Death by Well-Intentioned Rescue

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AFTER MONTHS OF SURVIVING BULLETS AND HUNger, Bosnia's Muslims faced a new and particularly cruel deathtrap -- the lure of escape. At least 12 were killed, nearly all of them women and children, in the tumult of evacuating some 4,300 civilians from the besieged town of Srebrenica by two United Nations truck convoys. Desperate to escape a Serbian blockade, loads of as many as 180 people swarmed aboard the transport vehicles designed to carry sacks of food, unwittingly crushing to death the small and weak in the process. Others died of suffocation during the eight-hour journey to Tuzla. Horrified U.N. officials, already smarting under accusations of abetting the Serb aim of ethnic cleansing by evacuating Muslims, temporarily called off further convoys. There was nothing to dissuade them from their pessimism in the rejection by the Serb nationalist parliament in Bosnia of the Vance-Owen peace plan, approved not only by other factions but, conditionally, by their own leader.

Meanwhile in Sarajevo, in the first war-crimes trial growing out of the bloody civil war, two ethnic Serbs were sentenced by a Bosnian military court to death by firing squad. One of them, Borislav Herak, admitted to murdering 35 Muslims, 12 of them women he raped first. (See related story on page 38.)