From- The Washington Times National - Weekly Edition

27 Feb-05 Mar 95 page 21

By- Andrew Borowiec

GENEVA - International efforts to prevent a new outbreak of hostilities in former Yugoslavia are snarled by new accusations that the Muslim dominated government of Bosnia has been sacrificing the lives of its people to gain sympathetic publicity.

The latest allegations, published anonymously by a former senior staff officer of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia, further jeopardize international cohesion as the United States and its European partners seek a solution to conflicts in the Balkans.

France has called for yet another conference of the Group of Five - France, the United States, Russia, Germany and Britain - for what foreign Minister Alain Juppe calls "a last-chance scenario for everyone." Similar appeals have been made in the past, parleys were held, and fighting drags on.

The five nations have recognized tacitly that the Serbs are the masters of Bosnia's fractured battlefield and that no solution without their acquiescence and active participation is possible. However, the outside powers demand that the Serbs recognize the borders of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, in effect renouncing their dream of a Serbian union - or "Greater Serbia," to put it more menacingly.

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic - who got where he is by pushing Serbian nationalism - refused the deal, which had been grudgingly endorsed by the United States and linked to the lifting of the economic embargo against what's left of Yugoslavia, namely Serbia and Montenegro.

The latest accuser is the mysterious "Maj. Franchet," said to have served on the general staff of the U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia. His book, "Useless Blue Helmets - What I Saw in Bosnia," is being passed around the corridors of the sprawling U.N. European headquarters in Geneva and being scrutinized at the French Defence Ministry - ostensibly to identify the author who broke the rule that officers don't reveal secrets.

Bosnian Muslims have frequently complained that senior U.N. officers were pro-Serb. The purported secrets of "Maj. Franchet" undermine a number of accepted verities in effect confirming Serbian claims that have been officially rejected: The author states that the infamous May 27,1992, mortar attack on a crowd outside a Sarajevo bakery that killed 17 civilians and wounded 150 others was carefully staged by the Bosnian Muslim government.

The streets around the scene had been roped off before the incident "Maj. Franchet" asserts, so that waiting government crews could rush in to film the carnage.

An unpublished U.N. report rejected the Bosnian government's contention that the Feb. 4, 1994, Markale market explosion in Sarajevo was caused by a Serbian artillery round and speculated about a remote-controlled bomb detonated from the Muslim area. "Maj. Franchet" insists that this is what happened.

The book alleges that four days later, after a NATO ultimatum to the Serbs, U.N. observers reported seeing Muslim snipers firing on other Muslims in the vicinity of the local headquarters of the U.N. force.

Senior French intelligence officers have been quoted in French newspapers as saying that what "Maj. Franchet" asserts in his book has been known to them for some time. But nobody seems to be pressing for further investigation.

[picture caption] - President Slobodan Milosevic is aiming for a "Greater Serbia."