Burns on the Tongue

In the midst of the international scandal caused by the then published information about "concentration camps" in which Bosnian Serbs leader Radovan Karadzic's forces in Bosnia held Muslims, at a press conference in Belgrade the foreign minister of the Serbian Republic said that in the event of a western military intervention in Bosnia, the Serbs could retaliate by carrying out a series of terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants and other similar targets in the West. To all intents and purposes, the minister spoke off his head and without a previous agreement with the leadership of the Serbian forces in Bosnia; the statement was made in a hypothetical form and it mostly made those familiar with the state of affairs here grin. However, it did not go into thin air. The matter was stored in the memory of journalists and intelligence agencies. Too easily spoken words usually boomerang and haunt their authors. At the time when this was said, it seemed as if its intention was to finally "finish off" the already catastrophic image of the Bosnian Serbs in the world. Its echo is coming back now when American planes are flying above Bosnia and dropping their loads (albeit humanitarian), and when the American police is conducting an investigation of the biggest terrorist act on its soil in the past few decades, and it does not know where to start. In cases such as the explosion at the World Trade Center in New York, both journalists and the police equally try to satisfy the angry public, even with incomplete and hypothetical answers. For this reason, a telephone call by some alleged and until now unknown Serbian terrorist organization came in very handy: both journalists and policemen immediately put "two and two" together and the widely read international weekly "Time" informed its readers throughout the world that all this fits into "the threat by Serbian nationalists that they would bomb west European nuclear power plants in the event of an American military intervention in Yugoslavia".