by Sheri Fink
Christina has managed to evacuate many of her local staff. She is relieved about that and happy to be alive. Still, she feels that so much more could have been done, both medically and with advocacy, to help the people of Srebrenica. The magnitude of all she has witnessed is just beginning to hit her.
30
SADIK
THE DAY HIS COLLEAGUES LIST HIM AS MISSING, ten days after the fall of Srebrenica, Sadik Ahmetović is in fact very much alive, but his choice to walk farther back in the column has markedly changed the character of his as-yet-unfinished journey.
When the Serbs attacked the column, the large, dark-haired medical technician was cut off from the rest of the medical staff. His intense, intelligent eyes surveyed a scene of almost unimaginable carnage. Dozens of Srebrenicans lay dead and dying on the ground. He stopped to treat some of the injured, applying bandages with the help of anyone nearby. These past few days, as the front of the column made a beeline for Tuzla, he and the dwindling number of survivors from the back of the line have wandered through the woods. Every couple hundred yards he met someone else with a wound and stopped to help him. Sometimes wounded people lay everywhere, every step he took, in every direction he turned.
As the column was broken into smaller and smaller parts, with men being killed and thousands surrendering to the Serbs, the group of people Sadik traveled with shrank. Eventually he found himself in a group of fifty-two, and together they concluded it wasn’t possible to make it to Tuzla. The Chetniks had cut off key points along the possible routes. They decided to turn back toward Srebrenica.
The paths on the way back were a ghoulish scene of littered bodies. Sadik turned them over, trying to find friends. He walked for days and days that blended together. None of the men in his group slept. They were exhausted beyond description. Afraid. Confused. Crazed. At one point, Sadik forgot his own name. He became convinced that the Chetniks were attacking them with poison gas.
The group, picking up a few others as it went, eventually made it to Slatina, a small village near Srebrenica, and spent the night. Where could they go for safety? Srebrenica was taken. Žepa, too, from what they’d heard. But there was a famous saying about the woods near Žepa—“You can wander for ten years in Žepa’s forests without bumping into another person.” The next day, they decided to head there.
As they neared Žepa, they heard sounds of shooting from two sides. This made them realize the enclave hadn’t yet fallen. The news that it had, which was heard on Serb radio and caused the entire column to head for Tuzla, might well have been willful misinformation.
After discovering this last night, most of Sadik’s group went to stay in a nearby village. He continued into town, because he knew Žepa’s doctor, Benjo, the one who had trained for a while in Srebrenica and treated the survivors of the helicopter crash with Ilijaz.
* * *
WHEN SADIK AWAKENS the morning after his arrival, he can’t walk. The skin on the soles of his feet is swollen, cracked, and bleeding. He tells Benjo the horrible story of the exodus. The doctor warns him not to make people in Žepa, particularly the soldiers, afraid. “Keep quiet about it,” he says.
When Benjo first heard that Srebrenica had fallen, he hadn’t believed it. He’d been there just a month ago and experienced the “there but for the grace of God go I” sensation that haunts one who leaves a place by chance just before disaster strikes. His incredulity trickled away as he watched Mladić on Serb TV, standing before Ilijaz’s apartment building, announcing Srebrenica’s liberation from the Turks. But only now, hearing Sadik speak, does he get an inkling of the horror that has taken place.
During the day, Žepa comes under fierce attack. Serb forces pound grenades into the two-story medical building in the center of town where Sadik works, demolishing its rooftop. Several more shells carve craters into the side of the building. Within a half hour, the rooms Benjo has been using are destroyed. He moves his medical work, amputating a limb and giving first aid to patients, to the only place left that provides significant protection, a barn.
On July 25, the town of Žepa falls. General Mladić makes another triumphant arrival. Benjo, both doctor and mayor of the sparsely populated enclave, negotiates with him, and they reach an agreement to evacuate the wounded to a hospital in Sarajevo.
This is good news for the wounded, but medical technician Sadik Ahmetović, although he can barely walk five yards with his ravaged feet, isn’t one of them, and this sends him spinning into a psychological crisis. With his feet this way, he can’t possibly hike through the mountains again.
Sadik needs to be injured to qualify for the evacuation. In a panic, he asks Benjo to cut him, explaining that he’s seen too many dead people on his journey and can’t imagine making it through the woods again. “I just don’t have the strength to go back there.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” the doctor replies without explaining why. He takes all blades and other cutting implements away from Sadik’s part of the barn. Sadik figures the doctor is scared that he is going to seriously harm himself, perhaps even kill himself. But Sadik’s perspective has shifted. Compared with the dead bodies, the confusion, the whistling of rockets, the rat-tat-tat of heavy machine gun fire and worst of all the shells that landed with a thud and smoked, seeming to Sadik to be releasing poison gas that drove men to hallucinate and give themselves up to the Serbs—compared with all this, a small injury seems harmless.
Sadik begs a pistol from a soldier. He sets out bandages, gauze, an aspirin-like painkiller and penicillin antibiotic. Then he warns the doctor he’s going to shoot himself. If Benjo wants to help, he can tell him the safest place to aim. The doctor points to the fleshy front of the upper leg, a place with no major blood vessels or bone. He turns away, unable to watch.
Sadik gathers the skin at the front of his left thigh and shoots a bullet through it. The doctor, with tears in his eyes, returns immediately to help him. They bandage the wound. In spite of the pain, Sadik isn’t sorry for what he’s done. He feels relief. By giving himself an injury, he’s given himself a chance to survive.
* * *
AFTER RINGING THE BELL to herald the Serbianization of Srebrenica the night of its capture on July 11, Dr. Boro Lazić took advantage of the fact that some vehicles were going back to šekovići. He went home that night for an hour to see his family and then returned to an army base a half mile south of the entrance to Srebrenica. He spent the next couple of days in relative peace with his medical team, gathering more medical supplies from the U.N. Bravo base and the Srebrenica pharmacy. His unit was not even on alert.
Then they received orders to proceed to Žepa and participate in the offensive. Only then did Boro hear of the large numbers of Muslim men from Srebrenica walking through the woods west of the enclave toward Tuzla.
Boro and his team went the other way, south, and arrived at the front lines on a hill about two and a half to three miles from the city of Žepa. The line proved much more difficult for the Serb soldiers to break than the line around Srebrenica, and Boro had much more work treating the injured and sending them to hospitals in larger Serb-held cities. Serb leaders publicly announced their plans to take the Žepa “safe area” before beginning their advance. The announcement drew no military response from the international community. Žepa’s soldiers held out for day after day, but the fall of their town had been accepted as a fait accompli.
For ten days Boro stayed there, the only qualified doctor on his side of the front line, impressed by the best defenses he witnessed throughout the entire war. Finally, today, two weeks after the capture of Srebrenica, the line around Žepa broke. Žepa’s soldiers fell back east of the town up another hill toward Serbia, and the Serbian soldiers Boro was with advanced down their hill to the river that ran before the west side of the town. They have been ordered to stop here and refrain from engaging in provocations. While he waits, Boro inspects the Muslim soldiers’ trenches, struck by their professionalism.
Meanwhile, the Serb and Musl
im commanders begin to negotiate a surrender agreement in the presence of the Ukrainian U.N. battalion that was stationed in Žepa. Unlike Srebrenica, there were no representatives of humanitarian organizations here, and Boro is invited to cross the river into the city and participate in talks about evacuation of children and the injured. He is tasked with drawing up lists of those to be evacuated, in what order and by what means. His first priority is to evacuate the seriously injured to Sarajevo by bus.
* * *
SEVERAL THOUSAND INHABITANTS of Žepa town and the remote hillside settlements around the enclave congregate in the town square, awaiting evacuation.
“Dr. Boro, Dr. Boro,” someone shouts.
Next to the Žepa town square, inside the open U.N. barracks, Sadik Ahmetović lies with other injured and ill men and women, listening to the hubbub of thousands of people gathering for the evacuation. People walk in and out, calling to one another, issuing instructions. In the distance he hears someone shout, “Dr. Boro, Dr. Boro.”
“Call that doctor,” he tells a soldier.
* * *
A MUSLIM SOLDIER APPROACHES. “Are you Doctor Boro?” he asks.
“I am,” Boro answers, surprised because he doesn’t recognize the man. “That’s my name.”
“A young man is asking for you,” he says, and beckons Boro to follow him toward the U.N. barracks.
Boro wonders who could know him here in Žepa, this out-of-the-way backwoods town that he’s never before visited. He suspects, with some fear, that it could be a setup. The soldier leads him to an improvised medical station inside the barracks. Boro looks around and doesn’t see anyone he knows. The man keeps walking, taking him deeper inside, into a second part of the barracks, to a young man lying on the ground. Boro immediately recognizes Sadik, a former nurse from Boro’s days of medical training. They met two years ago at the stadium in Srebrenica, and, when Boro was frightened, Sadik had said, “No one will harm you here.”
They greet one another warmly.
“I’m very sorry for you,” Boro says, noting Sadik’s wound. “How are you doing? How did it happen?”
Sadik lies. He tells Boro he was injured while fleeing from Srebrenica to Tuzla. That was why, he explains, he came back toward Žepa.
“Are you still bleeding?” Boro asks, offering to look at Sadik’s wound and change his bandages. He unwraps the wound, cleans it, and places a fresh, clean dressing. Boro sees that the injury isn’t serious. Still, he promises to evacuate Sadik by bus with the heavily injured to Sarajevo, even offering to make sure any family members he has can go with him. Sadik has none here. Boro asks if Sadik is in pain and gives him analgesics and a pack of cigarettes. When the buses line up in the late morning, Boro makes sure that Sadik is aboard one of the first to depart. Boro hops on the bus and speaks with the bus driver. Then he guarantees Sadik, once more, that he will make it through the front line.
The two men bid one another farewell. The buses begin to roll around noon.
* * *
IN THE MEANTIME, twenty other buses arrive to take non-injured women, children, and elderly civilians from Žepa to Kladanj. A nervous crowd of about 500 people stand around Boro—women, children, and some men he figures, he hopes, are unarmed. Boro is unarmed. He treats the lightly injured who are still here, changing bandages and giving medicines. One of the injured refuses his care. He looks at Boro with hatred, as if he doesn’t believe the Serb could be a doctor and thinks his help would be some sort of a trick.
A woman looks toward the river where the Serb soldiers are waiting on the other side and begins to scream hysterically, “The Chetniks are coming!” Her words spark mass panic. Mothers and grandmothers and children start screaming, too.
Boro can’t stand to hear the children crying. He grabs someone’s plastic water bottle and pours it on the woman who started the hysteria, yelling at her to calm down.
“Don’t scare the kids!” he shouts. “The kids don’t need this kind of traumatizing. The soldiers won’t come into the city. There’s no need to be afraid!”
The crowd immediately falls silent. Then it strikes Boro that as an unarmed “enemy” soldier surrounded by 500 Muslims, he probably shouldn’t be yelling at anyone.
Soon after, a middle-aged man approaches Boro in tears, explaining that he is a soldier worried about sending away his wife and five daughters.
“Is it true that the women and children being put onto these buses are being taken to Kladanj?” he asks.
“It’s true and it’s for sure,” Boro answers. “It’s a fact.”
“My wife and five daughters are getting onto one of these buses,” the man persists, “and I’m afraid something will happen to them.”
“Nothing will happen, it’s for sure. There’s an agreement and there’s no reason for you to be afraid. Everyone will stick to that.”
The answer fails to reassure the man. Boro knows why he is afraid. The Muslims are telling wild stories about Serbs raping women and girls. He doesn’t believe the rumors and wants to prove to the man that they aren’t true.
“I’ll go and personally escort the bus where your family is,” Boro promises him. “And when I come back I’ll bring you the message that they’ve arrived safely.”
“I’d be grateful if you’d do that for me.”
The requests for assistance don’t end with this man. Žepa’s other doctor, a young man about Boro’s age, approaches Boro and begs him for help leaving Žepa because the agreement doesn’t provide for the transport of a non-injured man like himself. Boro requests approval for the man to be evacuated, based on the concept of medical neutrality—that those serving medical functions in war are neutral noncombatants entitled to protection. His superiors grant it, and in the evening, he takes the doctor on a bus, and also the wife and five daughters of the man who beseeched him, planning to ride with them to the front lines. A Serb commander, surprised to see Boro on the bus, tries to talk him out of the trip. Boro goes anyway.
* * *
BORO RETURNS FROM THE JOURNEY to Kladanj at night and looks for the soldier to report that his wife and daughters have made it to safety. He does not find him. Most of Žepa’s men of fighting age are melting into the hills.
Boro remains in Žepa for two more days, the only doctor to help with the evacuations and to treat the lightly injured. Almost all of the women, children, elderly, injured, and ill inhabitants of Žepa—about 5,000 in all—are safely evacuated to the main body of Bosnian government–held territory. When the evacuations are complete, the Muslim soldiers fail to keep their end of the bargain by surrendering, en masse, to the Serbs. Having regrouped in the hills, they skirmish with the Bosnian Serb army. Boro moves back into the field, but after just a few days, most of the Muslims exfiltrate themselves from the enclave and across the border into Serbia, where they give themselves up. They are imprisoned, but most are not killed.
Boro receives a military promotion to lieutenant. At the beginning of August 1995, he finally makes it home, where he has not been since the night after the capture of Srebrenica. It was his longest separation from his family in the entire war. He hugs his little girl and kisses his baby. He asks his wife to make some coffee and they sit and talk long into the night, remembering old times. He tells her nothing of what happened these past three weeks. It is his last field mission of the Bosnian war.
EPILOGUE
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
—Willi
am Wordsworth (1770–1850) Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
May justice be done lest the world perish.
—Hegel
THROUGHOUT JULY, the women of Srebrenica waited, mostly in vain, for their men to emerge from the woods or be released from Serb detention. Every now and then a man would struggle into Tuzla from the mountains to the east, appearing disheveled and emaciated and bearing a story that began with his surrender in the woods or his separation from the women and children in Potočari, and ended with his unlikely survival by jumping out of a moving truck or falling under the bodies of his friends, brothers, or neighbors during a mass execution that took place in a factory building or a house or a field. It became clear that thousands were missing.
The tide began to turn against the Serbs. The first week of August 1995, the Croatian Army launched Operation Storm, an offensive on the Serb forces controlling a third of Croatia. Over the next days, the Croatians swept eastward toward Bosnia, capturing all the land the Serbs had held. Thousands of Serb civilians fled the advance, and some of those who remained were killed.
The last week of August, the Bosnian Serb army sent another mortar bomb crashing into a Sarajevo marketplace and attacked the safe area Goražde. This time the international community responded, under the belated leadership of the United States whose president, Clinton, was under extraordinary pressure from the public, Congress, and his political rival in the upcoming presidential election, Senator Bob Dole. More than eighty peacekeepers were secretly removed from Goražde and NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force was launched. Within a matter of days, the air attack, the largest in NATO history to that point, destroyed bridges, communications equipment, anti-aircraft systems, and other strategic targets of the supposedly invincible Bosnian Serb military, including the barracks at Lukavica, which Eric Dachy had seen the United Nations sharing with Serb forces in the war’s early days. After two weeks, the Serb military finally pulled its heavy weapons back from around Sarajevo, and NATO ended the campaign. Meanwhile, though, the Croatian army had joined forces with the Bosnian army and moved into Bosnia from the northwest. By the time that international leaders, citing the growing numbers of Serb civilians fleeing the ground advance, pressured the Croatians and Bosnians into halting their offensive, Serb forces’ control of Bosnian territory had dropped from 70 percent to 50 percent. All sides agreed to a ceasefire, then peace negotiations in Dayton, Ohio. On December 14, 1995, in Paris, with a flourish of pens and staged handshakes for the cameras, the war was declared officially over. On paper, at least, Bosnia remained a unitary state with all of its citizens enjoying freedom of movement and the right of return to their pre-war homes, but the state comprised two constituent parts, the so-called Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska, the Serb Republic. Many Bosnia analysts and even Richard Holbrooke, the top U.S. Dayton negotiator, believed that recognizing Republika Srpska inappropriately rewarded the atrocity-filled war strategies that were used to create it. The final agreement had something each side had wanted all along—the Bosnians had their unified state; the nationalist Serbs had their separate entity. All had what they wanted and none had what they wanted. And meanwhile hundreds of thousands of people had died.
