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- THE WEEK, Page 20WORLDBlasting a Corridor
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- Serbs take a key town in Bosnia as the U.N. talks a little
- tougher
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- The conquest came with surprising ease. For months Serb
- forces have struggled to secure a broad corridor across northern
- Bosnia connecting Croatian regions they control with Serbia
- itself. The town of Bosanski Brod, where Muslim and Croat troops
- were easily supplied from across the Sava River in Croatia, was
- a stone in their path.
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- No more. Faced with blistering air and artillery attacks
- Tuesday, the defenders retreated over the last remaining Sava
- River bridge in Bosnia. Wednesday morning the bridge was blown
- up, leaving only a handful of towns in northern Bosnia still
- under the control of the Bosnian government.
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- The Serb victory left some routed defenders and Western
- diplomats wondering aloud whether the Croats had yielded
- Bosanski Brod by prior agreement. Bosnia's Croats want western
- Herzegovina to the south just as badly as Bosnia's Serbs need
- the corridor.
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- While peace-conference moderators Cyrus Vance and Lord
- Owen searched for ways to stop such a partition, the U.N.
- Security Council voted to create a war-crimes commission that
- will gather evidence of atrocities in former Yugoslavia. The
- U.N. also voted to impose a ban on military flights over Bosnia
- to stop Serb air strikes, but it did not authorize enforcement
- of the ban. President Bush had offered to enforce the no-fly
- zone with U.S. planes, but France and Britain feared that if a
- Serb plane were shot down, their ground troops in Bosnia would
- be vulnerable to revenge attacks. There has, after all, been no
- shortage of those.
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