Muslims advance

By Julius Strauss in Bosanski Petrovac

17 September 1995

The victims of the battle for Bosanski Petrovac lay in a heap in the high street: two goats, a horse and a pig. They were slaughtered to celebrate after 502 Brigade of the Bosnian Fifth Corps overrun the small market town.

Nearby soldiers awaiting fresh orders played pool or table football, shouted, smoked and shot their automatic guns in the air.

The Fifth Corps, led by Gen Atif Dudakovic, had reason to be triumphant.

Trapped for four years in Bihac by the Bosnian Serbs' superior military might and starved of food and weapons, they have finally broken out of their shell and driven the Serbs out of thousands of square miles of territory.

The offensive, which captured a huge swathe of western Bosnia, is not only the swiftest seizure of land since the Bosnian war began, but the first major battlefield victory for the Muslims.

It has also opened the road to Sarajevo - for the first time since the war began a Muslim can travel to Bihac without crossing into Serb-held territory.

In Bosanski Petrovac the orders to advance came without warning. The horseplay stopped and the soldiers grabbed their guns and headed outside, stepping over empty bottles of beer and paper money bearing the Cyrillic inscription of the Serbs.

Noisy diesel engines roared into life. One group of soldiers squeezed into the back of a new Land Cruiser while another climbed into a Volkswagen that had a stiff paper Jeans advertisement in place of a back window. With cheers and shouts and more machine gun bursts ringing in their ears they drove off.

Back down the road the debris of war was being cleared away. Muslim soldiers were heaving twisted corpses - some afforded the simple dignity of a black plastic sheet - on to a waiting truck.

But the bodies are heavy and most of the soldiers have seen more dead people than they could count and the last few were shoved roughly aboard. As the truck drove off, the head of one young soldier lolled over the tailgate.

Platoon commander Muhamed Havic said: "Only the beginning was difficult. The Serbs had three fortified fronts. It took us six hours to break through. Since then it has been a rout."

And with victories on the battlefield threatening to outdate international efforts for peace, these soldiers have no time for UN maps or plans.

Senad Alibabic, Chief of Staff of 502 Brigade, said: "History has shown that we can only rely on ourselves. Ours is a military option. The Serbs only had 33 percent of the population before the war. They have done us a lot of damage and they don't deserve 50 percent of the land."

In Bihac an official said: "We will pronounce that we are for peace but on the ground we will do our job. This is tactic we learnt from Karadzic."

In the town hospital a ward has been set aside for the soldiers injured in this offensive. For Nermin Melkic, 18, injured by shrapnel during the initial attack, it is his fourth wound.

Nermin said that as soon as he is fit he will fight again. "I am young strong and I know how to fight. Of course I will return to the battlefield."

Nearby lay Vlada, a Serb from near Sarajevo, who was drafted to fight the Muslim advance. His leg was shattered by one of Nermin's bullets in the first hour of the offensive.

Outside an armed guard kept watch while all around him medical staff swapped the latest news from the battlefield. "We have taken Mrkonjic Grad," a nurse announced triumphantly.

Down the road is the headquarters of the Bosnian Fifth Corps. Now that the Serbs had been pushed back out of artillery range, the protective sandbags were coming down.

Serbian soldiers captured last month on the edge of the town had been detailed to do the work.