War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  Eric’s storm cloud of anger needs a release. He pours out a letter that the heads of the U.N. refugee agency, its targets, call a “critique,” sending a draft first to his bosses in Brussels. In it, Eric notes, “sadly,” that members of Doctors Without Borders “were the only ones to attempt to ameliorate the conditions of life on the ground” in Srebrenica. While calling the medical evacuations “totally necessary and recommended by us,” he criticizes the fact that “all energy” is going toward them, “which we don’t consider ethically acceptable unless an important effort is made to ameliorate, even temporarily, the lot of the local population.”

  The refugee agency’s leaders promise to help Eric get his doctors inside Srebrenica, but even these efforts fail to break the ban. Meanwhile, the need for the doctors is increasing. The military offensive has brought Serb soldiers and heavy equipment right to the tops of the hills that ring Srebrenica. The ceasefire agreement keeps them there, but they use their strategic position to violate the agreement in smaller ways, harassing the population by sniping and sporadically shelling the town with heavy artillery and tanks. The United Nations reports “clashes” along a front line.

  As for the “demilitarization of Srebrenica,” practically everyone but the Serbs agrees that it would be absurd to go house to house, forcing the Muslims to give up all their weapons, what with only a few hundred U.N. soldiers in town to protect them. Eric has to laugh at their show of demilitarizing the Muslims. The U.N. Protection Force interprets “Srebrenica” to mean the city of Srebrenica itself, rather than the entire enclave, so the Srebrenica forces take advantage of this loophole and move some of their light weaponry to areas outside of the town.

  U.N. representatives use the Doctors Without Borders satellite telex inside the enclave to transmit a report of the weapons the Muslims have voluntarily deposited in the U.N. collections depot. The machine’s computer saves the information, and later someone sends it to Eric, saying, “Have a look at it. It’s too much fun.” The list of approximately 300 weapons comprises mostly unserviceable arms, hunting rifles, and a few heavy weapons for which, as the United Nations later discovers, there is no significant amount of ammunition.

  “Children’s toys,” Eric calls them, chuckling. He hangs on to the list for when he needs a smile. “Demilitarization of Srebrenica a success,” reads the title of the U.N. press release on April 21, the demilitarization deadline.

  The next week, ceasefire violations send more wounded into the hospital, where—without Nedret or MSF—there are now no local or international surgeons to treat them. The U.N. refugee agency representative inside the enclave radios, “We urgently require Médecins Sans Frontières doctors to come to Srebrenica.”

  But even the dramatic outrage of a high-level United Nations Security Council delegation visiting Srebrenica, who accuse the Serbs of “a crime of genocide” for impeding medical assistance and instruct the Security Council to “consider urgent measures” to respond, fails to break the ban on Doctors Without Borders. In fact, the diplomats themselves are forced to undergo—and this seems to shock them—disrespectful treatment by the Serbs. The U.N. representatives and deputy representatives of countries including Venezuela, Russia, France, New Zealand, Hungary, and Pakistan are subjected to a one-and-a-half-hour delay at submachine gunpoint for having brought along a camera. The team comments on the incident in a report of its mission:

  The fact that five Serbian soldiers were able to defy a large group of soldiers and officers who were with the Mission should be noted by the [U.N. Security] Council in order to understand the actual conditions that UNPROFOR faces. The attitude of defiance of the Serbs towards the United Nations in general is a matter that should concern the Council. The Serbs obviously have little respect for UNPROFOR authority.

  This comes as no surprise to Eric, but after the delegation issues its strong media statements, he thanks the head of the delegation in writing for being “publicly indignant of the ban” on MSF. In his letter, Eric refers to the generally unrecognized “Serb Republic” in quotation marks. But as the days pass sitting at his desk, running back and forth to the border, Eric realizes what he has always suspected: The key to MSF’s operations in Srebrenica lies not with the United Nations, but with the Serbs. He writes another kowtowing letter to Dr. Radovan Karadžić.

  “Hello, Mr. President…,” he begins and immediately cuts to the chase: Despite three requests to Karadžić’s government, MSF has still not received authorization to enter Srebrenica.

  “It seems to me that you no longer consider MSF a friendly organization. I’m saddened without understanding why. Above all I hope to be able to maintain the excellent relations that I’ve kept up with the representatives of the Serb Republic.” Eric writes it as a proper name this time, without putting quotation marks around it. “I hope that all confusion between Doctors Without Borders and Doctors of the World is now resolved…. I would draw your attention to the important aid (more than a million [German] marks) that we have brought these last months to hospitals of the Serb Republic, as we know that they function under difficult conditions.”

  The letter ends with offers and a request. Doctors Without Borders will open an office in Pale, the “capital” of the Serb Republic, and more aid might be on its way to help hospitals in difficulty. What Eric wants is an immediate meeting with Karadžić… at his convenience, of course.

  Unless Eric is going to hop a plane, though, that immediacy is not going to be possible. The day Eric drafts his letter, Bosnian Serb President Karadžić is wearing a suit and sweating under pressure from his patron saint, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, at a peace conference in Athens, Greece. Milošević, under threat of a further set of crippling international sanctions and possible international military intervention, demands that the Bosnian Serb leader add his signature to the peace plan designed by Cyrus Vance and Lord David Owen—the decentralization plan creating ethnic cantons, which American commentators dubbed “another Munich.” Although the United States has some strong objections, the mounting public pressure over Srebrenica has led many world leaders to want to be perceived as “doing something,” and pushing through the Vance-Owen peace plan is another compromise.

  The Serbs have their own reasons for opposing the peace plan, and one of the biggest is Srebrenica. The plan calls for Srebrenica town and much of Serb-held eastern Bosnia to be included in a Bosnian Muslim majority province. This, the Serb leaders have said, they cannot abide. However, on May 2, Karadžić sits at a small table before news cameras and signs the agreement. He does it with a crafty catch. Seeming to know just how to appear to do what international leaders are demanding, while not really doing it, he approves the plan pending the nod of the “National Assembly of the Serb Republic.” The diplomats brush off the significance of this qualification, pat themselves on their backs, and go home.

  The pressure is off. The most serious threat ever to take military action against the Serbs, a threat that opened a divide between the United States, which supported it, and its allies, which didn’t, has been lifted. When the Bosnian Serbs not surprisingly renege on the plan, refusing to give up territory they took by force, the momentum to launch military action has been lost.

  Peace in Bosnia is officially off, but the ceasefire in Srebrenica more or less holds. The U.N.’s plan for Srebrenica’s “safe area” status is still a confused mess, though. Are the 150 Canadian soldiers there to monitor the ceasefire? To deter any future Serb assault? To defend against one? It isn’t clear.

  The leader of the Canadian House tells the Gazette of Montreal that his country’s forces will, in any case, escalate “the price that would be paid by any aggressor to attack the town itself, making it an attack on the entire world.”

  * * *

  SERB AUTHORITIES PERMIT an additional fifty-six Canadian peacekeepers to augment the 150-strong U.N. force inside the enclave. A series of leastcommon-denominator U.N. Security Council resolutions concerning the safe area are passed ove
r the spring of 1993.

  After all is said and done, what the United Nations agrees to do is create six “safe areas” in Bosnia—among them Srebrenica, Tuzla, Sarajevo, and Srebrenica’s neighbor to the south, Žepa. The big question is how far the U.N. Protection Force should go to ensure that the safe areas are safe. To foster agreement among Security Council members, the force is mandated to “deter attacks against the safe areas” rather than the original plan, which was to “defend” against them. UNPROFOR’s authorization to use force to respond to bombardment, armed incursion, or obstruction of the free movement of humanitarian aid convoys is qualified in the final version by the addition of the phrase “acting in self defence.”

  U.N. member states are authorized to use air power to support U.N. forces, but the exact triggers for NATO air strikes are left unspecified. The safe areas are referred to as a temporary measure. General Wahlgren suggests that 34,000 additional U.N. troops will be needed to effectively deter attacks against the six safe areas. The Security Council authorizes the deployment of only 7,600. Analysts refer to the option as “safe area lite.”

  “While this option cannot, in itself, completely guarantee the defence of the safe areas,” the U.N. secretary-general writes, “it relies on the threat of air action against any belligerents.”

  * * *

  WITH THE FAILURE of the Vance-Owen peace plan, U.N. member nations again split on an approach to ending the war. A trans-Atlantic rift opens between the United States, which, along with “nonaligned” countries, endorses a policy of “lift and strike” (lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnian government and supporting Bosnian forces with air strikes), and its European allies, which oppose it. A U.N. resolution to lift the embargo is put forward for a vote on June 29, 1993, but rejected. In the end, President Clinton, unwilling to act unilaterally, backs down.

  Eric Dachy supports lift and strike. The option dies because countries that contribute to the U.N. Protection Force argue that increased military activity will make conditions more difficult for U.N. troops and aid workers on the ground. This is the same old irony that Eric has long railed against; the internationals seem to forget that providing aid shouldn’t be their primary objective.

  But to Eric, the mere fact that the Serbs have allowed armed U.N. troops into Srebrenica indicates that at least they’ve accepted the safe-area idea. Almost immediately after the ceasefire, his attention is drawn to an even-graver threat than military action in Srebrenica—lack of water.

  During the recent offensive, Serb forces captured the site of the water treatment plant supplying Srebrenica, in a place south of the city called Zeleni Jadar. The plant ceased to work, the intake pipe clogged, piped water supply was cut off, and the Serbs refused to allow internationals in to inspect and maintain it. Hans Ulens, the MSF logistician who stayed inside Srebrenica when the other international aid workers left, is also a trained sanitation engineer. Short, energetic, and nicknamed by locals atomski mrav, “the atomic ant,” he has been working single-mindedly to supply Srebrenica with water by constructing reservoirs in the hills to collect spring water and organizing its distribution via the fire brigade water truck to three collapsible water reservoirs in town. As the Serbs will not approve gasoline deliveries, the truck is fueled by diesel extracted—by Hans’s team of eight diesel suckers, each with his own pipe and jerry can—from the tanks of the trucks that come in with U.N. convoys. The system provides two liters of potable water per person per day whereas the minimum required, Hans tells Eric at headquarters, is five.

  People have been making up the difference by hiking into the hills to collect water from springs, but as these begin to dry in the heat of the approaching summer, Hans panics. He needs to fix the water treatment plant. Already scabies and lice are at epidemic proportions and doctors fear that outbreaks of other diseases will follow.

  “If there is no access to Zeleni Jadar this city will fall soon without water,” Hans telexes Eric in Belgrade. “I have the impression that nobody outside of Srebrenica takes this seriously…. The whole world needs to realize that this town will be strangled in several days if they do nothing. At the meeting tonight the authorities said clearly that they’ll restart the war if there isn’t access to Zeleni Jadar.”

  Before Eric can jump into action, Serb authorities relent and escort Hans and a team of internationals to the pumping station, only to announce at its door that no one has brought the key. Hans is able to clean the intake so that water, although untreated and not of drinking quality, flows by gravity to the town and can be used for washing.

  After several days, the water stops flowing again, and Hans asks for permission to visit the plant and fix whatever problem has occurred. He arrives to find the plant blown up.

  That is when the real battle for water begins. Hans deems the water treatment plant beyond repair and focuses his attention on a small, disused plant inside the enclave that provided Srebrenica with water long ago and is now being used to shelter war refugees. To get there, Hans has to walk up a winding dirt road to a hilltop where an old concrete dam forms the intake. The lined concrete pipeline between the intake and the treatment plant is broken in many places and needs extensive repairs or replacement. The problem is getting supplies. The Serbs have imposed “sanctions” on Srebrenica, and will not approve any kind of construction material.

  As summer approaches, bored women wait hours in water lines holding large plastic jugs, restless children at their sides. Men and boys hike farther and farther toward the edges of the enclave in search of springs. The emergency reservoirs lose water, and the stench of human sewage fills the city.

  It takes teamwork to rehabilitate the old plant. Hans finds an expert pipe layer in Srebrenica and makes detailed plans for the repairs, scrounging as many supplies—cement from an old concrete factory in Potočari, wheelbarrows, shovels—as possible. In Belgrade, Eric takes down the specifications for water pipes and the amounts of chlorine and aluminum sulfate coagulant needed to purify the water, and passes them on to Muriel, who is running the new MSF office in the fairly isolated Bosnian Serb capital, Pale. Opposed to any aid projects that will rehabilitate structures in Srebrenica, Serb authorities refuse to give MSF permission to bring in pipes. Muriel begins buying their wives knickknacks, getting their glasses fixed, and performing other favors on her weekends off in Belgrade. At last the Serbs relent and allow the pipes to go through. Eric starts calling Muriel “Mata Hari.”

  Now Hans, back in Srebrenica, must find workers to do the job, but most men aren’t used to working anymore and won’t volunteer without some sort of payment. Only one thing seems to animate the exhausted, demotivated Srebrenicans: cigarettes. And not just any cigarettes—real Marlboros. Eric has to figure out where to get them. Because of the trade embargo, there shouldn’t technically be any real Marlboros in Serbia. But someone has to be getting rich in wartime. Eric finds a bar advertising black market cigarettes. After smoking them himself to guarantee their authenticity, he sends them into Srebrenica to be used as payment—one per day of work—for the local staff. The internationals start referring to Srebrenica as “Cigarica.”

  * * *

  AFTER SOME FITS AND STARTS AND DIFFICULTIES, the rehabilitation of the water plant gets under way and the predicted catastrophe is averted. With continued effort, Eric succeeds in getting Doctors Without Borders physicians and surgeons back into the enclave in early May, and throughout the spring, their rotations go fairly smoothly. The last big battles for Srebrenica, it seems to Eric, have been won. Now it’s on to other challenges. But does he have the energy for them?

  In June, a tiff arises over which MSF section will supply Goražde, another surrounded Muslim “safe area” that has initially been designated as a site for MSF Holland, not MSF Belgium. When the first opportunity to reach the town on a U.N. convoy is offered to Eric in Belgrade, and he insists on sending a Belgian surgeon who’s already in the region, an MSF Holland representative sends an angry letter informing him that a Dutch
surgeon will arrive in Belgrade and make his own way to Goražde. Eric sends a letter back reminding him that, for security reasons, all MSF staff members in Serbia have to be under his authority. When the MSF Holland representative fails to relent, Eric snaps.

  “Look,” he threatens, “if you send any MSF here without my authorization, I’ll get him sent to jail.”

  Eric knows he is fed up with this place, knows that he will have to fight to reach and supply this other new enclave—not just fight with MSF Holland but with the Serbs. The mere thought of spending hours arguing his way across front lines exhausts him, and he has no interest in speeding through shellfire or plying roads that are potential minefields.

  In June, a reporter catches up with Eric as he performs a needs assessment in an isolated Serb village with a local name that translates into English as “Lower Little Hell.” She describes Eric as “frustrated, bored, burnt out and leaving.”

  He tells her the war is an endless problem that’s getting worse and worse, and that success in channeling humanitarian supplies into Muslim villages hasn’t stopped some of them from being “ethnically cleansed” afterwards. He also complains about the difficulty of getting humanitarian supplies, let alone anything else, into Serbia.

  “The sanctions are a scandal,” Eric tells the reporter. “It’s collective punishment. It’s very cruel and it’s ineffective. It simply kills and enslaves sick people and poor people, the lowest layers of the people, and it reinforces their leaders. It’s not even an effective political weapon. It only slowly and deeply destroys the structure of the society.”