by Sheri Fink
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Six days after Ilijaz’s birth village went up in flames, Resolution 816, authorizing the use of military action to enforce the flight ban over Bosnia, is adopted by a vote of 14–0–1, with China abstaining. Security Council representatives make much of their newfound determination to back up their own demands. “It is the first real step toward addressing the actions of the aggressors in this conflict and draws a firm line beyond which further disregard of our efforts and positions will not go unanswered,” declares the representative from rotating council member Djibouti. The resolution is referred to as a “landmark.” It will go into effect after a brief delay.
* * *
BOSNIAN SERB GENERAL MLADIĆ ANNOUNCES the following day that no further aid convoys will be allowed into Srebrenica. U.N. trucks will be permitted to enter Srebrenica empty, only to evacuate civilians. The head of UNHCR, Sadako Ogata, writes to the U.N. secretary-general that only two options remain to save those trapped in Srebrenica: Either inject internationals and turn the enclave into a U.N.-protected area or organize a large-scale evacuation.
“As time is running out,” she writes, “more drastic action needs to be taken urgently to ensure the survival of the population in Srebrenica.”
The Security Council responds by issuing a toothless demand for the Serbs to immediately “cease and desist forthwith from all violations of international humanitarian law,” stating it is “shocked by and extremely alarmed at the dire and worsening humanitarian situation” and commending, for good measure, the “brave people” of the UNHCR and UNPROFOR. No further military threat is made.
The ceasefire around Srebrenica begins to break down in spite of the presence of the small contingent of U.N. soldiers. Under Serb attack, front lines in the south dissolve, leaving the main Srebrenica-Skelani road into Srebrenica wide open for Serb tanks. The local commander of the area must force his fleeing men back to the front lines to fight.
Around 10:30 A.M. on April 3, a Canadian captain ventures into the dangerous front-line area near Osmaće, ostensibly on “humanitarian patrol.” He looks out across the valley through his binoculars and sees the Serbs. They see him, too. One after another, mortar bombs rain down on his position, exploding with a deafening boom. He tries to flee, but is injured on a snowy hillside along with a Bosnian machine gunner and ABC reporter Tony Birtley, who initiated the dangerous trip in an effort to assess the military situation.
Nedret, working alone since Thierry’s departure, takes Tony to the operating room first, over the protests of U.N. soldiers who want their fellow soldier to receive priority. Nedret doesn’t bend to their pressure, but neither does he base his triage system on medical criteria. “Even if his body was hanging in threads,” Nedret tells the journalist, who’s become a close friend, “you would be first.”
A few weeks ago Tony watched Nedret treat the injuries of Philipp, the German photographer, whose bumbling ways and repeated injuries led Tony to nickname him “grenade magnet.” The photographer awoke from ketamine anesthesia and described a beautiful dream. He was flying away, and the earth below looked like a beautiful ball.
“Did you see the earth very clearly?” Tony had asked him.
“Yes,” said the photographer.
“Was Bosnia on that earth?”
* * *
THE NEXT DAY SREBRENICA AUTHORITIES, Shooting guns in the air and shouting through megaphones, prevent civilians from climbing onto sixteen U.N. trucks leaving the enclave. More than 5,000 people have scrambled aboard the three outgoing convoys of the previous two weeks. About nineteen of them, mostly children, died from overcrowding or exposure to the elements.
“We don’t even transport livestock that way,” a Bosnian army commander says in a statement.
Upon each convoy’s arrival, soldiers abandon the front lines and rush to Srebrenica to help their family members get aboard. Military leaders, as desperate to hold on to the town as many civilians are to leave it, fear that an exodus of women and children will sap the men’s motivation to fight, devastating Srebrenica’s defenses. Every thousand civilians removed by U.N. trucks brings the Serbs that much closer to emptying of Muslims the town they covet for themselves.
The Bosnians accuse the United Nations of collaborating with the Serbs in the ethnic cleansing of the town. Eric Dachy, disgusted by the way the evacuations are being carried out, and fully aware that men of fighting age won’t be allowed to leave, can’t help agreeing with this view. The massive evacuation being proposed by the United Nations seems like a capitulation, a predetermination that Srebrenica will fall. He believes they should try to prevent ethnic cleansing, not carry it out.
The UNHCR special representative for the former Yugoslavia, criticized from many corners, fires back angrily that his organization is only trying to save lives, and that Srebrenica is filled with refugees from other areas who have no place to live. “When we are trapped, as we are in Srebrenica, by all sorts of complications, the only thing we can do is to save the people who are asking us to save them,” he says in an interview quoted in the New York Times.
In Srebrenica, Thierry is replaced by another Belgian MSF surgeon, Piet Willems. The fifty-three-year-old is an older, stiffer, and more formal man from a peaceful neighborhood outside of Brussels where he has a large, neatly kept house, a neat, manicured lawn, and a neat, well-kept wife. He has decided to use three weeks of vacation volunteering with MSF, inspired by the Christian belief that he must do something to help those in trouble. Deemed too inexperienced in international work to be sent to Cambodia when he applied to work at MSF, he has somehow been dispatched in a pinch to Srebrenica. He nearly turned himself around at the border after Thierry, on his way out of the enclave, described the situation. What stopped Piet from returning home was imagining what it would feel like to face his family without having done what he’d set out to do.
MSF headquarters in Belgium has been recruiting a team for Srebrenica with the goal of keeping at least one surgeon, anesthetist, general practitioner, and logistician in the enclave at all times. Some of the doctors, particularly the surgeons, will come for short assignments.
The day they arrive, Piet and an MSF anesthesiologist begin work in the operating room on the top floor of the hospital. Like Thierry, they find the local medical staff unmotivated and listless. Even artillery fire doesn’t shake them. During one nighttime kidney operation, the locals barely flinch at a sound—close shellfire—that terrifies the new surgeon. The local nurses make fun of his trembling and make light of the intensifying artillery attack until one explosion rocks the hospital and sends part of a shattered windowpane flying narrowly past the MSF anesthesiologist’s head. The team quickly finishes operating and heads for the cellar. More than thirty mortar bombs and other artillery rounds land in the town overnight.
The Belgian surgeon leaves Srebrenica with the next convoy, too anxious to work in these conditions, at least for now. A U.N. report of the attacks motivates General Morillon to announce he is returning to Srebrenica and that he is negotiating with the Serbs for a contingent of 150 Canadian peacekeepers, already on the ground in Bosnia, to enter. He leaves the capital, Sarajevo, the following day. But when Morillon nears Srebrenica, hundreds of Serb civilians surround his armored vehicles, pounding steel spikes into bulletproof windows, pulling off antennas and flags, scrawling graffiti, including “Morillon—Hitler,” and preventing them from advancing.
In spite of Morillon’s failure to re-enter the town, a relative calm descends on Srebrenica over the coming days. A recently arrived MSF general practitioner takes advantage of the quiet to try to improve the situation in the Srebrenica schoolhouse. Hundreds of displaced persons live inside, packed fifty to sixty to a classroom, sleeping on pushed-together desks under the gaze of the old leader, Tito, whose framed photographs still adorn the high walls above green chalkboards. Almost all have the characteristic itchy rash of skin infested with scabies, and about half look anemic. The school lacks showers or
baths, its toilets are stopped up, and people defecate in the open. When Chetnik soldiers capture Srebrenica’s water treatment plant and cut off the meager supply of running water, diarrhea spreads in the schoolhouse. The doctor installs a water bladder, organizes cleaning of the schoolrooms, and begins to treat patients with the now-ample supply of drugs. In fact so many boxes of medicines sit in the hospital in such disarray that MSF’s new logistician, Hans Ulens, has to request, by radio, that the Americans stop airdropping them.
Serb authorities allow another aid convoy to pass through to Srebrenica on the Saturday before Easter, warning that it must be filled with women and children on its way out. But Srebrenica soldiers again shoo away the hundreds of desperate people trying to mount the trucks, firing into the crowd and injuring several. The convoy crosses back into Serb territory empty.
18
THE HOTTEST PART OF HELL
THE NEXT DAY, APRIL 12, 1993, dawns in bright sunshine and the long-awaited freshness of spring. It provides the perfect backdrop for what has been nearly a week without shelling. The MSF team awakens refreshed after having enjoyed Easter dinner and a rare bath at the Hotel Domavija the previous evening.
What’s more, today is the “landmark” day when U.N. Resolution 816, authorizing NATO to shoot down unauthorized aircraft over Bosnia, will go into effect after many delays. Srebrenica residents, the majority of whom have precious little with which to occupy their days, spill out of their cramped quarters and take to the streets. Refugee children from the schoolhouse run to play in the open air, their mothers strolling outside to watch them. Dozens crowd the amphitheater-like steps that wrap around the schoolyard to watch soccer matches played with balls air-dropped at the suggestion of a UNHCR official. In a far corner of the stands, a knot of young fans surrounds three teens who strum folk songs on a guitar-like shargija.
The exhilaration of the day contrasts with Ilijaz’s depressed mood. He has lost too many friends and family members to this war—among them his cousin, Sulejman; his colleague, Dr. Džanić; and several weeks ago the good friend who’d introduced him to Fatima, Dr. Hamdija Halilović, who was killed by a tank shell near the front lines in Sarajevo while trying to pull an injured fighter to safety. Ilijaz, given the news by a ham radio operator, was the one who had to break it to Hamdija’s parents.
Last night brought yet another loss, his niece’s husband—a good friend—mortally wounded on the front line south of Srebrenica. By the time the man was carried into a room on the hospital’s ground floor, he was dead. Ilijaz sat alone beside his body and cried. Hours passed, and someone gently led Ilijaz upstairs to the doctor’s room to lie down. He was too upset. For the first time in his life, he took a Valium to calm his nerves.
Now, on this beautiful Monday afternoon, family members arrive to take the man’s body away, planning to bury it in a tiny wooded cemetery not far from the hospital. Ilijaz, exhausted and disoriented, stays behind to finish some work and will join them later for the dzenaza ceremony.
* * *
AROUND 2 P.M., at the airport in Sarajevo, Serbian nationalist commander General Ratko Mladić concludes a meeting with U.N. General Lars-Eric Wahlgren. Mladić promises to respect the ceasefire and work toward peace. About the same time, U.S., French, and Dutch warplanes take flight from bases in Italy and roar off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Adriatic Sea to begin patrolling Bosnian airspace.
It is fifteen minutes later that the shells and rockets begin to hit Srebrenica’s schoolyard.
Many people will later attempt to describe this day that turns in a minute from bright to dark. The internationals who experience it will use words such as “infernal” and “catastrophic.” A displaced person from Konjević Polje, perhaps more desensitized by all she has seen and experienced, will remember it in her diary as “one of the most horrible days of the war.”
Stories will turn to legend—that one shargija player survived beneath the bodies of his two friends; that blood ran like a river down the street from the schoolhouse to the hospital; that Canadian soldiers patrolling the town in an APC when the shelling began couldn’t make it back to their headquarters in the post office because the roads were blocked by bodies. A U.N. refugee official will describe seeing body parts caught in the schoolyard fence.
“I will never be able to convey the sheer horror of the atrocity I witnessed on April 12,” he will write. “Suffice it to say that I did not look forward to closing my eyes at night for fear that I would relive the images of a nightmare that was not a dream.”
The tragedy coalesces at the Srebrenica Hospital, where within the span of minutes, more than 100 dead and wounded are pushed by hundreds more relatives and friends on oxcarts, carried in arms, and wheelbarrowed up to a building already so full of patients that some are lying in the corridors and in the spaces between beds.
The scene inside is confusion incarnate—the sight of blood, the sound of tears, the smell of vomit, and a maze of bodies strewn in doorways, topping stairs, and lying on the ground filling every patch of floor space. There is no water. No light. The doctors have to climb over patients, sometimes stepping on them, to reach other patients, shining flashlights in a useless effort to triage people whose wounds are buried under thick layers of winter clothes. The already beaten-down hospital staff cannot bear it.
“I was in the corridor when everyone arrived,” the MSF logistician, Hans Ulens, will remember later. “There was no organization, like ‘How are we going to attack that situation?’… They were not prepared at all for that. You would expect another reaction…. I would suspect that every nurse or doctor would run in, but it was like… ‘Aw w w, what can we do? We can do nothing.’… Piet came in and shouted, ‘You give morphine! Morphine. Morphine. Morphine.’ Then the whole thing started to work.” Piet Willems, the MSF surgeon, returned from Belgrade a few days ago to combat the senses of shame, failure, and cowardice that nagged at him after leaving.
He and the others spend the next five hours stabilizing patients. With the help of an assistant, the MSF anesthesiologist roves the corridors injecting morphine and, with a flashlight in his mouth, placing IVs. Just weeks ago, before the arrival of MSF and their battery-powered flashlights, it would have been nearly impossible to see and work in the darkening corridors of the hospital, the only light dim and smoky from improvised wicks burning in cups of oil. The staff begin to operate at around 7:30 P.M. The first few patients have more complicated injuries than expected and die soon after surgery.
In the corridor outside of the operating theater, people wait, arms out, begging for operations.
“There was also a lot of pressure from the family members, including people with weapons,” one of the MSF doctors will remember. “We were never threatened, but it’s always a bit impressive if you see people with guns insisting that their family members will have to be treated first. So, that also influenced a bit the selection for surgery.”
The MSF anesthesiologist records the injuries. “Gastric perforation”; “spleen, liver, stomach”; “shrapnel in the eye with brain coming out—dead, the fourth son of five in the same family”; “five-year-old child with large injury of an arm and fractured femur.” The selection, or triage, system—if not well implemented at first—is at least clear in the mind of the MSF surgeon, Piet Willems. He divides the injured into three categories: “they shall wait,” “they shall die,” or “we shall give salvation.” That second category is the most excruciating. Those injured in the head or chest will die without immediate intervention, but for each one, surgery would require three to five hours in the operating room. That is too much precious time. In another place, at another time, they might have been saved.
But Piet doesn’t make these decisions. After each operation, he barely has time to clear away an amputated arm or leg before the next patient is brought in. He just takes them as they come. Though he has never been trained for a situation like this, he gives the biggest effort of his life. He has no time to insulate hi
mself from his patients with new pairs of gloves and clean gowns; he works elbow-deep in blood, performing surgery after surgery, seemingly unconcerned by the nearby explosion of shells. Something has changed in him. His fear has given way to a stronger emotion.
“Then I was not afraid,” he will later remember. “There was something like… you became angry, eh? You became angry about people who would do something like this.”
Somehow Ilijaz Pilav manages to push away the memory of his friend’s death last night and tend to the pain of others. The day will stick to his memory in fragments, like shattered glass. Darkness. Crying. Every ten minutes someone else dying. He stops for a moment and considers what life will be like for the severely injured children they are treating and whether it would be better to leave them alone and let them die.
Nedret Mujkanović is seen in the corridor outside the operating room, holding his head in his hands, looking utterly defeated.
The doctors operate well into the night in the single, makeshift operating room, using its improvised operating table—a low-standing bed— and a small, steady light powered by a generator. It arrived, providentially, two days ago. They stop for a brief break, then begin again in the morning. By 8 P.M., they still have eighteen cases to go. They call over U.N. radio for the urgent delivery of helmets, an operating table and lamp, and fluids to help expand blood volume.
They will remember it always—the single operating room and the impossible choices. How they stood in their flak jackets for hours performing surgery; how they ran to the corridor each time there was shelling. How in the end their fear gave way to anger. How they saved perhaps twenty lives, while sixteen others died that first night. In the end, the story will be told in numbers. At least fifty-six dead. More than 100 injured. Most of them were displaced persons. Fifteen of them were children.
