by Sheri Fink
Three days after Nijaz’s death, Ilijaz has to treat a dying family member. His thirty-one-year-old cousin, Sulejman Pilav, the medical technician who worked by his side during the war’s early months in Kragljivoda, was eating lunch near the clinic when a shell exploded nearby. From the moment Ilijaz lays eyes on him at Srebrenica Hospital, he knows the injury is mortal. Sulejman’s right hip is destroyed. Ilijaz wants to comfort him.
“You don’t have to pretend,” Sulejman says. “You don’t have to lie. I know what’s happening.”
Somehow Ilijaz finds himself operating anyway, trying to help Nedret repair some of the damage. Futile.
Instead of staying in the hospital to watch his cousin die, Ilijaz packs some empty humanitarian aid boxes with emergency medical supplies—wound dressings, iodine, narcotics, IV fluids, chest tubes, an intubation kit, and a set of surgical instruments. He rides with soldiers south on the main road through the dark hills to Kragljivoda in a truck fueled by diesel from last month’s humanitarian convoys. After visiting with former neighbors, he and several men carry the supplies about three miles east on small, hilly country roads to a designated position, a small Muslim village burned at the start of the war. There, Ilijaz establishes a medical station in a partially destroyed house in preparation for another offensive. Other medical technicians and physicians from the hospital situate themselves at satellite stations.
The Srebrenicans have two military choices: push further north in an effort to link with Tuzla, or attack south to take Skelani and cut off the bridge to Serbia. They’ve chosen the latter.
Ilijaz knows there is no way that the lightly armed Srebrenicans will be able to hold on to a strategic town that sits right on the border with Serbia. To him, the offensive has another purpose altogether—to show the Serbs who have taken over the region that the Muslims from the area are still alive and that they are coming back.
The action starts at 6 the next morning. The Srebrenica soldiers attack from multiple sides and meet stiff resistance. Ilijaz, working about a half mile behind the nearest lines of battle, stabilizes the injured and sends them to Srebrenica Hospital by cart, by foot, carried by comrades, or on couch cushions laid on the back of a tractor. By late in the day, the Srebrenica soldiers succeed in moving the battle lines further south near a village called Jezero. Ilijaz moves his station along with the battle to another destroyed village. In the evening, a group of eight of Srebrenica’s most elite soldiers, injured while trying to take a munitions depot, reaches Ilijaz. Exhausted, he treats them. On this first day of battle alone, approximately thirty-five Srebrenica men and two women die and many more are injured. Serbs report forty-nine killed.
Srebrenica soldiers capture a great deal of territory and military hardware including another tank, their fourth, and their first mortar and howitzer. Thousands of civilian hapsi rush in to scrounge for food.
Ilijaz stays awake to speak with a captured Serbian special forces soldier, a volunteer from a wealthy family in Serbia who first fought in Vukovar. When Ilijaz asks why the soldier, whom he judges to be about twenty years old, has come to battle in Bosnia, the man answers, “To defend Serbianism.” He believes that Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia are being slaughtered and it is every good Serb’s duty to go to war.
For Ilijaz, the soldier’s words provide a rare peek into the mentality of his enemies. He is reminded of the delusion of persecution and endangerment that he first detected when Serbs posted Milošević’s picture in their dorm rooms back in medical school. The belief they are under attack and in danger gives them the mental justification to commit brutality. But fear and thirst for vengeance have infected the Srebrenicans, too, and Ilijaz knows it. The offensive to take Skelani is not without its atrocities. When the Muslims draw near to the town, Serb civilians take to the bridge, fleeing toward Serbia. A number of them, including at least one woman and one child, are shot.
Bosnian Serb Army General Ratko Mladić leads Bosnian Serb forces and Yugoslav army elements in a ferocious counterattack to wrest the strategic area, which pokes east like a sore thumb into neighboring Serbia, from the Muslims. Within four days, they push the Srebrenica soldiers back. The Skelani offensive costs Srebrenica dearly. More than fifty soldiers are killed and more than 150 wounded. The brother of one of those killed takes revenge on two of the last few “loyal” Serbs who remain in Srebrenica, killing a debilitated, immobile woman and her well-liked caretaker and son, “Zech” (Rabbit) with a rifle butt. The killer is captured and jailed.
* * *
NO VICTORIES ARE WON AFTER SKELANI.
A squeeze in the northwest part of the enclave coincides with news of a potential peace plan designed by negotiators for the European Community and the United Nations, Cyrus Vance and Lord David Owen. American commentators deride the plan, which would divide Bosnia into ethnic enclaves and appease those seeking “ethnically pure” territory, as “another Munich.” Serbs try to wring the area free of Muslims, perhaps to create a reality on the ground that will influence their area of control in the peace plan. Thousands of Muslim inhabitants flee, either undertaking a risky walk toward Tuzla or heading for Srebrenica.
Fighting rages. Displaced inhabitants tumble into the valley of Srebrenica along with the snow, filling its frozen streets with their blankets and their wood fires and their desperation. The crush of patients forces the doctors to send the wounded to recover in private homes that are choked with wood smoke, crawling with lice, and packed with dozens of displaced people.
Serb warplanes again blast Srebrenica, in violation of the no-fly zone declared by the United Nations. With no new aid supplies, no new offensives for the hapsi to collect food, and thousands of new refugees, food supplies vanish. People, especially those displaced from their homes in the villages, turn to old war recipes, pounding flour out of corncobs, tree buds, and the pulp of apples and pears. The diet constipates, but the doctors have no laxatives to offer.
More than one villager travels at night back to his burnt home, back to the fields where he might have buried some food, and is killed or injured by a mine as he crosses a front line or reaches into a corncrib. Malnourished children die from common colds. An orphaned baby perishes of acute starvation.
The hospital does not have enough food for its patients and staff, despite the donations of generous villagers with land. The doctors lose weight. Ilijaz has one, sometimes two, small meals a day. He is six feet tall and weighs only 128 pounds now, roughly 45 pounds less than before the war. He suffers from chronic back pain as he bends over the low, makeshift operating table to bandage wounds or assist with surgery.
The non-injured begin coming to the hospital, desperate for food. A guard named Shevko sits inside the hospital entrance stroking his mustache and leering out the window when someone tries to enter. From time to time he stretches out a hand to “examine” someone who is being especially persistent. Despite his best efforts to scare patients off, the hospital overflows with the ill and injured. They fill the clinic next door, too, and course up the town’s steep main street to occupy half of the health spa and the nearby Domavija Hotel.
To fight back against the Serb offensive, desperate means are considered. The army floats a pair of explosive-laden barges toward Serb-held areas—one explodes, but no one is hurt. A few days later, Commander Naser Orić and a small group of soldiers journey to Sase, the mining town where Ilijaz once worked in the health clinic and where Ejub met his wife, to investigate the possibility of releasing a pool of toxic chemicals into the Drina River. Accompanying them is a German photographer, Philipp von Recklinghausen, who recently walked into the enclave with Bosnian army soldiers, pulling his weight by carrying a rifle grenade and 300 rifle cartridges. He had bought a pair of hiking boots and come to Bosnia on holiday, on a young man’s quest to learn what war is, to initiate himself into manhood.
Kicking machine gun casings out of the way as they walk, the group passes through a village, Zalazje, which the Srebrenica soldiers captured in their July 12 S
t. Peter’s Day assault last summer. The Srebrenicans are proud of their victory here. Commander Naser encourages the photographer to take pictures, and a soldier begins to lead the photographer and his translator from the woods toward a high clearing, seeking a better view. The soldier triggers a mine. Shrapnel hammers the photographer’s right forearm. Back at the hospital there is no ketamine left, or at least none that Nedret will use, not even for Srebrenica’s guest, Philipp. Nedret pokes his injured arm with a steel probe and pours disinfectant into his wound. The photographer winces with pain but stifles a cry because he has noticed that at this hospital even children rarely cry. He watches technicians sharpen an old scalpel the doctor will reuse.
Nedret finishes dressing the wound and tells the photographer he must come to the hospital every day to have it cleaned and covered. No antibiotics remain, and the ones the photographer brought for himself he has naïvely given away, thinking he wouldn’t need them.
The injury starts a relationship between the two men. Every day the photographer walks into the hospital, dirty, stinking even to himself, and knocks on the door of the operating room. Nedret, who cannot bear most distractions or intrusions, always greets him warmly.
“Ahh, Philipp!” he laughs, “Let’s have a smoke.”
Sometimes Philipp joins Nedret in his room at the Hotel Fresh Air, watching him regale the soldiers. These people are a tribe, Philipp thinks. Nedret is one of their kings.
* * *
HOSPITAL SUPPLIES DWINDLE. Ketamine is gone or hoarded away. Again, the sound of screaming fills the operating room. In moments of extreme stress and anger, thrown instruments fly through the air and clatter on the floor. The doctors are exhausted and hungry.
The OR is such a stressful place that its chief instrument nurse comes to Nedret and asks to be relieved of her duties. She feels sick, she says, mentally sick. She cannot sleep and cannot even speak to her family about the daily horrors she witnesses. When Nedret tells her he can’t spare her, she goes over his head. Nedret, for all his power and influence, is not the official director of the hospital. Dr. Avdo, the older pediatrician, still is, and he agrees to let her go.
Nedret is furious. His friends have noticed changes in him—emotional changes. He came into the enclave with a positive attitude, a friendly and gregarious manner, a sympathetic ear, and an inability to finish even one glass of plum brandy. Now he drinks, curses, and quickly loses his patience. He knows that patients are offering gifts in exchange for good service—some doctors refuse to take the gifts, but others seem to expect them. When Nedret hears that some patients are paying exorbitant fees for scarce, lifesaving treatments, it strikes him as morally wrong.
If a patient needs an infusion, Dr. Avdo, the hospital director, has to be convinced to let go of one of the remaining few. If a patient needs antibiotics, there is only one way to get them—pay 100 Deutschemarks per dose of penicillin on the black market. Desperate family members discover where to buy it. Some who have no money consider killing to get the drugs they or their family members need.
One day Nedret examines a patient with a groin injury who’s been brought into the hospital after being stuck for days in the woods outside of Srebrenica. The patient has developed a dangerous infection and urgently needs antibiotics. Nedret tells him so, but says he has none to offer him. The next day, when Nedret stops by the patient’s room, the man shows him a small bottle containing an injection of four million international units of penicillin. The vial looks suspiciously like the penicillin Nedret brought with him when he entered Srebrenica last summer. He demands to know where it came from, but the patient refuses to tell him. Nedret corners Avdo, the hospital director, and demands that he get to the bottom of it.
“You have to make this patient speak!” Nedret says and swears he won’t come to work again until the source of the racket is discovered. He storms out of the hospital, the sound of his yelling echoing behind him.
The German photographer sits in Nedret’s room at the Hotel Domavija, sipping plum brandy and admiring Nedret’s “beautiful, stupid girlfriend” as he listens to the doctor vent. Nedret refuses to return to work. He is even willing to sacrifice patients, to let them die, to have this clarified. “I can’t work. I can’t work,” Nedret tells the photographer. “I have to go when there’s a chance to go.” Day after day passes, and Nedret fails to reappear at the hospital. Other doctors and nurses have their own theory about Nedret’s absence. They believe he has gone on strike over a dispute with the opština, the town authorities, because he wants to be granted a position of authority over Avdo.
A Serb attack near the Drina River leaves several wounded, and still Nedret will not return. A boy with a severe abdominal injury dies. Ilijaz believes he probably couldn’t have survived, even with an operation. He is disappointed in Nedret for not coming to look at him, but he realizes that the problem of Nedret’s strike may be more psychological than practical. Patients view Nedret as the surgeon and come to the hospital asking for him. Ilijaz and the other doctors defer to his authority. But in truth, although the other doctors expect so much of Nedret, he is not much more qualified than they are.
How far do the duties of a physician stretch? Is a doctor always required to be judged as a professional, or can he be seen as a human being, with extreme stress a factor in his decisionmaking? The intrepid photographer scribbles in the small, soft-cover notebook that he bought in East Germany and carried with him into Srebrenica. “The only surgeon of the self-described free area takes an apparent holiday,” he writes. “Without medicine, without anesthesia, it all makes no sense.”
14
ROAD TO SREBRENICA
THE VISION OF SREBRENICA HOSPITAL empty and cold, its patients lying dead and abandoned, haunts Eric Dachy. Nearly three months have passed since Bosnian Serb authorities allowed aid convoys to reach the town. As the Serb military closes in on the last remaining Bosnian Muslim villages in eastern Bosnia, frantic ham radio operators—the only sources of information from the besieged pockets—beg for help, telling of starvation, relentless shelling, and massacres.
Eric has found no way to deliver the MSF medical staff and supplies he promised in his letter to Nedret. His letter to Bosnian Serb leader Dr. Radovan Karadžić asking for approval to place an MSF team in Srebrenica was never answered. Eric wonders if the local staff members are even still there. Has Nedret attempted to flee back to Tuzla? Are Ilijaz and the others alive?
Evenings of food, drink and conversation at the homes of Yugoslav friends and their families temporarily distract Eric from these questions. When he climbs the stairs back to his room in the dark night, though, disturbing thoughts await him. He contemplates while drawing. He reads books by Yugoslav authors and poems by Bosnian sufi poets, trying to understand this place and these people. He takes in Balzac, Fernando Pessoa, Joyce’s Ulysees, and texts of philosophy and psychology, too.
Mostly he thinks about the war, and the workings of international politics and aid. Eric concludes that the medicine, the food, and the blankets that MSF and the other aid organizations donate here are “bullshit” compared with what’s really needed. Eric’s success at his daily job—providing medical supplies and equipment to hospitals in Serbia and Serb-held areas of Bosnia—matters less and less to him. So when the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees organizes a conference to introduce the humanitarian community to potential governmental donors and make a pitch for additional funding, Eric attends with a sense of duty, not purpose.
Dressed in an ill-fitting state-made Yugoslav suit jacket he bought and paired with his translator’s dark red silk tie, he sits at a large table in an opulent ballroom at the Belgrade Hyatt Hotel, uncomfortable amid the fine china, the formality, and the diplomats in their conservative suits and dresses. Other representatives of humanitarian agencies play the money game, wringing their hands over the dire humanitarian situation, trumpeting their own efforts to relieve it, and lavishing thanks on the donor countries that the diplomats represent. Though
Eric wants to be polite, he can’t help plunking a sour chord into this symphony of praise, letting the diplomats know that by failing to address the root problem—the war—their humanitarian generosity is merely a show.
In fact, it’s worse than a show. Saying, as the diplomats do, that humanitarian activity is “restoring peace” is a lie. World leaders are fully informed about the massacres and the “ethnic cleansing.” The U.S. government regularly issues its own reports detailing the atrocities. It’s clear that what’s needed for restoring peace is, ironically, military action. Force must be met with force. It will take risking lives, killing people. That is a painful step. But that, Eric believes, is what it will take. And Eric suspects, though of course he cannot be sure, that Milošević is a paper tiger. If powerful nations use force against him, he will crumple.
The word “humanitarian” makes Eric want to throw up. When you enter a flooded room, you don’t just start mopping up the water—first you turn off the tap. It’s simple logic. Eric is so sure that humanitarianism is useless here that he again considers giving up and leaving the Balkans. There is one thing that stops him—his idea of “interposition,” of aid workers stepping between victims and aggressors to break the pattern of ethnic cleansing, not as humanitarians, but as activists. He decides to stay and pursue a challenging ethical strategy: become a virtual “secret agent,” acting for good from within the camp of the supposed do-gooders. His hope of achieving his goals in Srebrenica, however, dims by the day.
* * *
THE WINTER PASSES. At the start of March 1993, as another set of Bosnian peace talks are under way at the United Nations in New York, ham radio operators report the takeover of the eastern Bosnian town of Cerska and the massacre of at least 500 civilians. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, sends an urgent telegram to the United Nations, making reference to the barrage of desperate-sounding reports from eastern Bosnia and warning that villages around Srebrenica “are on the point of falling to the Serbs.”
