It was to ease the unspeakable misery of Muslims in eastern Bosnia that President Bill Clinton undertook to drop food supplies from the air last week. For a besieged town like Gorazde, under attack since last May, Washington’s good intentions accomplished exactly nothing. Three nights last week, residents heard the heavy drone of the C-130 transport planes flying overhead, and hopes were lifted. Every day, they were dashed again as scouts posted around the valley searched the snow in vain. Gorazde was not one of the Clinton administration’s targets, but the 50,000 townsfolk didn’t know that. These days, they know only one thing: if they don’t get food somehow, they risk starvation.
Gorazde is one of the luckier towns in eastern Bosnia. After months of siege, the Muslim town of Cerska fell to the Serbs last Thursday, and was completely abandoned by the end of the week. Thousands of refugees flowed out of the enclave. Elsewhere in eastern Bosnia, Serbs were leaving a trail of destruction. Amateur radio operators reported that “enemy fire” made it difficult to search for airdrops in Konjevic Polje, where 10,000 civilians were forced to camp out in the snow after Serb assaults. One fourth of those were reportedly wounded. “Even if a small part of [the reports] are correct, the situation is desperate,” said Lyndall Sachs, an official at the Belgrade office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Reports indicated that only about one third of the American airdrops had reached their targets. But the recipients, however few, were pathetically grateful. Gen. Philippe Morillon, commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, visited the besieged town of Konjevic Polje. “It was something emotional for us,” the general later told a news conference in Sarajevo. “After 11 months of siege, it was the first sign of hope.” But there were bad signs, too. A World Health Organization official who reached the beleaguered town of Srebrenica reported that civilians were dying at the rate of 20 to 30 a day, and that at least 9,000 people were seeking a safe route out of the Muslim enclave.
Tens of thousands of refugees have already swelled the population of Gorazde. The town used to be one-quarter Serb, but most of them have left; so have a lot of the Muslims. Many more Muslims have arrived, fleeing “ethnic cleansing” elsewhere in eastern Bosnia, and they are the most desperate people in this desperate town. For the most part, they are elderly, too weak to escape and too weak to trek for food. They live in abandoned schools and public buildings, 10 or 20 to a room, dependent on scarce handouts to keep body and soul together. At a former television-repair shop-no electricity now, so no more need for TV-town authorities distribute a few meager slices of bread a day to the needy. As one old woman picked up her daily allotment last week, she approached a NEWSWEEK correspondent and wordlessly pulled down the neck of her two sweaters. The bony, jutting collarbone told her story.
The mountain trek is the town’s lifeline. Hundreds have braved the 20-mile journey, trudging silently in the dark through Serb-held territory, but dozens have died along the way. All it takes is one false step on the narrow, slippery trail. With Serb snipers sometimes as close as a few hundred yards, a whisper or the glow of a cigarette can draw fatal fire. Many trekkers have succumbed to exhaustion and the “white death,” pausing to rest along the track and freezing in the snow and subzero temperatures. Their bodies, along with those of dead pack ponies, loom like dark shadows along the gruesome trail. Sixty-six-year-old Ramiz Bezdrob froze to death on Feb. 28, on the last leg of his journey, hauling a sack of flour home for his six-member family. His body lies in the Gorazde mosque, snow still filling his nostrils. No one knows how many corpses remain on the mountain. “In the springtime we will find them,” says Gorazde resident Mehmed Culov.
For the sick and wounded in Gorazde, there is little hope. The city hospital, like almost every public building in town, suffered heavy damage from shells and mortars during Serb assaults last May. Once a simple country clinic, it became a full-fledged trauma center when the Serbs cut off ties with the outside world. The local doctors taught themselves basic surgery, performing amputations and other procedures straight out of textbooks. To give patients transfusions, the doctors and nurses took blood from each other, one syringeful at a time. Sometimes brandy and a little morphine were the only painkillers they could get their hands on. “We just told the patients to be quiet,” recalls Alija Begovic, a 40-year-old general practitioner. A trickle of antibiotics and anesthetics now comes in along the mountain trek. But the electric generator is reserved for only the most desperate cases-fuel is too short.
Gorazde’s young have managed to find some diversion. Two months ago they opened a little club, where more than 100 people crowd together most nights. “When you sit in the house, you just want to eat-but there’s no food,” says Armin Jahic, an 18-year-old soldier. “At least when you go out, the time passes faster.” There’s not much action: no alcohol and practically no cigarettes. But thanks to a generator that was borrowed from the local police station, the club has lights and music. (Guns N’ Roses is a favorite.) Sadly, there is no dancing. “We’re too tired to dance,” explains Jahic, who recently returned from a food trek.
Residents who are too weak to make the hike across the mountains wait listlessly for U.N. aid convoys. But most relief caravans are turned back at Serb checkpoints: since the summer, only four have made it through. (The arrival of a convoy is inevitably accompanied by a sudden burst of shelling; the Serbs like to tell the United Nations there’s too much fighting, and then refuse to let them pass.) One convoy did arrive in Gorazde last Wednesday, to the town’s great delight. Children made sport of unloading the relief cartons, and clasped their own allotments to their chests with unadulterated joy. Each person received one pound of flour, one can of meat, five ounces of sugar and one third of a quart of cooking oil. That’s not much food for a week-and the head of the convoy, Jean-Claude Amiot, was far from sure he’d make it next week.
That uncertainty makes the lifeline through the mountains more critical than ever. As able-bodied men die at the front or on the trail itself, more and more women, children and older people are making the perilous trek. When they reach the encampment where food is delivered, they sit, physically exhausted, and rest and smoke in the muddy snow. Skinny pack mules munch on hay, and thin trails of smoke waft from the shabby tents. It is a scene from another century. The trekkers sip plum brandy, fortifying themselves for the grim trip home. They can’t carry the plum brandy back anyway. The glass bottles are just too heavy.
