Secret U.N. Food Pipeline Feeds Bosnia Divisiveness

ZAGREB, Croatia —  A clandestine food pipeline operated by U.N. troops and a black-market businessman appears to have been at least partly responsible for setting Muslims against each other in the isolated corner of Bosnia-Herzegovina known as the Bihac pocket.

The operation by some of the 700 French troops assigned to the Bihac region was intended to pressure Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic into capitulating to the ethnic division of his country by aiding a political rival, according to some U.N. refugee officials.

While the secret shuttle served humanitarian interests by feeding people in the Serb-besieged pocket, it also drummed up popular support for Bihac businessman Fikret Abdic, seen as a more malleable figure than Izetbegovic.

Abdic, who has already served time for corruption and is under investigation for alleged fraud in Austria, has been the driving force behind a bloody rebellion against the Sarajevo government over the last 10 days.

The commander of U.N. forces in the Balkans, French Gen. Jean Cot, confirmed the existence of the pipeline. In an interview Saturday, he said his troops in the Bihac pocket “were able to go very far in providing humanitarian assistance,” but he declined to discuss the alleged political motive for the operation.

U.N. officials who gave details of the secret aid corridor say it could not have grown so large or been operated so brazenly without the highest-level U.N. authorization.

Western diplomats in this Croatian capital, which the French troops use as a staging ground for the convoys, said the U.N. Protection Force and European Community mediator Lord Owen have apparently collaborated in the operation to control the hearts and minds of some Bosnians through their stomachs.

U.N. officials publicly deny that either Owen or fellow mediator Thorvald Stoltenberg--who have been trying to broker a peace accord in Bosnia--encouraged the unofficial network that seems to have emboldened Abdic to launch his bid for power.

“The co-chairmen have had absolutely no role to play in influencing relief supplies going into Bihac,” said the mediators’ spokesman, John Mills.

But other U.N. sources contend that Owen pulled strings with the U.N. command staff here that allowed food to become a factor in the latest factional violence to beset Bosnia.

The Bihac pocket is home to about 300,000 Bosnians, mostly Muslim Slavs, who are entirely surrounded by Serbian nationalist forces who have conquered the adjacent swaths of Croatian and Bosnian territory.

U.N. military observers say the Serbian rebels have largely left the Bihac region alone because it is too big to overrun without drawing troops and hardware from more strategic regions, and because Abdic has nurtured mutually beneficial trade relationships with both the Croatian government here and the Serbian nationalists in the occupied regions around Bihac.

“It’s simple. He pays off both sides,” one U.N. official said of Abdic, whose privately arranged shipments manage to make their way in U.N. military vehicles without the delays encountered by humanitarian convoys elsewhere in Bosnia.

Abdic has long been the most powerful figure in the Bihac region, where he founded a massive food-processing complex known as Agrokomerc that accounts for about half of the region’s economy. Agrokomerc has continued to function despite more than two years of armed conflict churning just outside the pocket.

Abdic’s popularity has soared during the past months because he is credited with keeping the local cupboards full through his clout with the U.N. peacekeepers and longtime contacts in black markets.

Owen is credited with having enhanced Abdic’s standing among the Bihac Muslims by inviting him to Geneva in June to negotiate in the name of the Bosnian government after Izetbegovic refused to discuss proposals for ethnic partitioning of the country.

“Owen created Abdic, probably to support what could be a second force in Bosnian politics,” said a U.N. official here, noting that a senior British Foreign Office staffer now working with Owen has made at least three visits to the Bihac pocket since March.

According to Ejub Topic, a Bihac government leader allied with Abdic who explained the food convoy operation this past summer, funds were collected for humanitarian aid through Agrokomerc offices abroad. Food supplies were purchased in Croatia and Austria and trucked by the French peacekeepers from Zagreb to Agrokomerc headquarters in Velika Kladusa, nearly 100 miles away and through the heart of Serb-occupied Croatia.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, by contrast, has been persistently thwarted in its efforts to get relief goods across the siege lines. Only 11% of the supplies prepared for delivery to Bihac in September got past the Serbian checkpoints, said Peter Kessler, a spokesman for the relief agency.

One UNHCR source said the French troops have delivered at least three times the volume of relief goods to the Bihac pocket as has UNHCR, or about 10,000 tons per month.

“Clearly there has been an order on the part of the French to assist Abdic, and it all had to have been sanctioned at a fairly high level,” the official said.

Abdic’s recent attempt to create his own fiefdom has heightened diplomatic concerns that his supporters may have sparked trouble instead of keeping peace.

They believe that Abdic was being encouraged by Owen to threaten Izetbegovic with secession unless the Bosnian president agreed to a proposed peace plan mediated by Owen and Stoltenberg that would have divided Bosnia into three ethnic ministates.

But when Izetbegovic refused to sign the deal he considered a death warrant for his once-integrated country, Abdic followed through on his threat of rebellion.

“Abdic is his own player, and I don’t think Owen fully realized that when he propped him up to challenge Izetbegovic,” said a Western intelligence source who has traveled widely around the areas of conflict in Bosnia and Croatia.

On Sept. 29, the same day the Bosnian Parliament rejected the ethnic partitioning plan, Abdic declared his corner of Bosnia to be the independent Republic of Western Bosnia, sparking an aggressive crackdown by the Bihac-based 5th Army Corps that remained loyal to Izetbegovic.

At least nine people were killed in armed clashes for control of key installations, and U.N. military sources said 2,500 5th Corps troops defected to support Abdic.

Tensions eased somewhat this weekend, and the commander for U.N. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, Gen. Francis Briquemont, has attempted to open negotiations between the Izetbegovic and Abdic factions to restore order to Bihac.

Ironically, it may have been the food factor that led to the sudden lull in fighting.

Izetbegovic loyalists from 5th Corps headquarters in the city of Bihac agreed to meet with the U.N. mediation team brought in by Briquemont after caches of food and cigarettes were delivered to them by well-supplied Abdic forces, said Cedric Thornberry, deputy chief of U.N. mission in the Balkans.

After an eight-day standoff during which the government forces presumably received none of the aid stockpiles controlled by Abdic, the staples allowed through Thursday “were well accepted,” Thornberry said.