MORTAR BLAST KILLS 68 IN SARAJEVO MARKET

SARAJEVO, 1994-02-05. — A mortar shell exploded in Sarajevo’s crowded Markale market shortly after noon today, killing at least 68 people and wounding more than 140. The blast struck civilians gathered at one of the surviving centres of ordinary commerce in this besieged capital. Market stalls and the surrounding pavement were turned into a casualty station as survivors and rescuers carried the injured towards vehicles. The scale of the slaughter has brought renewed urgency to the question confronting the United Nations and Western governments: what protection, beyond declarations and relief deliveries, can they provide for Sarajevo’s inhabitants?

The explosion occurred at approximately 12.10 p.m., when the market was busy. Television pictures showed bodies among the stalls and rescuers struggling to remove the wounded. Civilian vehicles joined the evacuation to hospitals already working under the restrictions imposed by the siege. The weapon has been identified as a 120-millimetre mortar shell. Its explosion in a densely occupied public space produced casualties far beyond those of many individual bombardments that have become part of the city’s daily experience. For families searching hospitals and casualty lists, the immediate concern is not diplomacy but whether missing relatives have survived.

Responsibility for the shell remains contested tonight. The Bosnian Government blames the Bosnian Serb forces surrounding Sarajevo; the Bosnian Serb side denies responsibility. United Nations personnel are investigating, and no conclusive public finding about the firing position is available. The distinction matters in a city where military accusations are immediately carried into international negotiations. It does not diminish what is established: a heavy explosive projectile struck a civilian market, and scores of people who had gathered there to buy, sell or find provisions are dead. Claims about the gun crew must be kept separate from those facts.

Sarajevo has been under siege since the spring of 1992, following Bosnia and Herzegovina’s declaration of independence and the outbreak of war. Bosnian Serb forces occupy commanding positions around much of the city, while the Bosnian Government retains its centre. Artillery fire and sniping have made streets, tram routes and queues dangerous. Water, electricity, fuel and food supplies have repeatedly been interrupted. International relief operations sustain a large part of the population, but the delivery of supplies does not ensure that residents can cross a street or enter a market without coming under fire.

Markale’s importance is therefore greater than its place in the city’s commercial life might suggest in peacetime. Markets provide opportunities to obtain scarce goods and to maintain some exchange between households in an economy broken by war. They also draw people together in exposed spaces. Today’s shell struck precisely that point of vulnerability. The attack has immediate consequences for the movement of provisions as well as for the hospitals: fear of another bombardment may keep buyers, traders and those seeking necessities away from public gathering places. There can be no ordinary commercial confidence where an errand for food entails such danger.

The United Nations Security Council formally addressed this danger last May. Resolution 824 declared that Sarajevo and several other threatened Bosnian towns should be treated as “safe areas” and should be “free from armed attacks and from any other hostile act.” Those words now stand against the pictures from Markale. The designation has not removed the weapons around the capital or ended the bombardments. Nor has it given the civilian population a reliable boundary behind which it can resume normal life. Today’s deaths expose the gulf between the Council’s declared protection and the security actually experienced on the ground.

A further resolution adopted in June authorised the United Nations Protection Force, acting in self-defence, to take necessary measures in specified circumstances, including “in reply to bombardments against the safe areas.” It also provided a basis for supporting air power. But the existence of authority does not automatically produce a military response. Commanders must establish what has happened, identify possible targets and consider the safety of troops and relief operations. Those practical questions are now inseparable from a political one: whether another mass killing will bring a different application of powers that the Security Council has already approved.

Western policy has so far combined humanitarian assistance, sanctions, diplomatic negotiation and limited military measures rather than a general intervention in the Bosnian war. NATO aircraft enforce a prohibition on unauthorised military flights over Bosnia, but today’s explosion illustrates the limits of an air exclusion regime against weapons fired from the ground. A mortar does not have to cross an international frontier or challenge a patrol aircraft to reach a crowded street. Any proposal to use air power against such attacks must therefore go beyond keeping hostile aircraft out of the sky and confront the forces and weapons operating around the city.

The political pressure created by the massacre is sharpened by its visibility. Television crews have recorded the aftermath, carrying images of Sarajevo’s dead and wounded to audiences far beyond Bosnia. Governments supporting the international operation must now explain not merely their intentions but the results of their policy. Yet pressure for action does not settle what action would accomplish. Attacks on military positions could carry risks for peacekeepers and aid workers; inaction leaves civilians exposed to further bombardment. Neither consideration can be dismissed, and neither supplies an easy answer to the immediate demand for protection.

The slaughter also bears directly upon negotiations over Bosnia’s future. The conflict involves territory, the authority of the internationally recognised government and competing proposals for political division. For civilians in Sarajevo, those arguments are conducted while the means of daily survival remain vulnerable to military force. A settlement discussed abroad offers little present reassurance to someone deciding whether to join a queue at home. Today’s attack threatens to deepen the distrust surrounding negotiations and strengthens the urgency of obtaining concrete security arrangements, rather than assurances whose enforcement remains uncertain.

Tonight the immediate tasks are to treat the wounded, identify the dead and establish where the shell was fired. Beyond them lies a decision for the governments and institutions that have undertaken to protect Sarajevo without entering a full-scale war. No new promise can reverse what happened at Markale, and no military option can be judged solely by the strength of the language used to announce it. The test will be whether residents can obtain food, move through their neighbourhoods and gather in public without facing another such explosion. For now, the city’s declared safety remains a promise its market dead did not enjoy.