U.N. Negotiates Safe Passage for Aid to Sarajevo

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina â€”  U.N. peacekeepers said Saturday that the warring parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina have agreed to allow safe passage for aid convoys from the Sarajevo airport to the hungry city.

Bosnia’s president, Alija Izetbegovic, meanwhile, reportedly made a fresh appeal for Western intervention to halt the fighting.

Izetbegovic asked for an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council on the fighting and appealed anew for intervention.

Sporadic shelling continued in the besieged capital, and mortar rounds fell near the headquarters and barracks of the U.N. peacekeeping force. Sniper attacks intensified Saturday, and at least three people were killed.

Also, a U.N. convoy that had been stranded for four days on mine-strewn roads outside Sarajevo finally reached the city.

Elsewhere in Bosnia, Serb forces advanced on Gorazde, a town 30 miles south of Sarajevo to which 30,000 refugees have fled from the fighting, Sarajevo media said.

“In God’s sake, on behalf of civilization . . . please help us,� a ham radio operator pleaded in a transmission monitored by the Bosnian territorial defense.

Forward defense positions in Gorazde were said to be under heavy artillery fire with a Serbian tank column approaching. The report could not be independently confirmed.

Sarajevo radio said Bosnian Commander Sefer Halilovic ordered units from eastern Bosnia to march to Gorazde.

Ethnic Serbs have been fighting to take control of newly independent Bosnia from the Muslim and Croat majority that split with Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia.

Bosnian authorities say about 7,500 people have been killed and Serbs have captured two-thirds of the republic’s territory.

Serbia, widely blamed for fomenting the 4 1/2-month-old civil war, is the target of United Nations economic sanctions, which Western nations were moving to tighten.