War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  To the right of the hospital sat the squat, orange brick-covered health clinic where Ilijaz worked. People frequently took breaks to smoke and talk on the steps of its verandah. Josip Broz “Tito” had died a decade previously, but no one had the heart to remove a giant poster of the adored leader from the lobby window. “Comrade Tito,” read the front page of a Srebrenica newspaper, reporting his death, “we swear to you that we will not turn off your road.” The eyes in his magnified head stared vaguely in the direction of Bratunac.

  From the clinic’s porch, Ilijaz had a view of Srebrenica’s main street, the square PTT—post-telephone-telegraph—building and the town’s only gas station. Noisy little cars drove by, and, when the weather was fair, men clad in blue jeans and women dressed in skirts and light summer blouses strolled past. Some older women wore kerchiefs on their heads and the patterned bloomers, called dimije, of Muslim villagers. They sauntered with the relaxed posture of people who could predict the contour of every inch of road in the small city and who recognized just about everyone who passed.

  Once every hour, as cars zoomed by, hammers clanked, and buzz saws buzzed at the construction site of a new school, bells chimed from the white Orthodox church overlooking the town from a hill. The deep clanging “ding, dong-dong” set roosters crowing and dogs barking. Five times a day, praises of Allah spun out of the loudspeakers atop Srebrenica’s five minarets to join the cacophony.

  Organized health care in Srebrenica stretched at least as far back as the late nineteenth century when the area—then backward and unindustrialized—came under the governance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrians mapped the area, developed its forestry industry, paved its main road, and, knowing that Srebrenica had been a mining town in medieval times (its current name means silver, its Latin name was “Argentaria,” and in the Middle Ages it was the most prosperous inland town in all of the western Balkans), explored its mineral resources. They erected a one-story hospital to serve a large area of villages along the Drina River. Most of its physicians and nurses came from neighboring Serbia. During World War I, Srebrenica’s reputed healing waters, known since Roman times and analyzed by the Austrians, were used to treat injured soldiers. The waters were bottled for export and a spa was built. After the war, health tourists thronged into Srebrenica for physician-administered bathing treatments in the waters of the medicinal springs on the far southern end of town.

  During World War II, Srebrenica and the surrounding villages of Muslims and Serbs switched hands frequently between forces loyal to royalist Serb Chetniks, communist Partisans, fascist Croat Ustashe and their allies, Muslim Handžars. Acts of violence took place, even near the hospital, but locals also saved one another. In 1942, Ustashe authorities interned 3,000 Serbs from the district of Srebrenica in the hospital vicinity, but local Muslims intervened to prevent their execution. In 1943, as part of widespread massacres and killings by Ustashe in revenge for a Partisan attempt to take the area, two Muslim nurses were killed near the hospital. Srebrenica was liberated by the pan-Yugoslavist Partisans late in the war, on March 11, 1945, which came to be celebrated as liberation day. Srebrenica’s health clinic was named after a Partisan leader, Dr. Asim Čemerlić, a Muslim physician who had helped protect local Serbs.

  During the post-war years, the area remained backward and underdeveloped. Most of the hospital workers still came from Serbia. The area had more Muslims than Serbs, and only a few Croats. However, until the 1960s, aside from Čemerlić, one of the only other non-Serb hospital workers was a Croatian doctor who had served as a military physician for the fascist Croatian forces. After the war, he was sentenced to a long prison term, but a politician decided he would be more useful in a hospital than a jail, and his “punishment,” instead, was being sent to work in the backwater of Srebrenica.

  In the late 1960s a young doctor from the Srebrenica area, Sabit Begić, became one of the first locally born Muslim physicians in Srebrenica. He made a name for himself treating workers at a nearby lead-zinc mine in Sase, where roughly a third of workers were on sick leave every day due to lung ailments. In the early 1970s, Begić led a campaign to encourage local children to go into nursing and established small health clinics in the neighboring villages, including the one where he treated young Ilijaz’s sore throat. At the time, the Yugoslav government targeted the area’s mining and forestry industries for development and initiated new industrial activities. Battery and car-brake factories were built, a furniture factory, stone-cutting workshop, and textile factory were established, and the area enjoyed an upsurge in tourism at the medicinal spa and in nearby hunting grounds. To create a well-educated workforce, Yugoslavia invested in the education system, turning Srebrenica high school into one of the best in Bosnia.

  Local companies, enjoying prosperous times, donated money for equipment, vehicles, and even apartments for physicians. Srebrenica’s squat health clinic was built next to the old hospital building and used for general medicine, pediatrics, and women’s health services. A separate building adjacent to the clinic served as doctors’ quarters and later came to house an x-ray machine, ultrasound apparatus, and a small diagnostic laboratory. In 1981, the hospital was renovated and two new stories added for gynecology, obstetrics, and internal medicine. At the opposite end of Srebrenica, psychiatrists, rehabilitation specialists, and general practitioners worked at the now-famous Guber spa.

  Doctors came from all over Yugoslavia and the world to spend a few years gaining the precious, hands-on experience obtainable only in such a top-notch small-town hospital. In the late 1980s, physicians of eleven nationalities worked at the health clinic, including one from Nepal and one from India.

  One day in 1990, during Ilijaz’s first summer working at the clinic, someone entered his examination room unannounced. With a start, Ilijaz turned from his patient to find a perplexed-looking young woman with long, black hair standing at the doorway.

  “Oh!” she said. “Excuse me. I’m sorry to interrupt you. I was looking for my friend, Hamdija.”

  “He’s in the next room. You can go through this door here.”

  She thanked him and left. When he finished examining his patient, Ilijaz didn’t call for another. He went to Hamdija’s room instead.

  He was pleased to find the woman still there. She had beautiful, dark eyes. He watched as she read the name on his white coat and broke into a soft, high-pitched laugh.

  “So you’re Ilijaz Pilav,” she said and offered her hand. “It’s nice to meet the man I’m going to marry. I’m Doctor Fatima Dautbašić.”

  Ilijaz’s friend, Hamdija, giggled.

  In Bosnia, villagers have honed the art of future-telling over centuries. The woman explained that her great aunt had predicted she would soon find a husband. He would be a young doctor, and his name would be “Pilavović.” That was close enough to Pilav.

  “Then let’s get started,” Ilijaz told her. “Let’s not waste any time.” The two began to date.

  Fatima was a serious yet loquacious young woman who, unlike Ilijaz, had grown up knowing that she wanted to be a doctor. She cultivated equally cherished dreams of world travel and of settling down in a nice house to raise a family in the traditional Bosnian way. For now, though, she was content to fall in love. The two took strolls every night along the pedestrian walkway in Bratunac. Trips to the River Jadar for picnics with lambs on a spit, games, line dancing, and singing framed their summer romance. At night, driving back from the dark hills above the valley of Srebrenica, the lights of the town looked like a luminous strand of pearls spilled on black velvet.

  THAT FALL OF 1990, a cultural festival took place in the building that housed Srebrenica’s historical museum. At the time, such events held no interest for a young bachelor like Ilijaz. But if he had gone, he would have seen groups of dancers take turns performing in traditional costumes that represented every phase of Srebrenica’s history—Roman, Serbian, Ottoman, Austrian, Yugoslav. The long vibrating tones that trilled from the tongues of the
singers and moved the shuffling feet of the kolo dancers carried the distinct sound and the shared heritage of the Drina River valley where peace between neighbors had long outlasted periods of war.

  They were simple songs, like the lullabies and love songs that echoed in homes high and low on both banks of the Drina—Bosnian and Serbian. From the coarse clucking falsettos of village women to the low-pitched croaks of tobacco-growing men, bowing the strings of their whiny, lutelike gusle or shargija, the songs and their sometimes-nonsensical words varied little.

  Nini, nini

  ninala te nana

  ninala te nana

  nini, nini

  Ninala te

  i uspavala te

  i uspavala te

  There was little in Ilijaz Pilav’s background to make him fear or dislike Serbs. He grew up hearing stories of World War II, when a multipartied civil war had ripped apart the region. But elderly villagers told Ilijaz that the occupying armies and local militias that passed through Gladovići conducted themselves with honor and left the civilians largely alone. Only one of Ilijaz’s family members, a grandfather, had been killed, but by which side, nobody knew or said.

  * * *

  Ilijaz’s first suspicions of Serbs traced back to medical school. In 1988 Serb students started to band together in the dormitory and post large photographs of Serbian Communist Party leader Slobodan Milošević in their rooms, replacing those of Tito. Ilijaz heard them say they felt threatened and needed Milošević to protect their interests. Some believed that Bosnian Muslim nationalists had plans to turn Bosnia into an “ethnically pure” state. They supported Milošević’s campaign to increase Serbian control over Yugoslavia. To Ilijaz, they sounded like parrots mimicking one another.

  When he came to work in Srebrenica, Ilijaz avoided forming friendships with Serbs and maintained only professional relationships with them. Some Serb doctors began to suspect Ilijaz was a Muslim nationalist.

  The fall of 1990, strange news blew into Srebrenica with the chill air that came early to that part of Bosnia, heralding the long winter ahead. From the radios, television sets, and boys returning home from military service, it whispered of change and sent a small shiver up the backs of the town’s Serbs, Muslims, and few Croats.

  As Slovenia and Croatia headed toward independence, the leaders of Bosnia’s mixed, multiethnic population were caught in a bind—not wanting to leave Yugoslavia, but made increasingly uncomfortable by Serbia’s domination of the federal state. Bosnia’s first multiparty elections took place in November. They brought nationalists to power from all three major ethnic groups. The new order sparked a scramble to claim resources and strategic positions at a time when the economy was faring poorly. In the 1970s, in an effort to decrease interethnic tensions through the fair sharing of resources, Communists had introduced a system of ethnic quotas for jobs, houses, business leadership positions, and scholarships. These were all up for grabs now.

  In Srebrenica’s local elections, the Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA) earned the majority, with the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) in the minority. Srebrenica’s Serbs accused the Muslim leadership of hegemony. Tensions heightened after the Croatian war broke out in 1991. Bosnia kept officially neutral, and Serbia’s Milošević punished the republic with an economic blockade, which hit import-dependent Srebrenica particularly hard.

  While Srebrenica and Bratunac were ethnically mixed towns, the villages outside, usually a few hundred inhabitants each, were a patchwork of purely Serb or purely Muslim—everyone knew which was which. Nationalist symbols began springing up in various areas, invoking memories of interethnic violence during World War II. The propaganda went all the way back to the Serbs’ loss of their kingdom to the Turks in 1389 and the subsequent years of Ottoman rule during which many Slavs converted to Islam. Serbs started referring to the current Bosnian Muslims derogatorily as “Turks” or Balijas. Nonstop television propaganda inflamed the fears.

  Serbs in Srebrenica complained of discrimination based on the fact that the proportion of Serbs to Muslims had declined dramatically in the area over the last fifty years. Serbs blamed this on pressure from Muslims and the lack of development of Serb villages. However, the demographic shift in Srebrenica paralleled the rest of Bosnia—after Muslims were recognized as one of Yugoslavia’s constituent nations in 1968, well-educated Muslims increasingly joined the cadres—trained workers and leaders of various organizations, professions, and businesses—which had until then been dominated by Serbs. Serbs, losing political and economic power, increasingly sought opportunity in nearby Serbia. By the 1991 census, the town of Srebrenica was 64 percent Bosnian Muslim and 28 percent Serb.

  In spite of the political fires raging about them in the early 1990s, though, most of Srebrenica’s doctors would later say that there had been little heat within the medical community until the day Bosnia held its own independence referendum in 1992. If anything, small conflicts flared between village folk and city slickers or between people from different towns such as less-developed Bratunac, whose inhabitants were nicknamed “frog-catchers,” and Srebrenicans, who were accused of snobbery and xenophobia and nicknamed “storks.”

  But change seeped into the health clinic building, too. Serb doctors in the clinic began to chill toward their non-Serb colleagues and complain of discrimination. Muslims pointed out that although Serbs constituted a minority in the city leadership, a Serb doctor had been allowed to keep his position as director of the health clinic. A few minor incidents ensued; workplace conflicts, allocation of medical specialization positions, and the assignment of free apartments were sometimes chalked up to “he got it because he’s a Muslim.” Serbs alleged that a cabal of “Muslim fundamentalist intellectuals” was active at the Srebrenica health clinic.

  In early 1992, Ilijaz still lived in Bratunac and worked at the Srebrenica health center. Fatima also lived in Bratunac and worked at the health center there. She was more confident than ever that the two of them were meant to be together. Ilijaz, feeling stifled, was not as sure.

  Before long, he had something much more serious to preoccupy him; his father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Ilijaz brought him to the capital, Sarajevo, to undergo chemotherapy and prepare for possible surgery. With the stresses of his father’s illness, his job, and his changing relationship with Fatima, Ilijaz spent little time thinking about a potential war in Bosnia. He considered the few incidences of violence and increasing lawlessness a political problem that the Yugoslav army, the JNA, was going to solve. But when actual fighting broke out around Bosnia, and many people fled Srebrenica, he could ignore it no longer.

  Doctors began failing to show up for work, and fewer and fewer patients came to his clinic. Some of Ilijaz’s friends urged him to join them in leaving the area. As an unmarried man with a car and money, Ilijaz could go wherever he wanted. He knew that most of the clever people in town were leaving, but that was their idea, not his. He wasn’t ready to make such a major decision.

  Roadblocks flew up on country roads and city streets, manned by the tense citizens who lived on them. They checked cars and people for guns, raising more fear than security. Patients at Srebrenica’s historic health spa were collected in a minivan, and a Muslim maintenance worker at the spa volunteered to drive them to their homes. Paramilitaries captured him at a roadblock on his way back, then tortured and killed him.

  Ilijaz and Fatima started asking themselves what they should do. Should they go away together for a little while just until things calmed down again? But Fatima didn’t want to leave her mother and younger brother alone. And her mother, a widow with strong memories of World War II, refused to leave their home.

  “In that war, nobody touched old people and women,” she’d say. “I can stay in my house. Nobody will harm me.”

  The days tumbled forward with a momentum that left little time to contemplate a course of action. For security, Ilijaz moved his year-old white Yugo car to all-Muslim Gladovići.

  The health cl
inic ran with reduced staffing, and the few remaining doctors took long shifts. Ilijaz was assigned to work Friday, April 17. In the morning, before leaving Bratunac by bus, he stopped to see Fatima. They discussed their plans a little more, but made no decisions.

  Ilijaz arrived at the clinic. Srebrenica was quiet. No patients came. About ten in the morning, Ilijaz called Fatima in Bratunac. She told him that the Serbian paramilitary leader Vojislav šešelj and his soldiers had entered the town. The name šešelj struck terror for the atrocities and mass killings he was accused of having committed during the previous year’s war in Croatia.

  “Fata, catch a bus,” Ilijaz told her. “Go out. Anywhere. Tuzla.”

  She told him her mother wanted to remain in Bratunac. He begged her to reconsider, and she agreed to think about it. He planned to call her in the afternoon to check.

  Not long after, Dr. Sabit Begić, Ilijaz’s old pediatrician and the director of Srebrenica Hospital, burst into the clinic.

  “There’s nothing left. Everything’s finished. It’s war.”

  He’d come from a meeting with a Serb delegation at a hotel in Bratunac. For the past twenty days, Muslims and Serbs had tried to work out a power-sharing agreement that would have split the municipality of Srebrenica. Much of Srebrenica town, as well as the nearby villages of Potočari and Sućeska, was to have remained under Muslim control.

  But this morning, the Srebrenica Muslim delegation had arrived in Bratunac to find camouflage-clad Serbs toting automatic rifles and surrounding the hotel. The Serb delegation made it clear there would be no power sharing and that there was room for just one armed group. For Srebrenica to be spared, Muslims, particularly armed reserve officers, had to surrender their weapons by eight the following morning.