– NPR News – September 5, 1995 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
On this September 5th the world is holding it’s collective breath. On September 5th in 1995 the world was looking at the situation in the region formerly known as Yugoslavia and that nightmare the ensued after the death of Marshal Josip Broz Tito in 1980 – the leader referred to as “the glue that held it all together” – the six republics known as Yugoslavia.
The glue eventually came apart at the seams, the intense settling of scores and the spread of religious factions exploded and turned the entire area into a slice of hell not witnessed since the darkest days of World War 2. Ethnic Cleansing became a new word in our lexicon of shock and horror in the mid-1990s. Killing was on a mass scale.
NATO air strikes – seeking an end to the Serb siege, withdrawal of heavy Serb guns 12½ miles from the capital’s center and reopening of Sarajevo’s airport – will go a long way to tilting the military balance around the Bosnian capital toward the Muslims for the first time since war erupted in April 1992. Once that happens, these officials say, Serb claims on a part of the city in any peace deal will weaken, increasing the likelihood that the capital will be a Muslim-run city. But in exchange for the upper hand around Sarajevo, Muslims will be forced to reconsider their refusal to surrender the isolated Muslim “safe area” of Gorazde to the Serbs.
The U.S. and NATO attempted to broker a peace settlement but fighting continued before the U.S. staged a number of bombing campaigns on Bosnian Serb sites, finally bringing about the Dayton Agreement in December. But that was a ways off.
Sarajevo and Gorazde were the keys to the peace process in Bosnia because the hardest part of concluding a deal here was the struggle for the map. While the parties generally have agreed to splitting Bosnia equally, the actual breakdown was far clear.
The news on this day was about the war in Bosnia as relayed by NPR on September 5, 1995.
