Key supply routes to millions of needy Bosnians beset by war and winter cold remained blocked today, despite an accord by leaders of Bosnia's three warring sides to open them.
U.N. officials conceded it could take a few days for word of the pact signed Thursday in Geneva to reach local military commanders and for aid trucks to be loaded. Similar agreements have collapsed previously because local commanders ignored them.Cmdr. Idesbald van Biesebroeck, a U.N. forces spokesman in Sarajevo, said a key north-south route through the central Bosnian towns of Prozor and Gornji Vakuf was still blocked by Croat militias.
"We may have to wait until tomorrow to see any change in the mentality," he said.
U.N. aid deliveries to central Bosnia were suspended three weeks ago after a Danish driver was killed by gunfire blamed on troops of Bosnia's Muslim-led government. It was the latest in a string of attacks on aid convoys.
On Thursday, Serbs citing "bad road conditions" held up convoys bound for the Muslim enclaves of Tuzla and Gorazde in eastern Bosnia, said Peter Kessler, a U.N. relief spokesman in Zagreb, Croatia.
"We are willing to risk the trucks if there are a few bumps in the road," he said.
He said he found it "significant" the Serbs stopped the convoys the same day their leader was in Geneva signing the accord on humanitarian aid. The trucks remained stalled today, he said.
In the agreement signed in Geneva, the leaders of Bosnian Serb and Croat nationalists and the government pledged to stop harassing convoys and allow winter supplies to reach nearly 3 million civilians threatened by cold and starvation.
The U.N. high commissioner for refugees, Sadako Ogata of Japan, warned that it "was the last chance for the parties to avert disaster."
War broke out 19 months ago when Serbs, who now control about 70 percent of Bosnia, rebelled over the republic's secession from Yugoslavia.
The Bosnian government's Institute of Public Health today issued new estimates of war casualties: 141,398 killed, missing or dead of malnutrition and cold and 157,827 wounded. The institute said that the figures covered only areas where the government could compile statistics and that the overall death toll was estimated at more than 200,000.