SARAJEVO, 30 Aug (Hina) - IFOR and U.N. officials on Friday strongly condemned the behaviour of the Bosnian Serb police forces who yesterday attacked a group of some 30 Muslim civilians in the village of Mahala near Zvornik.
SARAJEVO, 30 Aug (Hina) - IFOR and U.N. officials on Friday
strongly condemned the behaviour of the Bosnian Serb police forces
who yesterday attacked a group of some 30 Muslim civilians in the
village of Mahala near Zvornik. #L#
The incident was the gravest one since the signing of the
Dayton agreement and Serb authorities tried to carry out ethnic
cleansing the way it had been done in 1992, UNHCR spokesman Kris
Janowski told a press conference in Sarajevo.
The incident in Mahala was the best indicator of what the real
problem was - the same people who were responsible for the war and
mass ethnic cleansing were in power in Republika Srpska and their
policy had not changed a bit, Janowski said.
U.N. spokesman Alexander Ivanko said that the incident in
Mahala could not be considered accidental.
'It is not by accident that the interior minister of the Serb
entity, Dragan Kijac, was in the area since early in the morning',
Ivanko recalled. It was obvious that Kijac was carrying out
decisions which were not made by the government but the Serb
Democratic Party (SDS).
Ivanko described as outrageous the arrest of a large group of
international police officers in Zvornik, which followed after IFOR
units arrested and disarmed a group of 25 Serb police officers who
were beating and driving away the Bosniac civilians, among whom
were women and elderly persons.
A group of 600 local Serbs, for whom Ivanko claims that some
of them were drunk, surrounded the International Police Task Force
office in Zvornik shouting threats and demanding that the Serb
police members be released.
The mob in front of the office destroyed several UN vehicles
and it was only after IFOR released 25 policemen and 40 other Serb
policemen sent as a back-up, that the international police members
were released.
The head of the U.N. mission Iqbal Riza sent a protest letter
to the acting Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic, demanding
that the police officers who are responsible for the attack on the
Muslim civilians be punished and removed from their duties.
IFOR spokesman Bratt Boudreau said that IFOR's reaction to the
incidents was decisive and adequate. According to Boudreau, NATO
soldiers seized 26 pistol and three hand grenades from the Serb
police, while three AK-47 rifles were seized from the Muslim
returnees.
The village of Mahala is situated on the separation line
between the two entities and it is prohibited to carry weapons in
that area.
According to IFOR data, ten Muslim civilians were wounded in
yesterday's incident and one of them is in critical condition.
(hina) rm
301356 MET aug 96