950803

First UN

troops return

from Zepa

SARAJEVO: The first batch of UN peacekeepers to withdraw from the fallen UN safe area of Zepa arrived in Sarajevo early Thursday, a UN official said.

"The Ukrainian, Russian, British and French reinforcements returned safely to Sarajevo at 2:00 a.m. The Ukrainian contingent in Zepa is en route and is expected later this morning," Un spokesman Chris Vernon said.

UN commanders took the dicision Wednesday to withdraw the entire UN presence of over 200 peacekeepers from Zepa following a demand from Paris that the French UN soldiers be pulled out.

Zepa fell to the Bosnian Serbs last month after they took Srebrenica, another UN-declared safe area in eastern Bosnia. The 79 Ukrainian peacekeepers deployed in Zepa were reinforced by the other troops to help monitor the Serb expulsion of the enclave's population.

Several hundreds of civilians and the remnants of the government defenders are thought to be in the hills where they are currently being chased by Bosnian Serb forces who have burnt and looted the town and surrounding villages.-AFP