any currency will do.Here at the Arizona Market, shopping is the best antidote to war.Named after Route Arizona, the main road leading to the U.S. military headquarters in Tuzla, the market is a cross between a flea market and an experiment in building democracy through free trade. Sprawling over 18 muddy acres, it is the one place in Bosnia where you can buy almost anything you want and, more important, do business with anyone you choose.

U.N. convoys arrived in ZENICA, TRAVNIK, TUZLA, ZEPCE and SREBRENICA, the first delivery of food supplies in a month. A convoy for GORADZE continued to be blocked.State-run Bosnian radio quoted the government commander in TUZLA as saying his soldiers had placed explosives in a dam near Serb villages in a bid to halt Serb artillery fire in the area. But the report said the bombardment continued and that two mainly Serb villages in the path of possible flooding were evacuated.Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians have left Serbia's Kosovo province to escape persecution, unemployment or the military draft, human rights activists said.

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina began in February 1992 when the Muslim-dominated government declared independence from the former Yugoslavia and the Bosnian Serbs, supported and armed by Serbia, rebelled. The fight for territorial control has raged ever since, with the outgunned Bosnian government forces and the Muslim population suffering defeat after defeat while the world community struggled unsuccessfully to negotiate peace between the warring parties. Some 200,000 people have been killed or wounded in the conflict; more than a million have been displaced, many of them through so-called "ethnic cleansing" in which Muslim populations have been driven from their homes.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- When the mayor first heard that 20,000 American soldiers were on the way, it seemed to be the culmination of a long-running nightmare for this humble, sooty outpost of war.The previous 3 1/2 years had brought a grim procession of air raids, food shortages, shellings, the threat of a chemical attack, huge waves of refugees and the slow torment of isolation.And now?The American hordes were coming, their arrival announced by the roar of every approaching U.S. transport plane.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- As the first U.S. Army combat troops arrived in Bosnia last night under cover of darkness and fog, an old hand in the Balkans reflected on what perils could await the newcomers.Land mines, of course. And potholes.If the millions of mines do not hinder the Americans, the potholes on the roads will, said Canadian Army Maj. Howard Michitsch, the United Nations Senior Military Observer who has spent the last six months patrolling what now is the U.S. peacekeeping zone.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Robert Wiener is the man who wrote the book on live televised coverage of war and peace. He's the CNN senior executive producer who rigged up a satellite telephone that enabled the world to hear the Gulf War bombing of Baghdad as it happened. He got his network a front-row seat on the beach when U.S. peacekeepers waded ashore in Somalia.Now he's in Tuzla, shepherding what had threatened to become the most expensive weather story in television history. Until yesterday, the media were fully deployed for the arrival of NATO peacekeepers, but the U.S. Army was not, on account of too much fog."

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The U.S. mission to Bosnia has encountered its first enemy, and it is neither Serb, Croat nor Muslim. The enemy is winter, blocking military cargo flights with fog and clogging roads with deep snow.Weather forced the cancellation yesterday of 20 flights by aircraft carrying soldiers and equipment. Only two aircraft even tried to land, but they were turned back after groping for the runway at Tuzla's snowbound airfield. No plane has landed since Wednesday.But with more worrisome challenges ahead for the year-long NATO peacekeeping mission, U.S. military officials say they're not worried by the prospect of a few initial delays.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Mukelefa Husic's forced march down the time line of Bosnian misery has come to rest in a hot stubbly field of 6,000 refugees sheltering in low, white tents.Like the others, she has just come through three years of shelling, expulsion and deprivation, uprooted first from one town and then from another in a conflict that has left 200,000 dead and wounded, and tens of thousands displaced.In the past 12 days she watched Serbian soldiers stab to death her oldest son, take away her second son, and haul her husband off a refugee bus to points unknown.

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina began in February 1992 when the Muslim-dominated government declared independence from the former Yugoslavia and the Bosnian Serbs, supported and armed by Serbia, rebelled. The fight for territorial control has raged ever since, with the outgunned Bosnian government forces and the Muslim population suffering defeat after defeat while the world community struggled unsuccessfully to negotiate peace between the warring parties. Some 200,000 people have been killed or wounded in the conflict; more than a million have been displaced, many of them through so-called "ethnic cleansing" in which Muslim populations have been driven from their homes.

Snipers from Serb-held areas fired more than a dozen shots on the Holiday Inn area in central SARAJEVO, flouting a U.N.-mediated agreement to stop such attacks.Tensions in and around the city have risen of late with more than 600 cease-fire violations a day.The U.N. airlift to SARAJEVO resumed after a five-day suspension.A U.N. aid official reported an expulsion of Muslims from &L Serb-held BIJELJINA.Relief officials said they believed the Serbs had resumed ethnic purges to cement their grip against pressure to cede land under the latest international peace plan.