War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  They walk into the room where volunteers have unloaded Eric’s supplies—dozens of brown cardboard boxes, each the weight a healthy young person can heft, each labeled with a code. The boxes contain essential drugs, instruments, surgical supplies, and plenty of bandages. Eric explains to the doctors that the contents of each kit are written in their language and that they should open all the boxes, remove the supplies from the polystyrene chips, and sort like items for their convenience. Looking at their exhausted, passive faces, he fears they won’t do it.

  He leaves the hospital with his colleagues in the late afternoon. Tall hills block the waning sun. They descend the steep driveway and return to the convoy. On the hill above their vehicle, the hospital looms over them in the dying light.

  Heartbroken by what he’s just seen, Eric is tempted to stay and pitch in with the medical work. But with no communications equipment or supply lines and little ability to operate in Srebrenica with autonomy, he feels he doesn’t have the conditions to do so. He ducks back into the APC. After the convoy crosses over the front lines, it is again stopped in Bratunac. This time the policemen are eager for news of old friends and colleagues. One of them asks about a former classmate.

  “Do you know, is he alive?”

  Again, the war in eastern Bosnia reminds Eric of a passionate fight between brothers. On the way back to Belgrade, Eric questions whether the fact that they reached Srebrenica, even with their valuable medical kits, has meant anything. He thinks of the white-coated medical staff standing up in the hallways to shake hands. They seem to have had just enough strength to put on their dirty gowns. In the rooms behind them nobody has thought to separate children with burns—very susceptible to infection—from people with lung infections. A patient’s broken femur wasn’t even stretched into traction. And the most vivid image in his mind is of that crying little girl, with her pathetic homemade splint.

  They could have devised something better for her, he thinks. All of it lends the impression of a medical team so overwhelmed by the situation that they are no longer able to see what they can achieve. They’ve all but given up. Eric thinks the burned-out, unmotivated doctors are finished. He doubts whether they will muster the strength to start treating their patients, even with the new supplies.

  * * *

  AFTER ERIC AND THE INTERNATIONALS LEAVE the hospital, Ilijaz, Fatima, and Srebrenica’s other doctors and nurses bustle back up two sets of stairs and practically race to the small room where brown cardboard boxes filled with tons of medical supplies have been deposited. They pass around the packing lists.

  “Penicillin.” “Ampicillin.” “Erythromycin.”

  Ilijaz cannot believe it! He rips open a box.

  Sterile compresses. Bandages.

  Ripppp.

  Sutures. Good sutures.

  Rippp.

  It’s all here. Every last item on the lists.

  Each hospital room has a notebook. On each page, a nurse has made columns for the names of the patients in the room, their birth dates, daily temperature readings, blood pressure readings, and therapy. The spaces for therapy are uniformly blank. Patients have died for lack of basic drugs.

  Now, the doctors and nurses stride through the hospital from end to end. They fill in the “therapy” column for each patient—antibiotics to fight infection, analgetics to fight pain, benzodiazepines to reduce anxiety. Ilijaz feels his heart growing bigger inside of his chest. It is a big day, he thinks, a big happening. He feels strong again. He feels that he can do something.

  * * *

  WHEN ERIC RETURNS TO THE MSF OFFICE in Belgrade, he thinks of Vukovar and its hospital and the doctors killed there. He believes it will happen to Srebrenica, too. The city is a dying place, a place likely to be overrun, like most of the other non-Serb pockets in Bosnia, its population massacred, raped, deported. Unless…

  He can think of one thing that might make a positive difference—install an MSF team in the town, at least one international surgeon, nurse, and assistant. Not only will they provide needed support at the hospital, but their presence could also play a protective role. They could stay until the war is over. They could interpose between victims and killers. This is where MSF has to be.

  Eric plots his strategy. Then he begins writing. The first message goes by fax the next day to MSF headquarters in Brussels. Eric summarizes the trip to Srebrenica, lays out the need for an “urgent and important” MSF intervention, and outlines two obstacles to his plan: one is security and the other is the potential hostility of local Serb authorities to the presence of an international medical team.

  Eric also drafts a proposal for collaboration to be sent to top UNHCR representatives, describing the devastating medical situation in the town and calling the placement of a permanent medical team in Srebrenica “crucial to aiding the population.” He asks that the UNHCR help transport MSF volunteers on future aid convoys.

  Another letter is for Dr. Nedret. Eric has it translated and sent along with a U.N. convoy of food and medical supplies that reaches Srebrenica a few days later. In typed Bosnian script on letterhead that says “MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES,” it reads:

  “Dragi Dr. Mujkanović….”

  Dear Dr. Mujkanović.

  During our visit I was very touched to see the hard conditions in which you work and live. I’m sorry that this time I won’t be able to visit you, because I need to negotiate our next couple of trips into Srebrenica in Belgrade….

  I hope that you found the aid helpful and that you used it well. We sent you the specific aid that you requested in the amount that our finances allowed us, and I hope that you’ll put this to good use, too. Our organization has decided to help you (for example, to send you the surgeon you asked for) but for now things are out of our hands. I hope that we’ll find a solution by the beginning of January. While we’re waiting for that we would like to keep in touch with you. We’ll do that through our visits with the convoys, and we’ll bring you as much as we can of the aid that you asked for. And don’t hesitate to let our team know all your needs and all your problems.

  I wish you much courage and hope that I’ll see you soon.

  Eric Dachy

  Eric writes the final letter to Dr. Radovan Karadžić, the president of the Bosnian Serbs, convinced that access to Srebrenica hinges on his approval. He types a draft in French and shares it with his colleagues: “To the President of the Serb Republic, Dr. Radovan Karadžić.”

  Mr. President,

  Thanks to a benevolent intervention on your part, a team from MSF was able to reach the town of Srebrenica. What we discovered there, among the civilian population, alarmed us greatly: There are no means of treating people; there are too few medical personnel; numerous children suffer and die there without the most simple modern medical materials available to save them.

  Will that news horrify or please him? Eric does not know. He writes that he wishes to place a surgeon, nurse, and assistant in Srebrenica and appeals for the leader’s approval of the plan.

  As a doctor and as one responsible for the destiny of your people, we know you are sensitive to the weight of human suffering and we hope that you will look favorably on our suggestion. I hope equally that you are convinced of our impartiality and of our neutrality. Thanks to the excellent relations that we maintain with your representatives, we were already able to bring important help in the form of surgical equipment to the hospitals of the Serb Republic.

  Eric writes that he plans to send an international surgeon to the hospital of a neighboring Serb-held town, demonstrating that MSF is eager to provide aid to all innocent victims, regardless of their origins, as long as the leader gives his agreement.

  “We have confidence in your generosity,” Eric concludes, “and we thank you in advance.”

  He sends the letter. Then, just days after the arrival of the three convoys, and perhaps emboldened by them, several hundred armed men from Srebrenica launch a surprise attack on a series of small villages near the Drina River eas
t of Bratunac. The villages, previously mixed Serb and Muslim, were brutally emptied of Muslims in the war’s early days and are now populated exclusively by Serbs.

  Eric sends a team of MSF nurses to the area on an aid convoy from Belgrade three days later. The group arrives at the Bratunac health clinic on the Serb side of the front line, where doctors and nurses have treated 110 people injured in the attacks, performing first aid and overseeing transfer of the seriously injured to hospitals in Bosnia and Serbia. They’ve examined at least fifty-eight bodies; many are mutilated.

  The team declines an offer to view the dead Serbs in the clinic’s basement, wishing to avoid the appearance of voyeurism. However, they agree to see a videotape. Its graphic succession of naked bodies, which the doctors assert have not only been ripped apart by explosives, but also mutilated by the Srebrenica Muslims, horrifies them. They cannot discern whether the mutilations occurred before or after death.

  “Castrated, breasts cut off, knee tendons severed, hands torn off, faces slashed,” the MSF team writes in a report, adding that the Serb health clinic staff appears “beaten down, exhausted and very sad.”

  During the attack, Serb civilians had fled toward the Drina River. Some were captured, some killed, including, according to a doctor, two Serb medics. Srebrenica soldiers and civilians also raided homes, taking food, shoes, and other items—perhaps some of their own stolen belongings—and setting house after house ablaze before withdrawing.

  In contrast to the medical workers across the front line in Srebrenica, those in Bratunac have ample supplies and can transfer the severely wounded to hospitals. However, they, too, labor under shellfire and treat wounded people daily. This is not the first time that butchered bodies have arrived after an offensive launched by the Srebrenicans.

  The Serbs vent their fury not only at the Srebrenicans, but also at the U.N. Protection Force. Despite the fact that Serb soldiers had searched the aid convoys from tip to top, poking open the bags of flour with bayonets, the Bratunac daily paper insinuates that the convoys delivered arms to Srebrenica.

  But arms are not the only weapons of war.

  “The Muslims got their strength back from the convoy,” a Serbian soldier tells a Reuters reporter.

  Plans for another U.N. convoy to continue on its way to Srebrenica are scrapped. Over the coming days, Serb authorities refuse to approve further aid to Srebrenica. The UNHCR suspends convoys indefinitely.

  12

  SPECIAL

  NEDRET CHERISHES ERIC DACHY’S LETTER. The medical aid and the recent successful offensive have cheered him and restored his energy. They have brought him, finally, a medicine so powerful it makes patients on his operating table sing, and so mysterious that it challenges Nedret’s highly intelligent mind.

  The four months Nedret has spent here have been the most exciting and depressing of his life. He has relished his ability to participate in two major aspects of life in Srebrenica—performing all of its surgeries, and providing input on all of its military offensives. From the day he’d chastised Commander Hakija Meholjić for “waging war like Indians” and failing to inform the hospital of an attack, he’d been in on all the planning. The mix of his military and humanitarian roles would make ethicists at the Red Cross cringe.

  A typical morning for Nedret begins with a walk to the hospital. On quiet days, he chats with people on the road. On other days, shelling forces him to stop and take cover. Once he heard something tumbling down the hill beside him. He froze, but when no explosion followed, went to investigate. Sticking out of the ground just feet away was the tail of a 2.24-inch rocket, miraculously unexploded.

  At the hospital Nedret meets with doctors and nurses, finds out who has come in during the night, assesses the condition of his patients, and examines them if necessary. Then, using instruments the nurses have sterilized overnight by boiling, he starts with surgeries. They take place in the operating room, which he moved upstairs, away from the busy hospital entrance, to reduce his patients’ risk of infection.

  When he works all day, he takes breaks in the “green room,” a lounge he set up next to the OR with green armchairs taken from the town’s cultural center and a large shelf for medical books he’s collected. People stop by to chat—friends he’s cultivated, civilian and military leaders.

  Nedret is perhaps the only man in Srebrenica always flush with cigarettes. Giving gifts to doctors, a tradition even before the war, has increased among patients and family members desperate for the hospital’s limited supplies and the doctors’ limited time.

  In the late afternoon, on days he can leave the hospital, Nedret walks back through the town, socializing with the idle townspeople who spend the days standing around outside their dim, overcrowded, poorly ventilated apartments despite the freezing temperatures and daily risk of shelling. Nedret savors his contacts with those he calls “the regular people.” Most of the other doctors wish they could avoid them. The one-and-a-quarter-mile walk takes Nedret past houses and apartment buildings with entryways bordered by giant piles of wood cut from Srebrenica’s now denuded hills.

  He ends his commute by climbing a small hill up the driveway of the Domavija Hotel, past the anti-aircraft gun stationed there. It has a seat, two pedals, two wheels for aiming, and three gun barrels. Once Nedret heard a Serb airplane overhead when nobody else was around and tried firing it himself, opening his mouth to equalize the pressure before the blasts. He missed, of course, but is proud of having tried.

  Hotel Domavija, his home in Srebrenica, houses a gaggle of soldiers loyal to Nedret’s friend, the commander Hakija Meholjić, whom they call “chief of the Hotel Fresh Air” because the hotel hardly has any intact windows. It faces a hill called Bojna, similar to a Bosnian word meaning battle. Nedret’s room, marked “317” on top of the door, faces the other way, toward a hill called Kozaric, which means goat pen.

  When he arrives from the hospital, workers bring him hot water to wash off the day’s blood and grime. By the light from a small generator—a special luxury for the doctor—he types his day’s medical notes.

  A chef named Dule concocts remarkable delicacies from the available food stocks, and every day at 8 A.M. and 6 P.M., unless they are at the front, the soldiers eat on wooden chairs in a wood-paneled dining hall with stone floors, reminiscent of a hunting lodge. Nedret sometimes joins them.

  At night his friends gather, using small torches to find their way through the dark halls of the hotel to his room. Nedret holds court, rolling tobacco, smoking and sometimes sipping a patient’s gift of homemade rakija, plum brandy, surrounded by the soldiers who idolize him. They play cards, talk and joke, or listen to the radio—Belgrade news, Sarajevo news, Zagreb news, the Voice of America—while garrulously trading their own political analyses.

  Some nights Nedret engages in other activities. Tall, beautiful Alma, ten years his junior, becomes a steady visitor after he cares for her injured sister. One of Srebrenica’s few female soldiers, she sates what he considers his “human need” for companionship in the stressful war zone where he imagines he may die. He is far from the only married man to take a girlfriend.

  One night the men conjure a worst-case scenario—what if Srebrenica is overtaken and they have to flee for their lives through the woods? What should they take? How could they make it?

  “We shouldn’t burden ourselves taking cans of food or flour,” Nedret advises Commander Hakija. “If you have an ounce of salt or a pound of sugar, you can survive fifteen days in the wilderness without anything else.”

  Wouldn’t they lose weight? Hakija asks.

  Losing weight doesn’t matter, Nedret says. What’s important is to keep the brain functioning, to maintain the ability to make sound decisions, to keep from hallucinating. Salt and sugar, he insists, are the way to go.

  Sometimes Nedret travels to the field to meet people living in the outlying areas. As a proud and curious member of the Srebrenica war council, eager to give confidence to the soldiers, he tours every yard of
the front lines and visits distant medical stations.

  He even witnesses some war actions, viewing the fighting from a distance and watching as thousands upon thousands of civilians pour in, like a lava flow, to pillage Serb villages. By their sheer numbers and the thunder of their voices, the howling, bag-carrying hordes help scare Serb inhabitants away. The rushing plunderers have earned a fake military designation, the “HPO division.” The “H” stands for hapsi, a Bosnian word for petty thieves. If 1,000 soldiers take part in an action, the HPO division adds at least 3,000.

  It is the rumbling of their empty stomachs that sets these hapsi on the heels of the soldiers. They come out of hunger and need and anger, many of them displaced from their own homes. Nedret sees them raging out of control, disobeying directives not to destroy things. Serb civilians lie dead in their wake.

  Part of the reason the Serbs guard humanitarian access to Srebrenica so jealously is that it’s one of the few areas of Bosnia where Muslims have fought back successfully, with such punishing and brutal effect. Nedret credits himself with some of this success, priding himself for having helped broker cooperation between some of Srebrenica’s rival commanders, men who might have preferred to kill one another instead of killing Serb soldiers. Indeed, it has happened—the commander of a neighboring town, a man with whom Nedret walked part way to Srebrenica, was allegedly assassinated by those envious of his power.

  Nedret packs his own pistol to and from work—a .25 caliber Beretta—although he makes other soldiers leave their weapons behind to enter the hospital. He likes war toys. His hotel room houses a small arsenal of guns that he’s collected here, such as his Heckler, the fast-shooting special automatic useful for street fights that reminds him of terrorists in the movies, a Scorpion, and a homemade pipe gun. Even the soldiers refer to Nedret as “a little ‘wild west.’”