by Sheri Fink
Meanwhile, the man with the leg injury waits. A technician places a temporary dressing on his wound, and this small gesture mollifies him. He dies before Nedret gets to him.
Ilijaz’s anger rushes inward. He suddenly wonders why he didn’t attempt the operation himself. Shame fills him, dampening his anger with despondency. It makes no difference that the patient had a good chance of dying on the operating table. Right now Ilijaz cannot bear to ponder the depths of his powerlessness. He would rather blame himself for passivity. He cannot forgive himself for not having tried to save a dying man.
* * *
NEDRET, STILL WEARING HIS GREEN, BLOOD-COVERED GOWN, Strides out of the hospital to take a much-needed break. In all of his weeks on the front line near Tuzla, he has never experienced anything like this. There, he worked with trained surgical colleagues and had an advanced hospital close by. Here, the buck stops with him, but the commanders who chose to wage this all-out attack don’t seem to have considered this. He catches sight of one of them, Hakija Meholjić, climbing the hospital driveway to check on his injured soldiers.
“You should have warned me about the offensive!” Nedret yells at him. He would have advised the commander to hold off until the medical team was prepared to receive casualties. “You’re waging war like Indians!” he says. He insists that soldiers include him in all future military planning.
11
“DEAR DOCTOR”
IN BOSNIA AS IN VUKOVAR, Croatia, Eric Dachy frequently finds himself arriving too late, after the violence, after the massacres. He is nervous, unable to rest. The Balkans remind him of a conflict-ridden family. He plays the role of child. Upset by the fighting, impotent to make peace, he simply watches waves of violence break over and over again.
Sometimes he dreams of his dead father. On sleepless nights he tiptoes down the staircase and pads into the office. He sits in front of his computer and plays games for hours, racking up losses.
“What am I accomplishing?” he writes in a chronicle of his experiences. “Nothing. Or very little. It’s all so inadequate. Civilians don’t need humanitarian assistance; they need someone to protect them by force… Wouldn’t it be better if we slammed the door and refused to participate in this scene?”
During this time of tortured self-questioning, Eric Dachy first learns of Srebrenica. Ham radio operators report that tens of thousands of displaced Muslims desperately need medical assistance and are in danger of being overrun by Serb forces. Representatives of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have negotiated for access to Srebrenica and set out several times to reach the town, but were forced to turn around when Serb military and angry Serb civilians blocked their convoys. The head of the U.N. refugee mission in Belgrade concludes that, for whatever reasons, the Serbs are particularly determined that Srebrenica not receive aid. By November 1992 it is the last surrounded enclave not to have received any international assistance since the war began, more than seven months ago. To Eric, it sounds like a place where humanitarian action wouldn’t just be a coverup for international indifference, but could actually help.
Late in the month, U.N. officials reach agreement with Serb forces to transport a twenty-truck convoy of food to Srebrenica. On the way, a human wall of angry Serbian women blocks it. The women brandish axes and wooden stakes and holler, “No food for Muslims.” After a humiliating three-day delay, the convoy makes it into town, arriving to scenes of jubilation. The reception at the hospital is different. The U.N. has brought food but no medical supplies. Nedret is so furious that he refuses to be interviewed by journalists who’ve hitched a ride into Srebrenica with the convoy. One male nurse tells a writer for the Christian Science Monitor that medicine was more necessary than food. “It’s a disaster,” he says. “Seventy percent of the people we could have saved if we had medicines.”
The next day’s news stories describe doctors as shocked and aghast at the “unexplained oversight.” Eric Dachy responds. He packs a truck with all the supplies he thinks an isolated group of doctors in a hot war zone need: a variety of surgical kits, a range of substances for anesthesia and painkilling, and plenty of dressings, syringes, infusions, and surgical instruments. Anything that might be useful in a difficult, precarious situation. He drives to a tiny town on the Drina River across the border with Bosnia and waits for the next U.N. convoy to assemble, confident that he can convince whomever it takes to let him go to Srebrenica.
* * *
ERIC AWAKENS IN AN UNFAMILIAR HOTEL BED to a cold December morning. He slips on his thick leather jacket and walks outside into darkness. No stuttering rifle fire or shell explosions interrupt the quiet. He sips coffee and smokes a few cigarettes in a small shop on the riverside where he threw back a few plum brandies last night. In time, his two colleagues amble inside, an administrator and the head of MSF Belgium, who has made a special trip to the Balkans to visit Srebrenica.
The shopkeepers eye them with suspicion. Perhaps, Eric figures, they’re being taken for spies. Then again, the owners seem more than happy to accept their German marks, hard currency being much more valuable than the rapidly inflating Yugoslav dinar. One of the men hanging around the store asks where they are from and where they are going. Srebrenica, they tell him. “You’re going to our enemies,” the man says. “Go and kill them.”
Eric and his colleagues walk outside of the shop and wait for the arrival of the Bosnian Serbs who control access to Srebrenica. The sun rises, but the air remains cold. When they see a helicopter land, they jog to their car and drive to meet it.
A six-foot-tall man steps out of the helicopter and onto the grass. More than a half dozen bodyguards take their places around him, wagging automatic weapons at their hips.
Even if he had never met him, Eric would recognize Dr. Radovan Karadžić, the self-proclaimed president of the Bosnian Serbs, from his news photos and television appearances. The flabby-faced, forty-seven-year-old physician has hooded eyes and a conspicuous helmet of frizzy, graying hair that juts from his forehead and falls in waves over his ears. Journalists and human rights groups have linked him to the violence and torture being carried out in various Serb-run concentration camps, and some have compared him with Adolf Hitler. Until just a few months ago, he was a Sarajevo psychiatrist.
This leader of the Bosnian Serbs isn’t even from Bosnia. He comes from a troubled family of Montenegrin peasants and moved to Bosnia’s capital as a teenager. He attended Sarajevo Medical School and, like Eric, studied psychology, but he fancied himself a writer, wooing his wife with lyric poetry. Later employed to instill a winning attitude in a Sarajevo soccer team, he was jailed in 1985 for fraud and misuse of public funds, but released in less than a year. Not long after, as nationalism rose in the wake of communism’s fall, Karadžić began to brag of the cleft chin and familial resemblance he shared with an earlier Karadžić named Vuk, a nineteenth-century Serb nationalist. As Serbia gained autonomy from the Ottomans, he standardized the Serb language, campaigned for a “greater Serbia” comprising all lands where it was spoken, and galvanized the illiterate rural population with epic folksongs about the Serbs’ historical tragedies.
In 1990, the modern Karadžić became leader of the Serb nationalist Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), established on July 12, the holiday of Petrovdan, St. Peter’s Day. He clung to the philosophy of SDS Croatia founder Jovan Rašković, also a Sarajevo psychiatrist, who analyzed and stereotyped the various Balkan ethnic groups in a book entitled Luda Zemlja (The Crazy Country). The book explained why Serbs had to assert authority over the other Yugoslav nations. In the mid-1980s, Rašković helped draft a memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences arguing that Serbia was being discriminated against economically and that Serbs were being subjected to genocide in parts of Yugoslavia. Just before dying in 1992, he took public responsibility for creating the emotional strain on the Serbian people that “lit the fuse of Serbian nationalism” and led to war.
Now Karadžić, who refers to Bosnian Muslims as the succes
sors of the Ottoman occupiers so resented by the Serbs, is thought by analysts to be using psychiatric theories to create terror in civilian populations and to incite the Bosnian Serb public to violence. Fellow psychiatrists in the United States describe him as a “malignant narcissist” with dreams of messianic glory.
Eric has already met Karadžić. Over the summer, when rumors of concentration camps in Serb-controlled areas emerged, Eric wrote him a letter, threatening to cut off MSF support for Serb areas unless Karadžić met with visiting MSF France board members. Karadžić agreed, and during the meeting, he complimented MSF’s work, denied the camps were anything more than prisons, and invited MSF to work in two of them.
Eric felt that there was nothing they could do to help people who were being locked up and tortured in concentration camps. He met some of the Red Cross and U.N. workers who visited the camps tossing back beers in the Belgrade bars and talking about the “interesting stories” they heard interviewing men who’d been beaten and tortured. It was easy to see horrible things—very easy. Meanwhile, their reports would be filed in cabinets and nothing would come of them. No, Eric would not run to see those horrors.
Still, the MSF board members brought the idea of working in the camps all the way back to France where Rony Brauman—the MSF leader who’d called for military action against the Serbs—rejected it out of hand as unthinkable. He would never allow his organization’s staff members to become the medical auxiliaries of executioners and torturers. In a camp there would be no chance for independence, a fundamental principle of humanitarian work. There would be, in Doctors Without Borders lingo, no “humanitarian space.”
Now, in front of the helicopter, Eric meets Karadžić again.
“Dear doctor,” the Serb nationalist leader greets Eric, shaking hands and baring his lower row of teeth as he speaks. “I’m so happy to meet you. I’d like to be meeting you in some other circumstances. Isn’t this all so sad?”
Eric is tempted to tell him to stop what he is doing to cause the situation, but the sight of Karadžić’s armed bodyguards keeps him quiet. Karadžić strikes him as a paranoid Mafia chief who wouldn’t shrink from having his men kill someone who embarrasses him. Eric bites back his anger and shakes the leader’s hand, explaining that the MSF team wants to visit Srebrenica to assess the medical situation. He asks that MSF personnel be allowed to join the U.N. convoy, which is to depart in the morning for Srebrenica.
“Yes, of course, no problem,” Karadžić agrees in a gravelly voice.
Having Darth Vader as an ally is useful. Eric and his colleagues join several U.N. Protection Force soldiers in an armored personnel carrier, an APC, a boxy, claustrophobic, armor-plated vehicle with tiny windows and Red Cross symbols on its sides. They set off in a column of trucks carrying medicines and other humanitarian supplies from MSF and the U.N.
At one of numerous Bosnian Serb checkpoints, Eric stands outside to smoke. He looks into the windows of a passenger bus that pulls up beside him and catches the gaze of a small boy, ten or eleven years old. The boy lifts his finger to his neck, sliding it silently across his throat.
The closer to Srebrenica the convoy draws, the angrier the people seem. At some checkpoints, soldiers snarl and swear at them.
“We Serbs just want to survive,” one says. “The whole world is against us.”
The two-mile journey down the road from Bratunac to the border of the Srebrenica enclave stretches on for hours. At last the trucks reach a short stretch of road that runs over an almost invisible creek. Looking out of the tiny windows of the personnel carrier, Eric can see small, flat fields that appear to have been cultivated. Beyond them are leafless forests of deciduous trees, a few clutches of evergreens, and mountains. The maps the drivers carry name these mountains—to the left, one called Chaus, and to the right, one called Zvijezda. The topographical lines beside the town are squeezed together, indicating that Srebrenica stretches along a deep valley.
At one point, yellow-painted guardrails, mounted on blocks of concrete, border the street as it crosses a small river. This “yellow bridge” no longer connects the municipalities of Srebrenica and Bratunac. For the past eight months, the unremarkable piece of asphalt has served as a dividing line between the Muslims and Serbs, as impassable as a gaping drawbridge.
The convoy crosses it at about 1:30 in the afternoon, and Srebrenica’s soldiers quickly wave them past. The trucks trundle along the road for a mile and begin to pass burnt houses and abandoned factories of the former Potočari industrial zone. Then the people start coming. Wraith-like figures appear from every direction. By the time the houses lining the road give way to a soccer field, and the road curves hard to the left to reveal the first buildings of Srebrenica, thousands of folks have thronged the roadsides.
The convoy grinds to a stop before a building on a hill. Eric Dachy steps out of the APC, stretches his legs, and looks around. The people, gaunt and dirty, stare at him. Many women wear patterned handkerchiefs on their heads. Some hold babies. The adults flash smiles that contrast with their sallow, stricken faces. Most of the children look tired and expressionless. Eric can’t believe he’s here.
He hears a loud noise and senses something traveling overhead. A shell bursts nearby, its thunder echoing off the hills and making the ground tremble. Eric jumps, and the crowd around him snickers. They know that the explosions you hear are not the ones that kill you.
They’ve become experts, Eric thinks, noting their calm and wondering what will prevent the next shell from landing in the middle of the crowd.
As he reaches for a cigarette, a Bosnian man standing near him pantomimes that he wants one, too. Innocently, Eric draws another Marlboro from the pack and hands it to the man. A commotion of unintelligible, angry voices breaks out. Eric asks what has happened and someone tells him that a pack of cigarettes goes for 100 German marks, minimum—more than sixty dollars.
Eric thinks he might as well have stepped off a spaceship from Mars. Cigarettes for 100 marks? The place is shockingly isolated. He supposes the people jostling each other in the crowd are hungry and scared; he questions whether they understand what he has come to do. He becomes intensely aware of his freedom to leave.
Eric’s attention turns to the purpose of his visit—to assess the medical situation in the town. He and his colleagues move toward the hospital, a rectangular building that resembles a schoolhouse on the hill above where the convoy has stopped.
A tall man approaches. He wears combat shoes and battle fatigues that sport a patch with the Bosnian fleur-de-lis. He has on a beret and, rather ridiculously on this late fall afternoon, a pair of shiny sunglasses.
Eric shakes his hand with discomfort. The man introduces himself as Dr. Nedret Mujkanović, Srebrenica Hospital war surgeon.
He looks more like an elite officer than a Good Samaritan.
They walk up the hospital’s steep driveway and enter the building from behind, where it abuts a high hill. The moment Eric steps inside, foul air gags him. It reeks of dead tissue and everything that comes out of a human body—urine, feces, pus, and sweat.
They climb a stairway encased in thick-paneled glass windows, emerge on the second floor, and head down a high-ceilinged hallway with orange-painted walls. The Bosnian doctor unlocks a door, pressing down on its tapered silver handle. It opens into a private office, a small room with white tiled walls, green chairs, a bed, sink, and bookcase. Eric and the others seat themselves on the chairs, and the Bosnian doctor sits down on his bed, beneath the window.
Nedret removes his sunglasses. He has a broad face with high cheekbones, a cleft chin, sensual mouth, and elegant, well-shaped eyebrows. What strikes Eric the most are his soft, slightly crossed eyes. Eric sees in them exactly what most of Srebrenica’s civilians—from the hundreds of patients Nedret has treated to the female nurse he comforted on their journey through the woods into Srebrenica—see whenever they look at Nedret: gentleness and kindness.
Eric and his colleagues explain who they ar
e and what MSF is, and they tell Nedret that they’ve brought some medical supplies.
“Thank you for your help,” the Bosnian doctor says. “We really need some.”
Nedret looks askance at the U.N. translator, a Serb from Belgrade, apparently worried that what he is about to say will not be translated correctly.
“We’re in a desperate situation,” he begins.
He admits that he isn’t a trained surgeon. He tells of his journey on foot to Srebrenica. Although he has done his best the past few months, now, in December 1992, he is tired and almost completely out of supplies, trapped in Srebrenica along with the rest of the population, ready to get out and go back home. He asks Eric for help.
“Everything is wrong here,” he says. “I really need support.”
Eric and his colleagues meet Dr. Ilijaz Pilav and follow him into the hallway, illuminated only by light from a window at its far end. Ilijaz takes them on a tour, ushering them into a room to have a look at some patients, and everyone’s nose, just growing accustomed to the hospital’s stench, is reminded of it again, more intensely than before. A row of beds separated by nightstands runs along both sides of the room. On each bed lies a patient. On each patient lies a dirty, stained bed sheet. That is all. No IV bags drip, no machines beep, no bottles of medicine sit on the nightstands.
On one of the beds, a small girl lies crying. Eric sees that she has a broken arm. Where there should be a cast supporting the arm and helping it heal, two tree branches are affixed with Scotch tape.
Eric has to control his impulse to demand, “How the hell can you leave patients in such a condition?” But he reminds himself that the whole place is a nightmare, the whole city.
“I want to show you what I brought,” he tells the Bosnian doctors.
