War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  “Lots of civilians, women, children and old people, are being killed, usually by having their throats cut,” she says. “If only 10 percent of the information is true, we are witnessing a massacre in the enclaves without being able to do anything about it.”

  In response, the United States and Bosnia convene an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council. The council demands unimpeded access for aid convoys and an immediate end to “killings and atrocities” by “Serbian paramilitary forces.” It calls on the U.N. Secretary-General to increase the presence in eastern Bosnia of the only military force available, the U.N. Protection Force, UNPROFOR. The following day, the commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia, General Philippe Morillon of France, announces his intention to visit eastern Bosnia to assess the situation. Surely the Serbs won’t deny him his freedom of movement.

  Eric has a hunch, perhaps over-optimistic, that if Morillon can get himself and a convoy into Srebrenica, then he can get MSF in, too. He phones MSF headquarters in Belgium, his voice full of excitement.

  “Georges,” he says to the director of operations, Georges Dallemagne, “we have the opportunity to go to Srebrenica. Come!”

  At thirty-five, several years Eric’s senior, Georges is clean-cut with a round face and a receding head of straight, brown hair. His visits to the field have grown less frequent with his marriage and the birth of his two daughters, but he is as convinced of the importance of reaching the eastern Bosnian enclaves as Eric is. He wants to witness the situation firsthand so he can return to Europe and testify about it to governmental representatives and the media. Like Eric, Georges believes that distress, human rights abuses, and loss of human dignity—factors that don’t fit as easily on a scale as health needs—are important indicators for MSF intervention.

  Georges arrives quickly, and he and Eric set out for the border with two MSF nurses and a petite, sociable administrator, Muriel Cornelis, twenty-six, whose enthusiasm for her second MSF mission improves the group’s general mood. Eric’s strategy is again to drive directly to the Drina River, the convoy’s point of embarkation, rather than to stay in Belgrade and try to make official arrangements through Byzantine U.N. structures.

  The MSF team joins hordes of agitated U.N. soldiers, journalists, and U.N. refugee workers awaiting approval to cross into Bosnia in a dilapidated old riverine spa. Every day a line of white trucks filled with food and medicine sets out for Zvornik Bridge. There, an irascible, mustachioed sergeant, who reminds Eric of Saddam Hussein, blocks their progress with barrages of insults in Serbian, acting as if he’s the bridge’s king.

  Eric scurries back and forth to the bridge several times a day with the U.N. workers in a vain attempt to fulfill the latest demands issued by the Serbs for authorization papers, detailed manifests of humanitarian supplies, and a list of the weapons and ammunition of the accompanying U.N. soldiers, down to the last bullet. Getting through the days feels like wading through oatmeal.

  At night, back at the Communist-era spa, the orange-brown cavern of a dining room fills with a bizarre collection of international characters. They lean around a large table holding cigarettes and brandy glasses and shouting over the manic din of a raucous folk band. One white-bearded U.N. aid official, Larry Hollingworth, looks like Santa Claus, and a giant British major with aristocratic bearing resembles his nickname, the Giraffe. The U.N. soldiers, especially the British who spoil for some real action, trade rumors and attempt to drown their impotence in gallons of plum brandy. Looking useless and humiliated, they bear little resemblance to the proud soldiers engaged in a “courageous” mission whom Eric reads about in glossy French magazines.

  Serb soldiers share this hyperkinetic setting with the internationals. Aid officials and journalists, frustrated by day, spend their nights fawning over Major Vinko Pandurević, the massive, red-headed commander of what the Bosnian Serbs refer to as the 1st Zvornik Light Infantry Brigade. As best they can tell, the freckle-faced commander holds the key to their locked-up authorizations. The commander sits, smug, smiling, refusing to drink and looking, to Eric, as if he were observing flies repeatedly hitting the walls of a glass box. And as if the army unit he commands belongs to a state that really exists.

  On a minor holiday, a troop of folk dancers joins the cacophony, weaving through the room in traditional dress. Eric turns thirty-one in this surreal environment, but he doesn’t tell his colleagues. He never celebrates his birthday, anyway. This one marks the thirteenth anniversary of his father’s death.

  Meanwhile, General Morillon sets out to visit the besieged eastern Bosnian pockets of Cerska and Konjević Polje. On his return, he holds a press conference, surprising the journalists with his impression that conditions are not as serious as ham radio reports have suggested.

  “What we have seen is a population that is overrun with refugees but… we consider no one is really endangered.”

  As for Ogata’s reports of a massacre:

  “Je n’ai pas senti l’odeur de la mort,” he says. News outlets quote him worldwide: “I didn’t smell the odor of death.”

  Eric, knowing what he knows about the conduct of war here, quips to Muriel that Morillon “doesn’t have a very developed sense of smell.”

  Over the next days the general’s blasé comments provoke public outcry from U.N. refugee officials, whose previous reports on eastern Bosnia—based on information from local ham radio operators—now appear hysterical. They, not the military, have the expertise to assess the humanitarian situation, and they point out that the general was not taken to see outlying areas where entire villages were said to have been scorched.

  Indeed, even their most alarmist description of the situation turns out to be conservative. One of the members of the general’s own traveling party, Simon Mardel, thirty-five, a brave, level-headed British doctor representing the World Health Organization, hikes into Srebrenica from Konjević Polje and sends back assessment reports that are as authoritative as they are horrifying. The first foreign physician to reach Srebrenica since Eric Dachy last December, he describes the medical care as more primitive than anything he has seen in war-ravaged Afghanistan or Liberia. Up to thirty people a day are dying of disease exacerbated by malnutrition. Roughly 200 people require immediate evacuation and 2,000 are sick and injured.

  U.N. refugee officials hand his accounts to the media, who then report them widely. Now it is General Morillon’s assessment that looks foolish and naïve. Serb officials, on the other hand, seem more than pleased with Morillon’s statements. On the heels of Morillon’s announcement, Serb authorities agree to allow an evacuation of the seventy wounded of Konjević Polje to the Bosnian government-held city of Tuzla. Eight Red Cross buses outfitted as ambulances head toward the border, but a Serb mayor calls in soldiers to block their way, asserting that some of the purportedly injured Muslims must be “war criminals.”

  That night, General Morillon appears at the spa on the Drina River and convenes a press conference. Eric, Georges, and the frustrated lot of UNHCR officials, UNPROFOR soldiers, and journalists gather in the large dining room.

  The French general, a former Legionnaire, is an athletic-appearing fifty-seven-year-old man with short gray hair, square metal glasses, and thin lips that curl around cigarette after cigarette. He tells the group that he has met with the Bosnian Serbs and is confident the evacuation of the wounded will go forward.

  “I’ve also informed them,” he adds, “of my intention to travel to Srebrenica in person with a group of military observers in order to work out a ceasefire and possibly to allow the entry of a humanitarian aid convoy.”

  Eric notices that the general is announcing his intentions rather than saying he will seek permission from the Serbs. He suspects that Morillon, bitter and embarrassed, needs to look as if he’s doing something for Srebrenica, the largest enclave of non-Serbs remaining in eastern Bosnia, which now contains thousands of refugees fleeing Cerska and Konjević Polje.

  “I will go to Srebrenica, if necessary even by foot,
” the general says.

  Sensing opportunity, Eric stands up.

  “Mon général, we’re from MSF,” he says. “We want to go there, too.”

  * * *

  THE U.N. REFUGEE AGENCY REPRESENTATIVES also hope to send a fourteen-truck aid convoy to Srebrenica along with the general. But early the next morning, March 11, Bosnian Serb Commander Pandurević refuses to authorize the convoy. Morillon decides to proceed with a small party that includes Eric, Georges, and Muriel from Doctors Without Borders and just one truck of aid. Planning to return in the evening and warned that the Serbs will search everything, the three MSF workers carry no personal belongings, not even a change of underwear.

  They travel south along the east bank of the River Drina, in a Toyota Land Cruiser marked “MSF,” following a small line of vehicles carrying the general, two UNHCR officials, a small number of U.N. soldiers and military observers, some medical supplies and sugar, and, rather mysteriously it seems to Eric, two Americans in military uniform.

  It’s a clear, sunny day, and the rolling, snow-capped hills of Bosnia on the far side of the Drina River gleam in the sunlight, catching Eric’s eye. The convoy bypasses Zvornik and its obstructionist “King of the Bridge,” inching toward another bridge at the Serbian town of Ljubovija. Various groups of armed men stop them along the route to examine their papers and one, about halfway to the river crossing, tells them that they can’t proceed. Morillon negotiates, responding to the harassment of lowranking Serbian officers by threatening to call their leader, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević. One of the Americans attempts to mount the heavy tactical satellite communications equipment he is carrying, but is unable to find a signal. Morillon must ask local authorities for use of their Post Telephone and Telegraph, PTT. He finally reaches a high-level Yugoslav authority and then, after hours of waiting, escorted by a Yugoslav army general, they are allowed to cross the river.

  They arrive in Bosnia and are stopped just north of Srebrenica in Bratunac. Morillon meets with a local commander and hears a litany of atrocities allegedly committed by Srebrenica Muslims against the Serbs. Then, the kicker. He is told that the “Muslims” blew up the yellow bridge on the main road between Bratunac and Srebrenica last night.

  When Eric hears this, he suspects that the Serbs themselves destroyed the bridge to prevent the convoy from reaching Srebrenica. The day’s many delays, he thinks, were coordinated to give them time to do it. The only way to reach Srebrenica now is via a road that winds through the snowy, wooded mountains, hasn’t been used for months, and could be mined. Around 3 in the afternoon, the Bosnian Serbs escort them farther along the Drina River, show them a village they say was destroyed by the Bosnian army, and then turn them toward the hills. The Serbs bid farewell at the site of an abandoned mining complex, warning that they fear for the party’s safety because of the risk of attack by the Muslims.

  Eric is unsettled by the delays and warnings, but tries not to let it show. He goes only so far as to ask the U.N. military personnel, “Are the Bosnians aware that we’re coming?”

  Sure, they are, he will remember them saying. Of course, we told Sarajevo to tell them by radio.

  * * *

  BEFORE THE UNESCORTED PART of their journey begins, the U.N. military personnel take stock. It has recently snowed for nine days straight. According to the map, the all-weather road will change into a track meant for fair-weather use, and its path will climb. They decide the armored personnel carrier, painted white and marked “UN” on all sides, will take the lead with its crew of five Canadian U.N. soldiers. The boxy, mastabalike Canbat M113 has, on both sides, five wheels covered with rolling tracks that help distribute its weight and facilitate its movement on difficult terrain. Because the area may be mined, the convoy’s vehicles—the MSF Land Cruiser, the small Belgian transportation battalion truck filled with medical supplies and sugar, and a handful of jeeps carrying Morillon, the American soldiers, U.N. Military Observers (UNMOs), and refugee officials—will follow one at a time, fifty yards apart.

  The road narrows and is soon covered with ice and snow, a blanket that thickens as the elevation climbs. The atmosphere is tense. The travelers roll down their windows to avoid shattered glass in case they are indeed targeted, a lesson from Eric’s close call in Sarajevo. The air in the car turns cold. Above them the hills and pine tree boughs glow white.

  The jeeps repeatedly get mired in snow. As daylight wanes, Morillon switches, with his aide and his translator-bodyguard, to the lead APC to try to reach the Bosnian lines before sunset. His vehicle progresses out of sight.

  The UNHCR Nissan S.U.V. stops in front of Eric, and its occupants get out to put on chains. The MSF Land Cruiser has none. When the time comes to proceed, its tires spin. Eric remains at the wheel while Georges unloads from the car in his heavy flak jacket and walks behind it to push. He shoves the car forward, then stumbles through the one-and-a-halffoot-thick snow to catch up and push again. After Herculean efforts, he gets it rolling. Georges stops to catch his breath and, between huffs, shouts for Eric to keep going. Eric drives ahead and begins to navigate a bend in the trail.

  An earth-shaking detonation rends the muffled silence. It rattles the vehicle and reverberates in the mountain air. Eric hits the brakes and closes his eyes. It sounds as if an anti-tank mine has exploded behind them. He trembles with the thought that his own vehicle passed over it. Then he thinks of Georges.

  Someone shouts for the doctor. A U.N. refugee worker appears at Eric’s window. “We have to go see,” he says and Eric wonders, given the size of the explosion and the devastation it must have caused, whether he’ll have any way of helping.

  He grabs his emergency case from the back of the Land Cruiser, then carefully places his feet on the vehicle’s tire tracks. Where there is one mine, there may be more. Walking on the path where the car has already passed should be safer. Or should it? He’s heard of a kind of mine that detonates after several presses on its trigger.

  Fuck! Eric is later unsure if he thinks it or says it aloud. I could explode at any moment.

  Here he is, on a darkening mountainside in the middle of nowhere in a Bosnian no-man’s-land full of mines. He isn’t thinking about his sense of purpose, all the months he’s waited to get to Srebrenica, all the suffering people he could help save. He wonders what the hell he is doing here. He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be taking these risks. He feels like an egoist for not having thought about the effect his death would have on his mother, brother, and sisters. If he loses his leg or his life, he’ll have only himself to blame.

  The others notice his hesitation.

  Eric’s eyes fix a laser-beam stare on the snowy path ahead, trying to figure out the best way to proceed. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t try to reach the site of the explosion. He wants to walk gently, but he can’t stop shaking. His mind reels with images of the amputees he’s seen.

  Where is Georges?

  Eric braces for the shock of red blood on snow.

  The site of the explosion comes into view just around the curve. The truck’s cab is shattered and its front wheels blown away. Everything is stained black, including the snow. Smoke thickens the air with a suffocating smell.

  Where is Georges?

  The sight of him, upright, floods Eric with relief.

  “It’s incredible. It’s incredible,” Georges keeps repeating, and, with a far-off look: “I should have been on that running board.”

  The Belgian drivers had beckoned him up as they passed, but, exhausted by his efforts and weighted down by his flak jacket, Georges didn’t attempt the leap. As the truck passed, he grabbed a cord hanging from its back and let himself be pulled along. After a tiring sixty feet or so, he let go. Within moments the truck detonated the mine.

  “Did you think of your daughters?” Eric asks, as much as anything to assure himself that his colleague is oriented.

  “Yes,” he says. Instead of his life flashing before him at the moment of the explosion, h
e saw the faces of his little girls, ages four and two.

  It seems miraculous that nobody is seriously injured. Aside from the APC, the truck is the only armored vehicle in the convoy. The Belgian government took the unusual trouble to line its cabs with expensive Kevlar mine-resistant plates. The plates absorbed both the impact of the blast and the slivers of metal, cocooning the drivers as their cab disintegrated. They are bruised and shaken, with eardrums shattered, but to Eric’s examination, all right.

  One Belgian even regains his sense of humor.

  “There was this little noise in the engine anyway,” he says. “It needed to go for service.”

  Eric, still nervous, tries to get the MSF car going, but it is firmly stuck now in the middle of the bend in the narrow road. Morillon and his armored personnel carrier are nowhere in sight. The remaining jeep doesn’t have extra room. The aid workers and American soldiers have no choice but to walk. They spread out thirty feet apart, stepping carefully on the APC’s tracks in case of more mines.

  After a few hundred feet, Eric comes face to face with a Bosnian soldier dressed in white camouflage and bearing a gun. Georges sees him, too, and gives Eric a questioning look. The first thing the man does is pantomime a cigarette. A few of his companions emerge from the bushes. Eric musters some words of Bosnian to communicate and Muriel tries out her rusty Russian. The Bosnians are shocked that the convoy has come this way. Nobody warned them. They mined the route themselves. In fact, they say, a second mine is lying not far from the one that detonated.

  They deny knowing of any problem on the main Bratunac-Srebrenica road. They’re sure the Serbs have set them up to be blamed for a catastrophe. If, in fact, one happened, who would have been blamed? The Bosnians for mining the route? The Serbs for blowing up the bridge, if indeed they did? Or General Morillon for leading civilians on a reckless journey and then leaving them behind?