War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  * * *

  EVER PRACTICAL, those Srebrenicans not immediately affected by the tragedy turn to their radios for news of how the incident is playing and what the international reaction will be. At a press conference in Sarajevo, Larry Hollingworth, the white-bearded UNHCR worker who recently departed from Srebrenica, sheds his characteristic diplomacy:

  My first thought was of the army commander who had ordered the shelling. I hope that he burns in the hottest part of hell.

  I then thought of the soldiers who had loaded the guns and fired them. I hope that they suffer from nightmares. I hope that their sleep is broken by the screams of the children and the cries of their mothers.

  I then thought about Doctor of Medicine Karadžić, Professor of Literature Koljević, Biologist Mrs. Plavšić, Geologist Dr. Lukić and I wondered if today they will condemn this atrocity and punish the perpetrators or will they deny their education and condone it?

  I then thought about my Serb friends whom I have met on my travels. Do they wish to read in future history books that their army has chased innocent women and children from village to village, until finally they are cornered in Srebrenica, a place from which there is no escape, and where their fate is to be transported like cattle or slaughtered like lambs?

  Fierce condemnation rings from many corners. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warns that Bosnia may become “another Holocaust” and upbraids Western nations for standing idly by.

  Bosnian Serb leaders fire back, reviving the now-familiar canards that the Muslims shelled themselves or that the dead were really Serbs. The people of Srebrenica get more bad news. The media report that the French government plans to withdraw Srebrenica’s outspoken ally General Morillon from his job as commander of U.N. troops in Bosnia.

  On the streets of Srebrenica in the days after the massacre, the doctors see wagons piled with cadavers pulled by family members. Another aid convoy arrives and the empty trucks fill with about 800 evacuees, including some of the wounded women, children, and elderly. Again the unbearable scenes unroll of shouting, crying, and violence, of mothers and fathers separated from their sons and daughters, of desperate family members yanking children into trucks by their sweaters.

  The shelling of Srebrenica resumes and turns relentless. The number of people requiring all types of medical assistance is far beyond what the small medical staff, even with MSF, can handle. “The selection is terrible, but indispensable,” the MSF anesthesiologist writes in French in a diary he will later submit as a report to MSF. “I think of Auschwitz.”

  Nedret is ill and unable to work. Naser Orić, Srebrenica’s chief commander, is lightly wounded, and many of his soldiers withdraw from the front lines. The Srebrenica authorities—Naser, the mayor, and the president of the war council—meet with the Canadian commander to discuss capitulation. The mayor’s only condition is a helicopter evacuation for the wounded men, who he is sure will otherwise be slaughtered by the Serbs.

  Another U.N. convoy arrives. The authorities again prevent desperate civilians from scrambling aboard the trucks to be evacuated. The four MSF workers in the enclave, fearing a Serb “reprisal” the likes of the Easter massacre or worse, decide to evacuate themselves from Srebrenica on what they believe will be the last convoy to reach the enclave, along with representatives of the UNHCR and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

  One MSF doctor assuages his own conscience by assessing that, at this point and under these conditions, he can do “nothing important” for the people. The MSF surgeon, Piet Willems, has mixed emotions but a clear conscience—after all, he will later say, I needn’t have come in the first place. He is glad to have saved at least a few people’s lives and showed the population by his presence that they were not forgotten. The anesthesiologist wants to stay, but the U.N. commander finds him in the hospital and says he will no longer take responsibility for MSF staffmember security. Furthermore, with only a few armored personnel carriers in the enclave, the officer cannot guarantee the anesthesiologist a ride out if the worst occurs. He, too, decides to go.

  MSF’s local translator, who celebrated his fourteenth birthday last night, cries and pleads with them in his broken German. “Please stay,” he begs, in tears. He tells them that they are needed, that if they go, nobody will stay. At the last moment, the pleas sway MSF’s logistician, a short, energetic Belgian named Hans Ulens who, owing Doctors Without Borders a year of service for supporting his studies, had asked to be sent anywhere but Bosnia.

  With no reinforcements in sight, but no orders to evacuate either, the U.N. military observers and soldiers also decide to remain with the people. On Thursday, April 15, diminutive Hans, four military observers, and nine Canadian UNPROFOR soldiers are the last internationals to stand physically between the Serbs and the residents of Srebrenica. They are the last, as Eric Dachy termed it, to interpose.

  * * *

  FRIDAY, APRIL 16, 1993. NEW YORK, NEW YORK, USA.

  United Nations Security Council Resolution 819:

  “…Demands that all parties and others concerned treat Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or any other hostile act… ”

  * * *

  ILIJAZ PILAV FEELS CLOSE TO ROCK BOTTOM. The days will fuzz together in his memory when he tries to describe them later. He will remember feeling that the world is falling apart, wondering “what it’s all for,” finding “no meaning in anything,” and knowing that Srebrenica’s fall and the end of his suffering are just a question of time.

  Mostly, though, he will remember being numbed and indifferent to his fate as he works mechanically, doing whatever needs to be done in the hospital. He will remember the sense of being surrounded by thousands of other suffering people, a part of “one of those masses that are meant to suffer.” So much remains to be done at the hospital. He has eaten and slept very little for days. It has become physically difficult to go on.

  On Saturday, April 17, he stands across the operating room table from Nedret, performing surgery. The nearby explosions of grenades and mortar bombs are relentless and by 4 P.M., thirty-two new wounded have been brought to the hospital, most of them civilians. Every fifteen minutes or so, a messenger runs into the hospital warning that the Chetniks are coming closer and closer.

  Ilijaz looks up from the operating field and notices that Nedret’s face appears pale. He realizes his own face must appear the same way.

  Nedret looks up, too, and for a moment their eyes lock while their hands continue working. Ilijaz feels as if knives have already been put to their throats. There are no defense plans, no disaster plans, and no evacuation plans for the population, who will undoubtedly flee to the woods as the Serbs arrive. He is sure they will all die, and for the first time he pities Nedret for having chosen to come here.

  * * *

  IN THE UNITED STATES, Bosnia has become the number one subject of television news, with nearly twice as many stories in the first three months of 1993 as the inauguration of Bill Clinton or the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In the past weeks graphic footage of Srebrenica refugees has heightened the pressure on the new administration to respond. The Srebrenica saga makes top news in other Western countries, too, such as Canada and Great Britain. The local ham radio operator issues a final cry to the world, which headlines the April 17, 1993, London Guardian: “We beg you to do something, whatever you can. In the name of God, do something!” Exactly one year has passed since war broke out in Srebrenica.

  * * *

  AT DAWN ON APRIL 18, the clamor of artillery and mortar-fire suddenly ceases. An eerie silence envelops Srebrenica. At the hospital, Ilijaz, who hasn’t slept in days, has a strange feeling that the world is teetering “just on the edge of real catastrophe.” A few hours later the ominous rumble of tanks draws him to a hospital window. He can hardly believe what he sees. The company vehicles rolling into Srebrenica are painted U.N. white, not military green. The maple leaf of Canada, not the Serb tric
olor, marks them.

  * * *

  SARAJEVO AIRPORT TARMAC, sixteenth hour of negotiation, “Agreement for the demilitarization of Srebrenica”:

  At a meeting held at Sarajevo on 17 April 1993, Lt.-Gen. Mladic and Gen. Halilović, in the presence of Lt.-Gen. Wahlgren, representing UNPROFOR, acting as a mediator, agreed the following:

  1. A total cease-fire in the Srebrenica area effective from 0159 on 18 April 1993. Freezing all combat actions on the achieved lines of confrontation including supporting artillery and rocket fire.

  2. The deployment of a company group of UNPROFOR into Srebrenica by 1100 18 April 1993….

  3. The opening of an air corridor between Tuzla and Srebrenica via Zvornik for evacuation of the seriously wounded and seriously ill

  …The seriously wounded and seriously ill will be evacuated after identification by UNPROFOR in the presence of two doctors from each side and the ICRC…

  4. The demilitarization of Srebrenica…

  PART THREE

  A SAFE AREA

  Let people’s memory of all that’s ugly die, so children may not sing songs of vengeance.

  —Meša Selimović, The Fortress

  19

  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  JUST AN HOUR AFTER twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Boro Lazić finally closes his strained eyes after a night of operating and falls asleep, the unrelenting trill of his telephone badgers him awake. As a Serb physician working in the surgical department of Zvornik Hospital, he’s already invested more than his share of time treating casualties of the Srebrenica offensive. Why are the nurses disturbing him? It’s only 9 in the morning. He asked them to leave him alone for as long as possible!

  He grabs the phone receiver.

  “Ha-lo!” The nurse who answers him is not calling about a patient. She puts him through to his Bosnian Serb army commander, Lieutenant Colonel Vinko Pandurević.

  “Do you want to go to Srebrenica?” the commander asks, as if it was something they’d been discussing. Boro thinks he’s making a bad joke. The commander’s an arrogant, impudent, incompetent jerk.

  “Why not?” Boro plays along.

  “All right, be ready,” says Pandurević. “I’m sending a car.”

  So fifteen minutes out of a deep sleep on April 18, 1993, Boro is whisked to the commander’s office. Then the lean, sandy-haired doctor is sitting before the massive, red-headed commander. Pandurević explains that last night’s ceasefire agreement calls for two Serb physicians to oversee the helicopter evacuation of Srebrenica’s wounded to the Bosnian government–held city of Tuzla. The commander wants Boro to go and make certain that all those evacuated are truly wounded and not healthy “war criminals” trying to slip out of Srebrenica. Boro agrees to go, yes, but knowing that Serb forces spent last night pounding Srebrenica, he fears he will be a convenient target for vengeful Srebrenicans. He suggests that a Serb soldier accompany him for protection. Not possible, the commander tells him. Boro must choose whether to take the risk. But he won’t be alone; traveling with him will be some U.N. soldiers, another Serb doctor, two International Committee of the Red Cross doctors, and two Muslim doctors from Tuzla.

  Tuzla is where Boro’s parents, his wife’s mother, and at least fifteen members of his extended family still reside. It’s where he grew up, went to medical school, and lived before the war. All year he has wondered what life is like there and longed to find a way to help his parents, but aside from one brief ham radio conversation and one Red Cross message, he has had no contact. At times he has come close to various front lines and thought of stepping over them. Never before has he had the chance to visit the other side.

  When war started to tear Yugoslavia apart, Boro Lazić and his wife—a smart, petite psychology student—were staying at a Holiday Inn near Disneyland in Los Angeles, California. It was 1991 and they were on their first visit to the United States. Boro had saved up money back in medical school, skipping class to travel to Turkey and buy blue jeans to sell back home, returning just in time to cram for and then ace his final exams. With his boyish face and blue-green eyes, Boro charmed the bookish girls into lending him notes for missed classes and the teaching assistants into postponing his exams. For his enterprising antics and his razor-sharp intelligence, his schoolmates and even his future wife referred to him fondly as a “vagabond,” “entrepreneur,” and “Mafioso.”

  After medical school, when jobs and money were scarce in Bosnia, he’d trotted off to Switzerland, seeking fortune. For a year he worked as a medical technician and studied alternative medicine, but the Swiss had no use for his Yugoslav medical diploma. He grew impatient with the idea of working several more years before he could secure a visa for his family to live there. His wife and young daughter came for a visit and they bought tickets for a trip to New Zealand, planning secretly to stay there and exploit financial opportunities far greater than those in Bosnia. They landed, instead, in a pickle. When the plane made a stop in Los Angeles, their lack of visas for New Zealand was discovered. Officials confiscated their passports, but allowed them to stay in the United States for several weeks while their applications were being processed.

  They took advantage of the time to shuttle back and forth to Disneyland and other sights. Once an Angeleno taxi driver asked them where they came from. Boro’s wife was fluent in English. “Yugoslavia,” she’d told him.

  The driver turned around in his seat. “There’s a war in Yugoslavia,” he said. At that point, just some low-level fighting had broken out in Croatia. She was surprised he knew about it.

  “There’s not a war in all of Yugoslavia,” she said, “just a part of Yugoslavia.” The driver had visited the ancient city of Dubrovnik on the Croatian coast, which was now under fire. “Are you Serbs or Croats?” he persisted. Impressed that he knew enough to ask, she explained that she was a Croat and Boro, a Serb. They came from Bosnia, not Croatia, far from the fighting.

  “It’s a bad thing,” the driver pronounced. The way he said it chilled them, as if he had some foreknowledge that war would spread to Bosnia, too. The couple could not imagine it.

  Boro’s visa application for New Zealand was eventually denied. His wife and daughter went back to Bosnia, and he returned to Switzerland. He tried his luck in Austria, but could not secure a visa for the family to stay. Defeated, he rejoined them, taking a job as a general practitioner at a health clinic in his eastern Bosnian birth town, šekovići, population 4,323. Many of the non-cosmopolitan areas of Bosnia had a predominance of one ethnicity, and šekovići—at 97 percent Serb, 2 percent “Yugoslav,” and 1 percent “other” in the 1991 census—was no exception. His wife became one of a handful of ethnic Croats in the entire municipality of roughly 10,000 citizens. However, šekovići, nestled beneath hills on the Drinjaca River, had been a pivotal backdrop in the fight for Yugoslav “Brotherhood and Unity” and against fascism and nationalism—it was the most important Partisan stronghold in eastern Bosnia during World War II. Until recently, one of the area’s frescoed sixteenth-century Serb Orthodox monasteries housed a museum that commemorated the war and šekovići’s part in it. But when Communists lost the 1991 elections, the museum was shuttered and the building returned to the church.

  By the start of the new year, 1992, the war drums were beating. Serb leaders, refusing to recognize the authority of the Bosnian government, established a “Serbian Autonomous Region” of Yugoslavia centered in šekovići. As tensions continued to rise, and Bosnia moved toward a declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, the Serbian department of state security established a “Serbian voluntary guard” in šekovići. Boro joined it. All the local men he knew did, too. It seemed as if everyone in Bosnia was splitting into sports teams. Boro’s Muslim friends back in Tuzla booed Serbian leader Milošević and told Boro they were joining the Muslim “Green Berets.” The šekovići voluntary guard was Boro’s team, and, with his friends and cousins in the game, he couldn’t just sit on the sidelines and watch.

  His joining the Serb
military infuriated his Croat wife. He argued that he had to do it; otherwise people in šekovići would see him as a traitor. Besides, being in the army would give him the strength to protect her. Other non-Serbs, threatened by the growing Serb nationalism, were leaving šekovići. One Muslim, the wife of a friend, converted to Christianity and took a Serb name for security.

  Boro never would have predicted that he’d end up in a nationalist militia. His family had no historical ax to grind—his only relative killed in World War II, a grandfather, had been murdered by fellow Serbs in šekovići. His parents’ best friends were Muslims and Croats. He and his sister had been raised to differentiate people on the basis of relative goodness, not nationality. In fact, nationality was never even mentioned. Until the war, he wasn’t aware that people could be divided that way.

  Slowly, the barrage of media stories about atrocities against Serbs, which first appeared implausible to him, gained credence. Boro’s team began looking to him like the underdogs. In March, more than a dozen Serb civilians were reported to have been killed by Croats and Muslims in the strategic northern Bosnian border town of Bosanski Brod. Boro, shaken, feared for the entire Serb nation. A steady television-viewing diet of World War II movies expanded his apprehension. The films, shown continuously on state-run TV, depicted thousands of Serbs in eastern Bosnia dying at the hands of local Muslims and Croats allied with the fascists—including many in šekovići. The memories revived on television stretched back to the defeat of Serbs at the hands of the Ottoman conquerors in 1489, convincing Boro that the Serbs had a “too long” history of tragedy. Although he didn’t feel personally threatened, he believed that the “Serbian national being” was endangered and that he had to do his utmost to protect it.