by Sheri Fink
22
ANOTHER WORLD
AT THE END OF THE NIGHTLY LINDEN TREE MEETINGS, after the jokes and songs and conversations, at least one man usually pats the man beside him on the back and sighs.
“Hey, we’ll all grow old in Srebrenica,” he says. And for a while they talk about the impossible situation each one of them is in and what might be done to help. Sometimes, often, they speak of leaving.
As the summer of 1994 edges toward fall, it looks as if another winter of war awaits them in the prison of Srebrenica. The Serbs reject the latest peace plan, unveiled July 4, again objecting to the stipulation that Srebrenica and the Muslim-held “safe area” to its south, Žepa, be left as a Bosnian Muslim-majority area. The Serbs propose an exchange of territories—Srebrenica and Žepa for parts of Serb-controlled areas around Sarajevo. Bosnian government and Bosnian Serb leaders even go so far as to meet and discuss the idea. Then the peace plan—proposed by a “Contact Group” representing the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Russia—is scrapped for a variety of other reasons.
With the latest diplomatic failure, military operations around Bosnia recommence. Bosnian Serb attacks on several other safe areas make Srebrenicans feel vulnerable. The countries that have committed soldiers to the U.N. Protection Force, including Britain and France, continue to oppose any Security Council initiatives that threaten bringing them into conflict with the Serbs. They deploy and equip their forces for peacekeeping rather than peace enforcement. Meanwhile, other countries without forces on the ground, such as the United States, argue weakly for a more robust mandate that will allow U.N. forces to confront the Serbs.
International tension over Bosnia is high. No other issue has ever engendered so many U.N. Security Council resolutions in a similar period—forty-seven in the first year and a half of war alone. But, as an outgoing commander of U.N. Protection Forces in Bosnia points out, there is a “fantastic gap between the resolutions of the Security Council, the will to execute these resolutions, and the means available to commanders in the field.”
The U.N. Secretary-General has been reanalyzing the very concept of the safe areas after Serb forces attacked several of them. In mid-April, 1994, in response to “pinprick” NATO air strikes (against a Bosnian Serb artillery command facility, a tank, and two armored personnel carriers attacking the safe area of Goražde), Bosnian Serb soldiers seized 150 U.N. soldiers and held them hostage at heavy weapons collection depots in Serb-controlled territory near Sarajevo. They continued to press their offensive toward Goražde and succeeded in shooting down a NATO aircraft. The Serb advance finally halted after intense diplomacy and another NATO air strike ultimatum. The U.N. hostages were eventually released.
The events have led the secretary-general to express, in a report, his concern about the implementability of safe areas in Bosnia, emphasizing that civilian populations, rather than territory, should be protected through the presence of U.N. troops and the application of air power. So far, the U.N. Security Council has not responded to the idea.
When the Serbs again violate the weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo, the U.N. commander in Bosnia opposes NATO air strikes, arguing that they will jeopardize humanitarian aid work, expose U.N. personnel to retaliation by the Serbs, and cross the “Mogadishu line” between neutral peacekeeping and fighting a war. Another U.N. officer terms this “a policy of endless appeasement.”
Sometimes Ilijaz feels he is in a waiting room. Sometimes he feels he is in a concentration camp. Neither he nor anyone else in the linden tree group has any idea how long the war will last or how long they can stand it.
“In Srebrenica, there is no time,” Ilijaz says.
Doctors Without Borders surgeons report back to headquarters that Ilijaz seems depressed and exhausted, that he needs support, that he needs a holiday. Srebrenicans say he works like a slave and lives modestly, rather than taking advantage of his position as he could for perks like a larger apartment. Grueling night shifts every fourth night compound Ilijaz’s surgical duties and heavy clinical responsibilities. He feels his adrenaline level leap each time he leaves home for a duty shift. Overnight in the hospital, sleep comes in fits and starts. He catches a nap in the doctors’ room and is startled awake by the sound of a nurse knocking to rouse him. Sometimes the sound is imaginary, only the product of his anxious mind. But more than once after such a phantasmagoria, a serious casualty arrives at the hospital. It’s like a premonition before something bad happens. Back at his apartment, the same thing occurs. At some time during the night, he’ll bolt awake, certain the nurse is knocking at his door. Such “hypervigilance” is a clear sign of post-traumatic stress disorder—the problem is, Ilijaz’s traumas are still happening.
Ilijaz struggles. Sometimes just knowing that people need him helps him fight with the “last bits” of his “logical, rational thinking” the depression that he feels hovering above him, about to take him over. Other times, he turns to God and his religion for strength, and he feels his faith growing quietly. He doesn’t want to lose his fight against despair like three men he knew who hung themselves in Srebrenica. He wants, instead, to get out of here.
“I want to be everywhere except in this enclave,” Ilijaz tells his friends, but there is almost no way out. Trying to leave is something like plotting an escape from Alcatraz. Many of those who attempt the reverse of the journey that Nedret took in August 1992—through the woods back to Tuzla—never make it. But still, people keep trying, undaunted by others’ failures. The groups, which begin as small parties of ten or fifteen, grow to fifty, even 100 people.
Ilijaz begins to think seriously of trying to leave. At first he tells only people he trusts, like Ejub, who himself talks of attempting to reunite with his wife and son in Tuzla.
As Ilijaz grows more serious about the idea, he stops hiding the fact that he’s considering it. One day the military commander, Naser Orić, confronts him about rumors of his impending departure. Ilijaz admits that they’re true. He wants his action to draw the attention of national authorities as a protest against the situation in the enclave. He also wants the local authorities, including Naser, to take his exit as a protest against the way they tolerate criminal activity and fail to provide the hospital and its workers with a proper share of humanitarian assistance.
Naser advises Ilijaz not to leave, warning that his departure might have “great negative consequences.” Rumors spread and a panic arises in town. Many will follow Ilijaz if he goes. Ilijaz still can’t decide. He weighs his options until the day that a soldier he treated long ago warns him of a plan for his assassination should he decide to go. Life in Srebrenica looks a little more bearable compared with near-certain death. Ilijaz gives up his plan.
* * *
IT TAKES MONTHS before Ilijaz finally has the chance to travel outside the enclave. The fall and winter of 1994 pass into the spring of 1995, and then Naser Orić shows he hasn’t forgotten Ilijaz. The military will reward him for his work by clearing a corridor through Serb territory to the safe area of Žepa so that Ilijaz can take a several-day holiday with his best friend Naim Salkić and one of the anesthetists. Žepa, a similarly sized enclave as Srebrenica, but less densely populated, is roughly fifteen miles away. The path between the enclaves is a popular, but dangerous, smuggling route. Srebrenicans go there to buy cigarettes from Žepans, who supposedly get them from Serbs, paying Ukrainian U.N. Protection Force troops as intermediaries.
Snowstorms in April 1995 force Ilijaz to delay his holiday five times. In the meantime, Orić and a dozen other top Srebrenica commanders fly to Tuzla on a Bosnian military helicopter for consultations and training. With Orić gone, others in the military keep his promise to Ilijaz. At last, on the night of April 28, Ilijaz sets out for Žepa. More than 100 local soldiers wait in the woods at various points along the route, creating a path that Ilijaz moves through with roughly twenty other soldiers around him. The rocky, mountainous terrain and the dark night make it impossible for Ilijaz to r
ide the horse they brought for him, so he walks instead.
Ilijaz isn’t scared. He just feels incredibly lucky and happy to experience a brief change in routine. It isn’t fair that for the better part of three years of war, he, Fatima, Ejub, Avdo, and Branka have been the only Bosnian physicians to care for the entire enclave of Srebrenica, with just a few MSF internationals to help them. Ever since “Mad Max” took his leave of them in the summer of 1993, nearly two years ago, they have appealed repeatedly to Tuzla’s Second Corps for reinforcements or replacements. Some candidate doctors were identified, but Serb authorities would not grant them the right to travel through Serb territory to Srebrenica.
Ilijaz is elated to arrive in the tiny, backward village of Žepa, somewhere he never would have imagined wanting to visit before the war. He feels he’s entered another world. After these past three years of nonstop work, Ilijaz doesn’t know what to do with himself. Incapable of merely relaxing, he and the others vacationing in Žepa decide to do something for the village. Sparsely populated, Žepa has no foreign aid workers, and until one of its two doctors, Benjamin “Benjo” Kulovac, spent six months in Srebrenica learning surgery, those requiring operations had to be carried over the dangerous, forested mountains to Srebrenica. The town has never had so many experienced surgical staff in its midst, and so Ilijaz decides to make history. Someone wedges wood under the legs of Žepa’s makeshift operating table to raise it to his height, and he repairs two hernias. Several days later he performs an emergency Caesarian section. Someone even videotapes the event.
Benjo’s father throws a party for Ilijaz the day before his planned departure. By early afternoon, a group has gathered in the house, eating and drinking, laughing and singing along with a talented accordionist. Ilijaz, who usually can do without plum brandy, finds the batch they offer him divine. Everything seems perfect—the food, the music, the spirits, and the company. The war folds up and slips away.
At 1 A.M., he is overwhelmed by a sudden desire to leave. Letting loose like this makes him nervous. Something bad could happen and he’d be needed. He jumps to his feet. At almost the same moment, Benjo does, too, announcing that he is going to sleep.
“You can’t go yet!” people argue.
They both insist.
* * *
ON THE SAME NIGHT, in a heliodrome in Tuzla, a Russian-built M-18 transport helicopter owned by the Bosnian army, painted white with a red cross, lifts off into the night. Inside it, Dr. Dževad Džananović, a thirty-one-year-old general practitioner from a village near Srebrenica who has spent the war working in Tuzla, bites back a sense of foreboding. Dževad, a handsome, dark-haired physician and an old friend of Ejub Alić, looks around the cargo hold at his three nervous medical colleagues, a pulmonologist, a gynecologist, and a pediatrician, who lean against large boxes and bags full of medical supplies, military equipment, and ammunition being smuggled into Srebenica to help bolster its defenses. An elderly woman heading for a family reunion bounces her young grandchild on her knee. Several soldiers and top Srebrenica military officers sit, solemn-faced.
Dževad didn’t volunteer for this trip. The other three doctors didn’t, either. The Bosnian Army Second Corps conscripted them, its medical officers having received an order from higher command in Sarajevo to choose doctors for Srebrenica. The order came not long after Dr. Avdo sent yet another official request for medical personnel. This time, Srebrenica’s Commander Orić was in Tuzla to push it through. All four doctors chosen for the trip practiced in Srebrenica or Bratunac before the war.
Dževad was frightened when his mobilization orders came. He has been separated from his family members in Srebrenica since the start of the war and has long wanted to reunite with them, but now he senses something bad in the air. With the spring thaw, a cessation-of-hostilities agreement, signed in December 1994, has broken down, and warfare is reerupting all over Bosnia. Dževad has been in recent radio contact with his father in Srebrenica, who warned him not to come. Not now. Srebrenicans are uneasy in the absence of Orić and their other top military authorities. Dževad has a strange feeling that the town won’t be around much longer.
The other three doctors are scared, too. They’ve been described in public as volunteers, but in fact they’ve been compelled to go to Srebrenica. One considered hiding to avoid the trip, but was threatened at army headquarters and gave up the idea. He handed his wedding ring to someone to keep for his son in case he didn’t return. Another went to the hospital just before the planned trip complaining of chest pains—nothing was wrong and he is here, too. There is supposed to be a fifth doctor traveling with them, a female psychiatrist originally from Srebrenica. She went into hiding and couldn’t be found when they came for her today.
The helicopter lifted off once already tonight, but a Bosnian army base received intelligence that Serbs discovered the flight, and it radioed for the pilot to turn back. Army officers figure that the Serbs won’t expect them to attempt to fly again the same night.
Their forty-five-mile journey should last only twenty to twenty-five minutes. The pilot has made this flight many times before. The helicopter has little in the way of navigation systems and will travel most of the way with its lights off to avoid detection, maintaining radio contact with a Bosnian army base that does not have radar.
Nobody attempts to talk over the noise of the helicopter’s engine. Dževad keeps a nervous watch out of a small window. Bright flashes of anti-aircraft fire fill him with fear, but the engine noise prevents him from hearing anything. In his mind, he predicts they will not reach Srebrenica. Then he hears a terrible clatter that fills his head and seems to emanate from every direction.
What’s happening? he wonders.
* * *
THE FLIGHT CREW RADIOES the Bosnian army base to say that they’ve been hit. They estimate their location and report that they are having trouble turning. They ask whether they should try, somehow, to come back. The soldiers on the ground advise the pilots to continue the final half mile to their goal.
* * *
ON THE PLATEAU OF A SNOW-COVERED MOUNTAINTOP between Srebrenica and Žepa, keeping warm inside a small house, are several people who plan to return with the helicopter to Tuzla. When they hear its low rumble, at about 1 A.M., they go outside and watch the helicopter appear from behind the mountains. They twist on American-army-style flashlights, using colored lenses to signal the pilot.
The helicopter seems to be losing height and listing from side to side. It doesn’t put on its lights as it usually does when it descends for landing. They watch the aircraft regain some height and clear the mountain. But instead of landing gently, it starts spinning as it angles toward the awaiting crowd. People scream and scatter. After four or five rotations, the helicopter catches itself on a huge beech tree and crashes to the ground on its side.
* * *
INSIDE, BOXES FLY. The elderly woman leans over her grandchild to protect him. Dževad feels he is on some sort of slope. Then everything goes blank.
* * *
AROUND 4 A.M. SOMEONE COMES to awaken Ilijaz with the news: There’s been a helicopter crash in the mountains between Žepa and Srebrenica. Ilijaz knew nothing about the helicopter. He and Benjo rush to the clinic building to pick up some medical supplies and then travel by car and on foot to the crash site in the rain. They arrive to find half of the helicopter’s two dozen passengers dead and most of its survivors injured, a few severely. Ilijaz is shocked to learn of the doctors’ presence. Three of them are dead. The sole survivor is Dževad, whom Ilijaz knows from before the war as a delicate, tender man.
With their paltry supplies, there is not much more they can do than apply first aid. The grandmother is dead, but the grandson she protected has lived. Ilijaz makes an assessment of the injuries and draws up a list of supplies he needs, giving it to a soldier and asking him to radio the request to Srebrenica. Some soldiers have already started to walk there to retrieve supplies.
Žepa is closer than Srebrenica, so the inj
ured are transferred to its clinic, coming under shelling as they’re carried down the mountain. Within about six hours, an incredibly short time for the journey, twenty to thirty men show up from Srebrenica with more than 200 pounds of medical supplies on their backs, far outstripping Ilijaz’s request.
Perhaps the most seriously injured is a black-haired man of about twenty-four years, who is alive but unresponsive. He has a small wound on the side of his head and when Ilijaz palpates his scalp, he thinks, but isn’t sure, that he feels bone moving beneath it.
At the clinic in Žepa, the man’s pulse begins to slow, an indication that pressure inside his head is reaching a critical level. Family members of the patient live in Žepa and come to ask what can be done. Ilijaz prefers to be brutally honest. He describes the man’s condition and poor prognosis.
“He needs neurosurgical treatment,” he tells the family, “but I’ve never done it. I’ve never even seen neurosurgery.”
The patient’s father begs Ilijaz to do something, anything. “My son’s life is in your hands,” he says. “I forgive you, even if he dies, but just do something. Just relieve us from the feeling that we didn’t do everything we could.”
Ilijaz feels trapped. As if by fate, the equipment the runners have brought includes a neurosurgical set with a drill and a large-bore metal bit. When cranked by hand, the drill can grind a hole through skull bone. A chill goes through him. Ilijaz knows the man will probably die no matter what he does. He reaches back, far back, to the books he studied in medical school and the theory he learned.
In order to see what is happening in the patient’s brain and how he might fix it, Ilijaz has to remove a piece of skull bone, a procedure known as trepanation. The skull is fractured, which gives him a head start, but he still has some work to do. The first step is to drill several holes in the skull and then “connect the dots,” using a wire saw to file away the bone between them.
