CROATIA and Muslim led Bosnia, both shattered by wars with superior Serb forces after declaring independence from Yugoslavia, said yesterday the end of a UN arms embargo on the region was long overdue.
The controversial five year ban formally expired on Tuesday in the wake of a UN Security Council resolution passed after the Dayton peace treaty on former Yugoslavia was signed last December. Croatia and Bosnia long objected to the embargo, saying it awarded the Yugoslav army and local Serb militias an unfair edge in wars to thwart the two republics' move to independence.
Yugoslav backed Serb forces overran a third of Croatia and 70 per cent of Bosnia, expelling hundreds of thousands of Croats and Muslim inhabitants, in fighting from 1991.
Last year, a Croatian army bolstered in part with smuggled arms circumventing the embargo recaptured almost all Serb held land and, in Bosnia, powered Muslim Croat offensives that rolled back Serb breakaway holdings to 50 per cent.
"The lifting of the embargo is a belated satisfaction for Croatia," the UN correspondent of Croatia's leading state run daily, Vjesnik, said in a commentary.
"It is a chance to remind ourselves of a highly immoral and unjust Security Council resolution which reflected the stance in 1991 of a large part of the international community."
He wrote that the embargo, enacted to curb wars that flared after Croatia and Slovenia seceded from federal Yugoslavia to escape increasing Serb domination, effectively "disarmed the victims of Greater Serbian aggression".
We were thus denied the right to self defence," he said.
Mr Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia's ambassador to the UN, also welcomed the end of the embargo while saying that that it had happened "four years too late".
"But from the perspective of the future, I think it's one essential step to bringing about a new regional balance and military stability," he said in Bosnia's capital, Sarajevo.
The Croatian newspaper Vjesnik said the message carried by the demise of the embargo was. "Those who have survived the Greater Serbian aggression may arm themselves now."