Thousands of weary and rain-drenched Bosnian refugees were crowded into a narrow strip of no man's land Friday, and U.N. officials feared a standoff with Croatian police could spin out of control.
Croatia, already burdened with 400,000 refugees from the war in neighboring Bosnia and its own battle for secession from Yugoslavia, has said it could not accept them.But the Bosnian refugees, most of them Muslim, poured into the overcrowded corridor separating Serb-held land from Croat-held land after the Bosnian army routed forces loyal to a renegade Muslim commander last weekend.
The Muslim-led Bosnian government has promised there will be no reprisals if the refugees return to their homes in Velika Kladusa, in the Bihac pocket of northwestern Bosnia. U.N. officials who have visited Velika Kladusa say the town is safe, and civilians there say they have not been mistreated.
But the refugees in Turanj, 30 miles of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, believe the strident propaganda of the defeated rebel leader, Fikret Abdic, who says they face retaliation if they go home.
"We shall never go back," Dzemal Haris, 35 said. "We would rather die here."
Abdic, a wealthy local businessman, declared the Bihac pocket's independence from the Sarajevo government last fall and made his own peace with Serbs who surround the Muslim enclave.
It is unclear why Abdic, whose whereabouts are not known, continues to warn refugees not to return home.
A U.N. aid official in Sarajevo, Peter Kessler, said the United Nations fears that "these people on the ground at Turanj have no freedom of choice, and that they are sitting out in the rain, perhaps due to the will exerted by Abdic authorities."
Refugees were sleeping under trucks and buses, or building tents of wood and plastic sheeting. Others sought shelter from persistent rain in bombed-out buildings abandoned after Croatia's 1991 war with rebel Serbs. Drinking water is scarce and sanitation is poor.
U.N. officials said 10,000 to 14,000 people were in the no man's land, but journalists there said the number appeared to be about 6,000. At least 16,000 more were at an abandoned chicken farm in Batnoga to the southwest.