by Sheri Fink
Just days after Bosnia’s recognition as a U.N. member state, both the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Red Cross announced the suspension of their Bosnia operations. Persistent violence and lethal attacks on aid workers and aid convoys led to the decision. To the great disappointment of the local population, the U.N. Protection Force, UNPROFOR, which had been based in peaceful Sarajevo for operations in war-torn Croatia, followed suit, pulling out all but a skeleton force from the Bosnian capital and transferring its headquarters to Belgrade, Serbia. Its remaining 120 peacekeepers were practically the only internationals left in Sarajevo, and, without a clear mandate to work in Bosnia, were nearly powerless in their efforts to mediate ceasefires and deliver humanitarian aid.
The headquarters of Doctors Without Borders’s semi-independent national sections split over how to respond to Bosnia’s war. Leaders of the French section halted all aid activities. “This can’t go on,” the president of MSF France, Rony Brauman, told a reporter for Agence France-Presse, the leading French news agency. “We (the MSF) are stopping our work, because there is a failure and a cowardice among the European Community that borders on monstrosity.”
The international community needed to stop the war and atrocities against civilians, he said. “The humanitarian and legal pretext has gone on long enough and what’s needed now is a military intervention,” Brauman said, shocking his colleagues in the aid community, “because we have all these dead and injured, and what we see among the international community is a complete void, indifference, people bashfully looking elsewhere.”
The leaders of MSF Belgium had a different philosophy. Let the French give press conferences and write articles and books; the Belgians would act in the war zone. Eric, though he worked for the Belgian section, shared many of the French leader’s opinions. Providing humanitarian aid was not the way to end this war. Still, he clung to the hope that humanitarians could accomplish something important in Bosnia, and not only with aid. He had another idea, an activist idea: to interpose between victims and aggressors.
The Doctors Without Borders headquarters in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was burned and looted. The newly fledged Bosnian army, loyal to the Bosnian government, had managed to keep control of the city, but Serb nationalist forces ringed its heights, shooting and shelling at the city below. All MSF internationals had pulled out for safety reasons not long after the start of the war. What remained of the MSF mission was its local staff members, who’d relocated their office to the civilian hospital, the biggest and most advanced in all of Bosnia, and alerted Eric in Belgrade that it had a critical shortage of kidney dialysis fluid. Eric sent his translator combing through the chemical laboratories of Serbia looking for the exact type and concentration of fluid that would work in the hospital’s machine. If the hospital had to stop providing dialysis, then those in the capital who had kidney failure and depended on the procedure to filter dangerous toxins from their bloodstreams would die.
Eric’s translator found a local factory that produced the needed fluid, and Eric purchased more than 1,000 liters. He argued it, along with cases of external fixators, surgical kits, wound dressings, and some medications, onto a convoy of French peacekeeping forces headed to the Bosnian capital the first week of June. Then he set about seeking a way to get himself to Sarajevo to assess conditions in the city and the feasibility of supplying it regularly with medical aid from Belgrade.
He found his ticket a few days later with a bizarre lot of Bosnian Serb liaisons who’d congregated in a palatial, former Communist government villa in the nicest part of Belgrade. A large, scowling man, whom the aid workers jokingly referred to as Bluto, after Popeye’s parrot-toting archrival, menaced Eric when he entered. Eric asked for permission to travel to Bosnia. Bluto and the other Serb officials grilled him. What did he want to do there? Why did he want to go? Eventually they relented, and the trip was set for the second week of June. Eric kept the date, despite suffering from a painful bout of tonsillitis. He loaded MSF’s 4WD Toyota Land Cruiser with provisions for the local MSF team and boxes and boxes of the best surgical material in MSF’s warehouse. He and three colleagues drove across the Drina River into Serb-held Bosnia. They didn’t know exactly how they’d get across the front lines to reach the capital, but Eric knew that U.N. Protection Force soldiers had a base nearby in the hilly Sarajevo suburb of Lukavica. When he reached it, he was appalled to discover that the UNPROFOR soldiers were sharing a barracks with the separatist Serbs. They couldn’t have avoided seeing Serb artillery emplacements slam shells into the hospital pavilions, historic landmarks, and high-rise apartment buildings of the Bosnian capital in the valley below.
The UNPROFOR soldiers referred to military activity in the matterof-fact language meteorologists use to give weather reports. Eric’s group was in luck. Today’s weather was “calm.” A small U.N. military convoy was about to leave for Sarajevo, and, rather than integrating MSF into the convoy, its leader grudgingly authorized Eric’s car to follow at his own risk. They made it into the city with little incident, and the local MSF staff members greeted them in good spirits. Together, they sped to the hospital along streets crackling with sniper fire, ducking on reflex when the shooting sounded close. Eric sneaked glances at the proud former Olympic city he’d visited numerous times before the war. Its delicate Austro-Hungarian buildings were splattered with shell craters, its twin modern skyscrapers had been burnt in a rocket barrage.
After delivering supplies to the hospital and making their assessments, Eric’s team returned to the dangerous streets, racing toward the apartment of an MSF worker to stay the night. The car ahead of them stalled for a terrifying moment at an exposed crossroads and Eric’s own driver, a local hero for delivering drugs throughout the besieged city, took the risk of slowing down and nudging it to safety from behind. Inside the ugly high-rise block apartment, Eric listened as the shelling of the city intensified. He stepped out on the balcony and gazed at the city and the mountains that rose on its northern side. Before his very eyes, grenades slammed into houses, exploding with flashes of fire.
Maybe people are dying there. Maybe whole families.
He turned to his host.
“What if the Serbs start shelling this building?”
“We’re all dead,” the young man answered.
Eric’s infected throat felt as raw as if live birds were pecking it. Exhausted, he lay down and, in spite of the continuous pain and the continual thunderclaps of shelling, he managed a fitful night’s sleep. The morning of their departure, Eric and his colleagues reported to the sandbagged main Sarajevo post office, now headquarters to a small contingent of U.N. Protection Force soldiers, and prepared for the drive back to Belgrade. Eric strapped on a bulletproof vest offered by U.N. soldiers. The day was sunny and quiet, aside from remote bursts of gunfire. Eric sat down in the back seat of the Toyota Land Cruiser, and the MSF administrator started the engine. They joined a convoy of armored U.N. vehicles and rolled slowly out of the city along a deserted road bordered by dismembered buildings.
Everyone fell silent as the group began to cross the wide-open tarmac of an abandoned airport. The engine hummed. Then, with a metallic bang, a bullet hit the car. Sniper.
Eric hit the ground—as best he could. He folded his lanky body as tightly as possible behind the front seat of the car and squinted up at the windshield. He watched as the U.N. “Blue Helmet” at the machine-gun of the tank ahead of him withdrew into the turret and closed the hatch. Eric’s vehicle was smack in the middle of a runway with a long way to go before reaching cover. He was sure that the sniper was adjusting his aim.
Then a second bullet hit, shattering both side windows. Eric ducked. He had to protect his head. A bullet in the thigh, that would be OK, that would heal. But not the head. Fear ran through him like a cold, metallic liquid. He felt pinpricks of pain from splinters of glass on his exposed skin.
The driver drove blindly, lying flat on the front seat holding on to the wheel.
Eric peeked up between the seats, trying to guide him, trying to estimate the location of the sniper so he could direct the car beside one of the armored vehicles for protection. The Toyota drew dangerously close to the back of the armored vehicle in front of them.
“Slow down!” Eric shouted through his sore throat, and the driver hit the brakes. Then a third bullet cracked the dashboard. Eric contracted into a ball, muscles tetanized by fear. He awaited the next shot.
Somebody who doesn’t know me, who never saw me, is trying to kill me, he thought. He hates me without reason, without knowing me.
Seconds passed. He felt the car inch forward, then turn. Eric opened his eyes. They were on a small road now, hidden behind trees. He straightened himself out and sat up.
“Everything OK, guys?” he asked. The people in the car took a moment to inspect one another. Except for a few bloody surface wounds, everyone was all right. They realized with relief that they’d more or less escaped the crisis and laughed nervously.
The U.N. soldiers had not returned fire. It was the first time Eric saw firsthand how wary they were of confrontation. The convoy continued back to Lukavica where Serb soldiers, possibly the ones who’d just shot at them, greeted them warmly.
Back at the MSF office in Belgrade, coworkers slapped Eric on the back and called him “cowboy.” He didn’t feel like one. He knew he’d been scared stiff. He’d had, as the Belgians call it, “a blue fear.” The visceral experience only strengthened his opinion that humanitarian aid meant little in the face of deadly violence. Rather than providing aid, powerful countries should be pouring their efforts into stopping the war.
But that was exactly the opposite of what happened. Unwilling to go to war in Bosnia, but needing to convince their populations that something was being done to alleviate the suffering being shown on CNN, member states of the U.N. Security Council passed resolutions that punished Yugoslavia with sanctions and led the U.N. Protection Force, with great fanfare, to secure the Sarajevo airport for a massive airlift of humanitarian assistance. MSF co-founder Dr. Bernard Kouchner, serving as a French government minister, helped initiate the airlift. He favored stronger action against Serb forces, but conversations with French President François Mitterrand convinced him it wouldn’t be forthcoming. Kouchner believed that multinational, state-supported humanitarian intervention, while not enough, represented major progress compared with the usual lack of interest of states in helping the victims of somebody else’s war. The council called for a strengthening of the protection force and gave it an official mandate to work in Bosnia to protect humanitarian assistance delivered by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and others.
The plan split the aid community. On the one hand, members of the International Committee of the Red Cross vehemently opposed what they considered a militarization of humanitarian aid, which could endanger humanitarian neutrality in the eyes of the combatants. Indeed, the May 22 agreement that had been initiated by the Red Cross and signed by the region’s military leaders emphasized “that humanitarian activities have to be kept absolutely separate from military operations.” In an article appearing the same month, a Red Cross leader wrote that the organization should not cooperate with efforts in which the military was involved in delivering aid. Aid delivery was protected by international law, he argued, and did not need protection from soldiers.
Even the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees feared that large-scale international military intervention would be counterproductive, because any upsurge in fighting would interfere with humanitarian assistance efforts. So, while it had seemed, at first, that the United Nations would undertake a humanitarian enforcement operation similar to Operation Provide Comfort in Iraq, in the end, the U.N. Protection Force’s authorization to use force was watered down. Countries were reluctant and slow to send additional troops.
Sure, it had made Eric Dachy slightly uncomfortable to travel with a military escort into Sarajevo, but there didn’t seem to be another way. What bothered him much more was that the only thing the inaptly named U.N. Protection Force was mandated to protect was humanitarian aid and those who delivered it—not the actual victims of the war. An MSF France board member would later compare such a U.N. force to the colonial gunboats that “came to the rescue of worthy missionaries beset by natives.”
The U.N. soldiers would fight to defend Eric’s life, but not the lives of the children and civilians living in Sarajevo. This shocked him. It seemed surreal. He didn’t want the force to protect aid deliveries. He wanted it to shoot back at the cowardly soldiers who were lobbing their shells at civilians.
7
INGRESS
CANCER WAS STEALING ILIJAZ’S FATHER. It stole his breath, his words. So weak he could barely stand, he seemed to have strength only for the terrible, unnatural cough that racked him.
Each day compounded Ilijaz’s sense of helplessness as a doctor and a son. Before the war, the diagnosis had been devastating, the family’s struggle intense, but at least they’d had hope. While lung cancer would kill him in a matter of months if left untreated, chemotherapy and surgery offered a shot at survival. The war had erased this chance. Front lines blocked access to a modern hospital. Ilijaz had only painkillers and asthma medicines to help ease some of his father’s symptoms while he waited out the war, mainly in the basement.
The two-story home faced Serbia and the tanks on Tara Mountain. One late afternoon, the entire family was coughing and choking much as Ilijaz’s father, trapped in the basement as smoke thickened the air in the wake of a strong explosion. The earth and the house above shook so violently that Ilijaz was afraid of being buried alive. Somehow, the structure held and all of them survived.
As the days passed, Ilijaz’s father remained selfless, able to see beyond his own suffering and aware of the larger situation in the region. Even as he grew sicker, he encouraged Ilijaz to go out and help others rather than stay with him.
“It’s more important for you to be on the field,” he would say. “There are many people who need you.”
It took more courage for Ilijaz to sit at home and watch his father suffer than to confront the Serb army with his band of lightly armed men. The risk of death for himself was abstract and random, but his father’s illness made life seem too fragile. He was more afraid for his father than for himself.
Ilijaz’s father died with Ilijaz beside him the morning of July 10, 1992, less than three months after the beginning of the war. Without treatment, the cancer had progressed so quickly. They buried him that afternoon on family property. News traveled fast and hundreds of men arrived to recite the Muslim dženaza prayers of mourning.
After the burial, Ilijaz refused to leave his father’s grave. His two medical technicians, Sulejman and Naim, and other friends did their best to comfort him, and then respected his wishes and left him alone. The part of Ilijaz that was a doctor had known his father’s cancer was progressing rapidly and that he might soon die. But as a son there was no way to accept or even conceive of a parent’s death. It caught him unprepared. Ilijaz wasn’t a crier, in fact he couldn’t remember a single time he had cried in his youth. Now he sat at the graveside and sobbed for what seemed like hours. He felt completely helpless, like a child.
The next day he set out with twelve volunteers to join a risky offensive—a coordinated action of local militias for a high point in an area called Shpat from which Chetnik gunners and artillerists targeted Srebrenica and launched attacks on Muslim villages. Having heard about the death in Ilijaz’s family, the others expected his unit to sit this one out. He felt he had to go, though he knew that an irrational, momentary zeal was driving him. Inat. The desire for revenge.
The battles were to be staged from the area where Fatima was living, and he was pretty sure he’d be able to meet her. For the first time since the war began, Ilijaz and nearly a dozen of his neighbors trod the dangerous paths to her village. When he arrived, he waited by a water well, chatting with two other men as an acquaintance went inside a
house to summon her.
Fatima stepped through the doorway. For a long moment she just stood and stared, as if unable to identify him. He hadn’t thought of how three months of war and the stress of his father’s illness and death might have changed him. In fact, Ilijaz had turned from tall and slender to gaunt. He had let his dark hair grow long around his wide forehead, and he wore a long, scraggly beard that curved under his chin, leaving a dollop of hair below his lower lip. His small eyes gleamed, and above them a fuzz of hair sprouted between his thick, arched brows.
That day he carried his weapons and wore what had become his typical battle uniform—a white bandanna around his forehead and his old, black gym suit. Fatima knew that gym suit well, and at last a smile of recognition spread across her lips. Ilijaz smiled back and familiar creases formed under his cheeks. She embraced him, breathing in his strong, familiar smell.
That night Fatima listened to Ilijaz talk about his father. Ilijaz seemed sad to her, but she noticed he was able to smile. She figured that all the death he’d seen these last few months had toughened him.
She told him about her work in the field, similar to his, although she hadn’t become a fighter. She didn’t consider the young men who defended themselves, their villages, and her and her family as soldiers. They were protectors—civilians who’d been forced to take up whatever weapons they had and try to protect local Muslim villages from being overtaken by the Serbs and “ethnically cleansed” like so many others. The problem was, these men, in their youth, were fearless. She instructed them in first aid, trying to force them to understand that they faced real danger.
