by Sheri Fink
“I will find a way back.”
He leaves his girlfriend behind. Over the past difficult weeks, he always made sure her family had food and firewood. He helped some of her kin escape to Tuzla on U.N. convoys, but at the time she hadn’t wanted to go. Now she cries and begs him to take her, too. He refuses, saying that he can’t put another healthy person on a helicopter meant to evacuate injured men.
Nedret gets into the jeep with Louisa, the Red Cross doctor. He weeps as they drive along the main road toward the soccer field where the last helicopter of the evacuation awaits them. Louisa tells Nedret she can’t understand why he’s crying after having begged to leave. “You should be happy,” she tells him. “You’re going back to your family, your wife and son.”
* * *
OVER THREE DAYS, nearly 500 wounded soldiers have been airlifted from Srebrenica to Tuzla. A swarm of journalists awaits the helicopters. Millions of folks back home are eager to know what it was like to live in the city described by a ham radio operator as being “on the verge of madness.”
Nedret steps out of the final helicopter. In sharp contrast to the bedraggled, wounded soldiers being unloaded around him, the tall, attractive doctor makes his entrance upright, in a brown Borselino fedora, dark sunglasses, swanky red silk shirt with matching Italian suit jacket, and fine leather shoes.
He sticks out in the dusty jumble of aid workers and patients, looking, in one reporter’s opinion, like a “black market kingpin.” Journalists close around him on the landing tarmac, shouting questions above the whir of the helicopter rotors.
A day later, Nedret sits in an outdoor café, sipping coffee, chain-smoking, greeting old acquaintances, and holding court for hours with international journalists. He tells the story of his weeklong overland journey sneaking through a patchwork of enemy territory to reach Srebrenica last August. He describes how he arrived to find the town cut off with no surgeons and practically no medical supplies. He estimates that he has performed 1,390 operations, 100 amputations without anesthesia, and four Caesarean sections over his eight-month stay. He rounds out the story with an emotional description of his grudging departure from the city yesterday and how his grateful patients dressed him in flashy clothes so he wouldn’t have to appear in Tuzla in dirty combat fatigues.
In their stories, the reporters liken Nedret to a medieval surgeon, cutting into howling patients without anesthesia and unable to save lives with such basics as blood transfusions and antibiotics. They turn him into a hero, an archetypal doctor/angel, a fighter against the devil of death in a place, Srebrenica, that everyone calls “hell.”
* * *
THAT EVENING, those with working televisions can watch images of events taking place thousands of miles away in overcast Washington, D.C. President Clinton lights a flame to inaugurate the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel at his side. Wiesel takes the podium, the collar of his coat turned up against a wind that riffles his hair and whips the line of flags behind him. He has a surprise for the president.
“I have been in the former Yugoslavia,” he says, shaking his fist and staring straight at Clinton, “and, Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country.”
The crowd cheers. Clinton’s face remains impassive. The harrowing tales pouring out of places like Srebrenica show that the war has only intensified since he took office three months ago. The pressure is mounting for him, as the leader of the world’s last remaining superpower, to do more than just airdrop supplies.
* * *
NEDRET, WHO LEFT TUZLA an ambitious medical resident, rapidly becomes a national hero and an international sensation. The evening of his first day back in Tuzla, he attends a reception hosted by Tuzla’s mayor and meets Bianca Jagger, the Nicaraguan-born activist and celebrity exwife of the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, without a clue as to who she is. Days later he is trundling over bumpy back roads with her in a four-wheel-drive jeep toward the Croatian port city of Split in a dramatic bid to save the lives of two dying Bosnian children denied an air evacuation by the United Nations. They deliver the children to an awaiting American specialist Bianca has called to Croatia, and then together, Nedret and Bianca continue on to France as guests of Dr. Bernard Kouchner, the founder and former president of Doctors Without Borders.
Days later, a fax arrives to notify them that one of the two children has died. They fly back to Split, Croatia, and go to the pathology department to view the girl’s body. She looks serene, as if she is sleeping. Nedret touches her hair. Bianca is afraid at first, but then touches her, too. In spite of all he’s seen the past year in Srebrenica, Nedret breaks down in the corridor and cries in Bianca’s presence.
* * *
BORO LAZIĆ RETURNS HOME from his stint in Srebrenica gushing about Nedret and the hundreds of surgeries he performed without anesthesia and electricity. Boro’s wife is surprised to hear her laconic husband tell story after story about “Nedret, Nedret, Nedret.” Boro typically doesn’t speak about what he sees and does in wartime. More than once his wife has answered a knock at the door to find grateful family members of Boro’s patients standing outside bearing gifts of dried pork and bottles of plum brandy and bursting with stories she’s never heard. They speak not only of his medical work, but also of his heroics—how he once pulled a man from a burning tank that nobody else would enter, which then exploded ; how at another time he vaulted across the front lines to carry out a wounded Serb soldier.
When she asks him about these stories, Boro answers with a question: “Who told you that?” If she presses him further, he will only say, in a tired, mildly sarcastic tone, “What else could I do? I had to help.”
At home there is no war and no talking about war. Boro refuses to watch the evening news. When he comes home from field actions, he wants to play with his daughter and new baby. Then he asks his wife to make some coffee for the two of them, and they sit together and talk, remembering funny stories and good times past, or dreaming and scheming about their future.
Srebrenica changes Boro. His wife senses this, even though he does not tell her, at first, about the plan he is hatching. One morning some weeks after his return, he travels to the stadium in Zvornik to meet a U.N. helicopter coming from Tuzla, stopping to pick up Serb authorities on its way to Srebrenica with a delegation to help set the safe area’s boundaries. He’s heard that Nedret might be aboard, making good on his promise to return to Srebrenica.
Indeed, Nedret is, and in the afternoon, Boro returns to meet the helicopter on its way back, handing Nedret cookies for his son and cigarettes to give to Boro’s parents in Tuzla. A few weeks later, the commission passes through Zvornik again. Boro meets Nedret at the helicopters and they chat a while about Boro’s parents. Then Boro asks Nedret what he thinks of organizing negotiations and possibly “mutually beneficial exchanges” between their two sides.
“It’s a good idea,” Nedret replies. He has to check with his superiors.
Boro does, too. He goes home and convinces the local authorities in šekovići that negotiations offer them a chance for personal gain, a way to help relatives stuck on the other side—to help get them out or at least channel food or money to them. A municipal authority then travels with him to Pale, a Serb-held area near Sarajevo that serves as the headquarters of the self-declared “Serb Republic.” There, he meets with the president of the republic, Dr. Radovan Karadžić, and others who govern the 70 percent of “ethnically clean” Bosnian territory the Bosnian Serb army now controls.
“OK, try to do it,” Karadžić says in his deep, gravelly voice. Boro takes away a good impression of his fellow physician. He honestly believes that Karadžić wants peace.
A local commission on the Serb side organizes the first meeting. The location and time are passed through military radio and then telephoned to Nedret, who has received permission to conduct negotiations from his own authorities in Tuzla.
* * *
ONE CLEAR, SUNNY DAY a few months after his first meeting with Nedret in Srebrenica, Boro waits in a car at the farthest point of Serbian-held territory just east of Tuzla, wearing blue jeans and a white vest, a Motorola radio in his hand. Soldiers man the Serb front line with automatic rifles and mortars.
Less than a third of a mile away, Bosnian soldiers with M-72 light machine guns sit hidden on a riverbank. At the agreed-upon time on this agreed-upon date, Boro speaks into his walkie-talkie and then it crackles back to life with the sound of Nedret’s voice coming from the opposite side of the front line. They have trouble hearing one another on the chosen frequency and get out of their cars to shout across the lines. After reconfirming that the meeting is on and that both sides are holding fire, they move toward one another by car, crossing into a no-man’s-land.
Entering a zone where guns are trained at him from both sides gives Boro a strange thrill. He is unafraid. Ever crafty, he inaugurates the negotiations by presenting a package of cigarettes to the Muslim soldiers accompanying Nedret to improve their mood. The meeting is short. Like a first date, they stand around and spend most of their time making small talk. The second meeting is more comfortable. Someone pulls a wooden table from one of the nearby abandoned houses, and they spread maps on top of it, gathering around with soft drinks, coffee, and cigarettes.
In the substance of the discussion, each side presents the names of soldiers who’ve been killed on territory that the other side has come to control. They ask that bodies be dug up and returned. Neither Boro nor Nedret talks about an exchange of military prisoners. There aren’t thought to be any.
They also talk about exchanging goods. The Serbs can use Tuzla’s salt and coal. The Bosnian government side needs flour, coffee, and cigarettes. They need more sensitive items, too—oil; gasoline; grenades and other munitions for cannons, guns, and rifles—and these might come in exchange for money or for ethnic Serbs living in Tuzla, perhaps some spies, whom the Bosnian Serb military wants to get out.
Nedret asks Boro to send greetings to his old pathology professor, his mentor living in Belgrade. Boro does, and the professor, perhaps remembering how his two former students were in medical school, assumes that they are meeting to make money.
Boro and Nedret view their motives for these negotiations as pure as contributing to peace, helping both sides achieve positive goals, and of course, for Boro, helping his parents in Tuzla. If they succeed in negotiating sales, they will take a percentage, but so far, nothing has materialized.
Boro does engage in some “business,” though, just not with Nedret. He helps a man smuggle cigarettes from Serbia, a far more lucrative and easier job than working as a doctor. In fact, he skips his duty shifts at the hospital more and more often to attend to this work and to the negotiations he conducts with Nedret every few weeks. One day his boss, a hardworking surgeon barely sleeping under the stressful conditions, chastises him for his absenteeism.
“How can you just not show up for duty?” he rails.
Boro just smiles. Then he resigns. He’s fed up with the overwork, attracted by the adventure of his new activities, and sees now his chance to help his parents. Besides, he isn’t one of those people who always wanted to be a doctor. When Boro was growing up, he planned to study law, not medicine. His father considered him incapable of finishing law school and instead enrolled Boro, without his knowledge, in a high school for medical technicians. There, Boro took an unexpected liking to medical subjects. He ended up being the best in his class, and his teachers insisted he study medicine at the university. He always did extremely well; his intelligence and winning personality allowed him to play and only study at the last minute for exams. But this wartime medical work is different; it requires constant presence and can’t be divided into bursts of hard work and then rest.
By quitting the hospital job, Boro loses his work-provided apartment in Zvornik to another doctor. He moves his family back to his birth town of šekovići. Ultimately, nothing concrete comes of his negotiations with Nedret. They meet and make agreements, but those with the power to carry them out fail to act. The two begin to feel as if they are united on one side of the war against their higher-ups on the other.
Local authorities lose interest when Boro’s efforts fail to bring them their anticipated personal gain. Some locals even turn hostile when they discover that Boro is fraternizing with the enemy. A woman who lost her son in the war runs down the street in šekovići, screaming that she’ll kill Boro for negotiating with the Muslims—at least that is the story a friend tells Boro’s wife.
Boro understands the opposition. Before he’d stepped across the front lines and met his “enemies” face to face, he hadn’t realized that the attitudes and ideas on the other side are identical to those of his own. Even his opinions about the genesis of the war are changing. He suspects it was planned, step by step, by power-hungry politicians who planted emotional seeds in the minds of the people to grow their will to fight. He and everyone else involved in carrying out the war has been fooled and manipulated. They are the losers, the ones who suffer.
Boro and Nedret continue to plan meetings, even as support dissipates on both of their sides. Nedret is convinced that a military security detail is tailing him, trying to catch him in the act of negotiating. Boro worries, too. As their next meeting is about to begin, the commander on Boro’s side pretends he doesn’t know about the plan and refuses to tell his soldiers to hold their fire. Boro watches as Nedret’s car begins to roll into the no-man’s-land. He wangles a Motorola from a policeman and shouts, “Go back! Go back!” Nedret retreats in time. Days later, the Bosnian Serb army launches operation “hammer and anvil” west toward Tuzla. Rifle and tank fire eradicates the silent space between the two front lines and brings a permanent end to negotiations between doctorfriends.
20
TO INTERPOSE
THAT LATE APRIL DAY, that last day, when the Serb military had pushed ever closer to Srebrenica, shelling and shooting and sowing destruction, Eric Dachy lost the most dear of his heart’s possessions, his hope. He lost it only briefly, and he had kept it almost right up to the end, right up until the moment that nobody in his right mind could possibly have kept it anymore. Even that morning, when the sun rose and the roosters crowed in Mali Mokri Lug, the little wet garden patch where Eric lived in the huge, stagnating metropolis of Belgrade, he stood firm in his conviction that international pressure could save Srebrenica.
It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable hope. After all, just the previous day the U.N. Security Council had demanded “that all parties and others concerned treat Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area,” which seemed like a step toward creating a protected zone for civilians.
The “safe area” concept was first raised eight months previously by the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross and shot down by the U.N. Security Council as a bad idea. Where were all the international military forces capable of peace enforcement going to come from? Wouldn’t the Serbs attack any areas of Bosnia not deemed “safe”?
But as Srebrenica was about to fall, and pressure on international governments increased, a version of the idea was revived as a compromise. Calling Srebrenica a “safe area,” without specifying a mechanism for enforcing its protection, became a position on which most Security Council member nations could agree.
On April 16, 1993, the day the resolution passed, Eric busied about readying another surgical team to enter and replace the physicians who had left Srebrenica. But the day went on and the news came in, hour after hour. Bad news. Fighting inside of Srebrenica. The post office hit, the post office where the MSF logistician, the lone MSF outpost in the town, had been staying. Fortunately, he escaped injury.
“This time it’s the end,” Eric announced to his colleagues in Belgium. “The town will be taken. It’s done for.”
What to do now? He switched courses, setting his mind, his voice, and his phone-dialing, letter-typing fingers to the new task of aiding th
e manifold thousands who would undoubtedly flee.
But somehow—and who knew exactly why it happened, out there in the middle of the night on the darkened tarmac of a gutted, pitted airport that lay between two front lines in a former Olympic City—somehow three hands representing the Bosnian government, the irredentist Bosnian Serbs, and a witnessing international had scribbled signatures on an agreement that stopped the offensive. The Srebrenica soldiers would give up their arms in return for a ceasefire, the deployment of a company of U.N. soldiers, and an evacuation of the wounded, among other provisions. Pieces of paper were transformed into a city’s reprieve.
Hours later the evacuation helicopters lifted off, rotors whirring noisily over the skies of Srebrenica, bellies full of the wounded and sick. It took just a few short days to empty the hospital. The Red Cross physician Louisa Chan-Boegli presided, but Eric’s MSF doctors were not there.
Eric is furious. The ceasefire agreement calls for the free passage of humanitarian aid, but the Serbs are turning his doctors and nurses back, not letting them into Srebrenica. Eric wastes hours in border towns facing off with slouching, square-headed boys in camouflage, their sidearms slung casually over their shoulders as they drag on cigarettes between pinched thumbs and forefingers and gaze at him with bored eyes. The U.N. convoys can roll and the Red Cross doctors can fly, but the MSF team hears only: No, no, no.
Why? Eric has taken care to maintain a sterling reputation with the Serbs. If anything he has even tried too hard, being obsequious at times when he should have spit on someone’s shoes, giving aid to Serb hospitals to foster good relations. Unlike U.N. leaders, Eric doesn’t mind referring to Radovan Karadžić, the self-declared president of a self-declared state carved in blood, as “Mr. President,” if that will help get aid to places that need it. Eric can only speculate that Doctors Without Borders has been confused with another medical organization, one with a similarsounding name that hasn’t taken so much care: Doctors of the World. The group, which MSF leader Dr. Bernard Kouchner founded in 1980 after parting ways with MSF, has taken a much more confrontational approach with the Serbs, going so far as to compare them and their leaders with the World War II fascists they purport to despise.
