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Like puddles drying on a sunny day, the patches of Muslim-held territory are getting smaller on the maps of Bosnia and Herzegovina that illustrate Serb and Croat aggression. As of this writing, the territory consists of a crescent-shaped chunk of land from Tuzla to Zenica, the surrounded city of Sarajevo, the three besieged towns of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde and the northwestern horn of Bosnia, called Bihaki djep, the Bihac pocket.
The war started in Bihac on June 12, 1992, when the Serbs turned their guns on the hills surrounding the town and started shelling it. I first came here last August, and the shelling was heavy. Serb commanders wanted to force all the Muslims out and bring 150,000 Serbs in; this would have linked Krajina, the territory they had grabbed from the Croats, with the territory they were in the process of grabbing from Bosnia.
Yet after one year, Biha is still in Muslim hands. And with any luck it will remain so. Each of the successive peace plans devised to end the war has left the pocket to the Muslims: the now-defunct Vance-Owen peace plan had it as "Province Number One," earmarked for the Muslims; and under the U.N.'s subsequent "safe zones" Bihac is on the short list again, together with Sarajevo, Tuzla and the three besieged enclaves. (This plan too is probably doomed, however, because the U.N. has not backed it with any threat of force and only timidly wagged its blue finger at Radovan Karadzic, the Serb nationalists' leader.) Even under the blunt Serbo-Croatian plan to partition Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bihac would apparently remain a Muslim-controlled territory, administered by the Bosnian government.
In Bihac the sheer mention of "safe zones" infuriates Ramiz Drekovic, the commander of the Fifth Bosnian Army Corps. His bushy eyebrows meet as he frowns and goes off on a verbal crusade against the world: "Reservations, that is what you want....Europe and even America are afraid of Karadzic....You recognized us in order to destroy us, but this will not stand....Just let Boutros-Boutros Ghali try to disarm us as he did in Srebrenica, just let him try." And bang! bang! his fist hits...