TOMAHAWKS USED AGAINST SERB TARGETS IN BOSNIA

The sophisticated Tomahawk cruise missile is a weapon of choice for the U.S. assault of Libya's regime of Muammar Gaddafi (see Sky News video clip or Daily Mail photos). Soon, Gaddafi will fall and the war will be over. There will be no U.S. casualties thanks to the sophisticated weapons like Tomahawk cruise missiles. If the US Army had decided to use Tomahawks against the Serb fascists in Bosnia during the fall of Srebrenica, the ensuing genocide could have been avoided.

Exactly two months after the fall of Srebrenica, the United States launched 13 Tomahawks against Serbian terrorists in Bosnia. Here is a report from the newspaper archive, courtesy of Bosnian Genocide Blog:

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, p.Front, 8A

11 September 1995.

By Liam McDowall

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — A U.S. warship in the Adriatic Sea fired 13 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Bosnian Serb anti-aircraft missile sites Sunday in northern Bosnia, NATO and U.S. military officials said.

The effect of the missiles fired by the cruiser USS Normandy was not immediately known, said NATO spokesman Maj. Panagiotis Theodorakidis.

Minutes after the missiles were launched, a wave of FA-18 jets took off from the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt carrying 2,000-pound “smart bombs,” according to NATO officials in Naples, Italy.

There was no immediate word on their target.

The assault marked the first use of cruise missiles in NATO’s 12-day-old campaign to force the Serb rebels to pull their artillery and other heavy weapons away from Sarajevo and to ease their pressure on other U.N. “safe areas” such as Tuzla.

The Tomahawks were fired at Serb surface-to-air missile sites in the Banja Luka area, Navy spokesman Lt. Conrad Chun said in Washington. Tomahawks were last used in 1993, when the Navy fired 26 of them at Baghdad, Iraq.

Air Force Capt. Scott O’Grady was shot down by a Serb missile on June 2 while he was on a NATO mission to enforce the ban on flights over Bosnia. He was rescued six days later.

“If we’re proving anything to the Serbs, it’s that we can have accurate strikes at all times and all weather and with no pilots,” said Capt. Jim Mitchell, the chief spokesman for NATO.

He said there could be more attacks if NATO pilots still consider Serb anti-aircraft systems to be a threat, Mitchell said. “If we need to use the Tomahawks again, we will,” he said in Naples.

Also Sunday, Bosnian Serbs shelled the U.N.-controlled Tuzla airport and NATO retaliated swiftly with airstrikes, destroying rebel positions near the northeastern city.

Despite morning cloud cover, NATO warplanes also carried out airstrikes Sunday in other parts of Bosnia, said Franco Veltri, a NATO spokesman in Naples.

Mitchell said the decision to use the missiles did not represent a change in the mission being carried out by NATO and the United Nations, nor in the targets being attacked.

Earlier Sunday, the Belgrade-based news agency Tanjug quoted Bosnian Serb officials as saying NATO warplanes had been in action several times overnight in the region around Banja Luka.

Since Aug. 30, NATO has carried out heavy attacks against a broad array of Serb targets across Bosnia, including ammunition depots and command and communication centers.

NATO and the U.N. have been trying to force Bosnian Serbs to withdraw their heavy weapons from the 12.5-mile exclusion zone around Sarajevo.

Bosnian Serb military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic met Sunday with Gen. Bernard Janvier, the U.N. commander in former Yugoslavia, but refused to withdraw Serb guns around Sarajevo, provoking renewed airstrikes, the French Defense Ministry announced.

The talks had been arranged by French President Jacques Chirac, who earlier Sunday had demanded that NATO suspend its attacks for several hours to let the Serbs agree to withdraw their guns.

After the talks failed to bring agreement, Chirac said NATO raids would go on as long as the Serbs refuse to bow to U.N. demands.

“We will not weaken vis-a-vis the Bosnian Serbs who are the aggressors,” he said. “I ask them (Bosnian Serbs) to stop their bombardments, withdraw their heavy arms surrounding Sarajevo and assure the freedom of circulation by road and by the Sarajevo airport. As long as they have not done that, we will take the necessary military measures.”

Igor Ivanov, Russia’s first deputy foreign minister, had been quoted by Moscow’s ITAR-Tass news agency as saying that Mladic has no plans to pull back his weapons.

Ivanov, who met with the Bosnian Serb commander Saturday in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, said Mladic told him the weapons were needed to defend Bosnian Serb civilians.

Bosnian Serb nationalist media have claimed that 100 to 200 civilians have been killed since NATO began bombing Serb targets in retaliation for a mortar attack on Sarajevo’s central market that killed 38 people.