Croatia Keeps Shrinking As Serbs Attack
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday September 5, 1991
ZAGREB, Thursday: The Yugoslav People's Army (YPA) and Serbian rebels have consolidated their hold on more than a third of Croatia by forcing the closure of the main Zagreb-Belgrade highway.
The breadbasket region of Slavonia is now isolated from Zagreb and heavy mortar barrages on towns and villages in the south, apparently designed to secure Serbian access to the Adriatic, have isolated other communities from the capital.
In a series of attacks that claimed about 20 lives across the republic, the Serbs proved the military advantage of their co-operation with the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army and again demonstrated Croatia's inability to defend the territory for which it pleads international recognition.
The assaults also underscored Serbian nationalist aspirations to shrink Croatia, annexing huge tracts of rich farm country, desolate mountain territory and a choice coastal strip in what the Croatian deputy Interior Minister Milan Brezac described as the attempted laying down of the borders of a "new, expanded Serbia".
Last night the Zagreb-Belgrade highway - the main link between the republics and between Western Europe and Turkey and Greece - was deserted.
Zagreb is increasingly isolated. Apart from the closure of the highway, Federal authorities last week forced the shutdown of its international airport after the seizure of a weapons consignment on a Ugandan aircraft. An anonymous threat of sabotage has forced the closure of the main east-west rail link.
The fighting has doused European Community hopes of effective negotiations at a Yugoslav peace conference planned in The Hague on Saturday.
The likelihood of failure provoked a bitter warning yesterday from the German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, that Germany would recognise Croatia and the other break-away republic, Slovenia, if the fighting did not stop.
"The hour of this recognition nears with every shot your cannons and tanks fire," he said. "We will not be able to stand by and watch any longer."
He also suggested that Germany would offer the two republics economic aid and threatened sanctions against Belgrade.
So far, Croatia is the only republic to confirm that it will attend the conference, proposed as the start of a two-month period of international arbitration on the future of the federation.
The Serbs have little to gain by attending. They already control most of the territory they claim and it is conceivable that the violence has been heightened this week in a deliberate effort to scupper the conference.
The now-isolated Croatian city of Osijek was yesterday subjected to further attacks and Serb units were reportedly moving to surround the community which daily is forced to retreat to makeshift basement bomb-shelters.
Croatians are convinced that a major assault is imminent - a Serb spokesman, Mr Lazar Macura, this week prediced that Osijek would soon be"liberated".
In Sisak, in central Croatia, six mortars were lobbed dangerously, but with little effect, into an operating oil refinery. A steel works also came under attack. Croatian authorities claimed they had been launched from a nearby YPA base.
© 1991 Sydney Morning Herald