Catherine Samary, a supporter of the French LCR, has just returned from Sarajevo. Below we print her assessment of the situation. The position of Socialist Outlook is set out on page 7. SARAJEVO is an encircled city, but you can reach it, which reflects an unstable relation of military forces. I confess that many aspects of the relationship of forces is obscure to me. At the entrance to Sarajevo there are Serb Chetnik forces who check all arrivals; but they are not strong enough to completely block the entrance to the city or to take it by force.
In other words, Sarajevo is encircied, being strangled, but Sarajevo still lives. The Serb offensive lasting several weeks was defeated, and the Bosnian forces pushed the Serb snipers who terrorise the city, mainly mercenaries, to the outskirts of the town.
One area of the city is under the control of extreme right-wing Serb Chet niks, but the rest is under the control of the military and civil Bosnian auththe populason Is otten prostrate or passive. The most active are enrolled in the police, the army or the administralion, which was totally disorganised by the departure of a large part of its Serbian functionaries.
There is no electricity and it gets dark at 4pm; people use candles.
January 30, 1993 No. 36 problems with the water supply; the population takes several hours each day to replenish water from rivers or Tered have in between few who have gas. minus5 and minus 10°C. on 1 January; and this is just the start of the Yugoslavian winter! (The pipeline which brings gas from Hungary goes through but has not been cut off.) For those without gas there are other expedients; fences, even window-frames, are made into firewood.
Food supplies have been severely reduced; three kilos of foodstuffs per person per month, brought in by the relief columns. There is also a s widespread black market, everything is sold in German deutschA kilo of coffee in Sarajevo is 50DM (about E21). Five kilometres from the The most numerous deaths are among babies and the old, from lack of One hundred thousand people in Sapeople; 30,000 coming from zones close to the city, and 76,000 from the part of the city controlled by the been destroyed.
The encirclement of the city is carned our by the enemiks, but also Dyl mercenaries, paid for their crimes. But there is also one entrance to the city controlled by the Croat HVO militia. we were taken by war route, passes through Mostar.
All along that road one sees Croat banners and flags. Bosnian flags didn't appear until the end of the route, near In Sarajevo itself, there is a unified Bosnian command. But people repeated over and again to us that the Croats did not want to break the vicelike grip on Sarajevo. They described shells fell on the city, the Croat HVO militia and the Serb Chetniks fraterOne can thus speak of a doublestrangulation on the military and politica evel. The Bosnians are politically and militarily straight-jacketed by the threat of reprisals against Bosnian prisoners, of whom there are thou sands in Croatia, by the Croat nationalist militias, and by the power of Croat The latter wants to expand the Croat state at the expense of Bosnia, and within the framework of an alliance, to put the blame for all aggression on Serbia.
The Bosnians, through the Croat actions, are hobbled in the battle against the Serb aggressor, whose threat is much more violent and immediate.
The Bosnians describe this situation by way of an old Bosnian myth about being eaten by two monsters, one who eats the body, the other who cats the soul. They also say in Sarajevo: 'God save us from the protection of the But the official Bosnian line is the prisoner of an immediate and disas. trous tactical choice, that of an alliance with the Croit natonalists faced with the more direct and immediate Serb aggression. Identity and not just a Muslim' one. One of the lecisive aspects of this affirmation is the ap arance of a completely new Bosnian army Formed at ground level during the struggle, it has existed for several months. But it was Bosnians considered the Yugoslav army to be 'their army, that of national liberation Because, even during the war in Croatia, nobody believed the war would spread to Bosnia, no action was taken to create a functioning army. They were totally disarmed on that terrain, and lost a lot of time.
The army was born from ethnically mixed battalions, from spontaneous groups of resistance, without a unified command. They have a strong tradition as anti-nationalist partisans. that was the prinear chorror me ana nanonalist Bosnians; to create an army with refurbished weapons, of neway nude ones. takes time. But their weapons were able to destroy tanks.
The anti-war movement developed strongly in this period. Until last April, they demonstrated solely against the war as such, with a strong anti-nationalist dimension. But since the apreta to bostia, te prost has been posed in another way: asainst the war. for peace, but with what political solution? exists which tries to push forward an alternaave to the nanomast accapitauon or boshia, ut is not content to oppose the war. It alms to organise resistance, aid the refugees, prepari the return of the displaced people, and overcome the lasting trauma which the war has caused.
On the question of foreign intervention, everyone is for it, but with very different visions o! What it would mean They demand the arms, but not the presence of a foreign army which would substitute itself for a political solution, and which it would The resistance is for any measure to break the seige of Saraiovo and the multi-ethnic villages There exists every sort of position, including technology show the way to bring down the reactionary powers in Belgrade As everywhere else, the divisions between political left and right mark the differences of assessment of the West.
It is necessary for us to demand that all aid and intervention is subordinate to the needs of the Bosnian resistance, to be against all logic of cantonisation, or decapitation of Bosnia on the Dasis of singie nadon states should send international brigades on that There is no solution without challenging the pse of Yugoslavia. The sole solution to avoid that outcome is the construction of a Balkan federation. This idea has most support in Bosnia and Macedonia, but to attain it means political changes in Belgrade and Zagreb, and the The present negotiations are scandalous from two viewpoints. On the one side there is a big fuss to denounce the what's happeningcamps and the fascist politics of the Chetnik On the other hand negotiations continue as ending the seige of the towns, which expresses he wish to suffocate everything which I mixed and non ethnically-pure. tions without attempting to arraign the war criminals, denounce the mass rapes as chimes, and put on trial those responsible for murder Second hypocrisy; the West accepts the logic of single-nation states, recognising Croatia and Serbia, without demanding that these states The Serbs are presented as the sole aggressors, and the Croats present the Bosniansas the 'third party and the Muslim side. The Croats don't support a Bosnian resistance, but only that of 'their territory, with a part of Bosnia going to the Muslims.
This is an absolute negation of the Bosnian multicultural identity and of the present resistance. However, the Bosnian multi-cultural line is the sole alterative to massacres and war