Red Cross Plans Big Evacuation From Sarajevo

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  Red Cross officials made plans Sunday to evacuate 3,000 women and children from the besieged Bosnian capital, where food and fuel are desperately short.

Pava Barisic, an official with the Red Cross in Sarajevo, said relief workers were trying to organize a convoy to carry 3,000 women and children out of the capital Tuesday.

Intense fighting was reported overnight around the city, and battles raged Sunday in an arc of land linking Serbian territories in the north.

The strategic northern border region near Croatia has been the scene of some of the most intense battles of late, particularly since last Tuesday, when Serbs captured the key city of Bosanski Brod.

The Muslim-held town of Gradacac, one of the few northern centers preventing the Serbs from taking total control of a corridor running along the Croatian border, came under heavy artillery fire Sunday, and its Serbian attackers moved more troops and weapons toward it, Croatian Radio reported.

But for the first time since the U.N. Security Council banned military flights over the breakaway Yugoslav republic last week, there were no reports that Serbs had staged air raids on Muslim-held cities.

In Serbia, the dominant partner in the new Yugoslavia, voters went to the polls to decide whether parliamentary and presidential elections should be moved up. Opponents view the hastily called referendum as a ploy by hard-liners to hold onto power despite worldwide condemnation of Yugoslavia’s role in instigating the ethnic bloodshed in Bosnia.