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Bosnia, Croatia Praise End of Arms Embargo
‘I think it's one essential step to bringing
‘It is a chance to remind ourselves of a highly immoral
ZAGREB, June 19 (Reuters) - Croatia and Muslim-led Bosnia, both shattered by wars with superior Serb forces after declaring independence from Yugoslavia, said on Wednesday the end of a U.N. arms embargo on the region was long overdue. The controversial five-year-old ban formally expired on Tuesday in the wake of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed after the Dayton peace treaty on former Yugoslavia was signed last December.
Croatia and Bosnia had long objected to the embargo, saying that it gave the Yugoslav army and local Serb militias an unfair advantage in wars to frustrate the two republics' move to independence. Yugoslav-backed Serb forces overran a third of Croatia and 70 percent of Bosnia, expelling hundreds of thousands of Croats and Muslim inhabitants, in fighting from 1991.
Last year, a Croatian army bolstered in part with smuggled arms circumventing the embargo recaptured almost all Serb-held land and, in Bosnia, powered Muslim-Croat offensives that rolled back Serb breakaway holdings to 50 percent.
"The lifting of the embargo is a belated satisfaction for Croatia," the United Nations correspondent of Croatia's leading state-run daily Vjesnik said in a commentary. "It is a chance to remind ourselves of a highly immoral and unjust Security Council resolution which reflected the stance in 1991 of a large part of the international community."
He wrote that the embargo, enacted to curb wars that flared after Croatia and Slovenia seceded from federal Yugoslavia to escape increasing Serb domination, effectively "disarmed the victims of Greater Serbian aggression. We were thus denied the right to self-defence," he said.
Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia's ambassador to the United Nations, also welcomed the end of the embargo while saying that that it happened "four years too late." "But from the perspective of the future, I think it's one essential step to bringing about a new regional balance and military stability," he said in Bosnia's capital Sarajevo. Sacirbey said the U.N. move, combined with a U.S.-sponsored "equip-and-train" programme for Bosnia's postwar Muslim-Croat federation army and an arms-control pact reached by former Yugoslavia's ethnic parties last week in Florence, would help "prevent future war and provide for lasting peace."
The Croatian newspaper Vjesnik said the message carried by the demise of the embargo was: "Those who have survived the Greater Serbian aggression may arm themselves now."
In fact, Croatian, Bosnian Croat and Muslim forces violated the embargo from the outset in desperate efforts to approach parity with the Serbs, slipping in large amounts of arms and materiel apart from heavy weapons like tanks and artillery.
The United States, which lobbied for years for a repeal of the embargo against European resistance, recently confirmed longtime rumours that it had turned a blind eye to rampant arms smuggling by Croatia. U.S. officials argued that to blow the whistle on arms pouring in from maverick nations like Iran would have betrayed Croatia and Bosnia's Muslim-led central government whose fight against the Serbs had widespread international support.
Washington's European allies publicly opposed lifting the embargo, concerned that this would heighten the war and imperil their troops in a 1992-95 U.N. humanitarian force in Bosnia, but many ended up winking at smuggling too, analysts said.
Croatian military analyst Fran Visnar said the end of the embargo meant Croatia could build its army into a state of the art force by 2000, the first of its kind in former Yugoslavia. But a senior diplomat said Western states, at least, may now unilaterally limit arms sales to former Yugoslavia until they are sure the new peace is stable. |
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