Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.wpost From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: 'Winter Is Here And Hope Is Lost';Battered Sarajevans Limp On Amid Siege Blaine Harden=Washington Post Foreign Service=SARAJEVO, Bosnia>Sarajevo is more concentration camp than European capital. It has been ripped to pieces by shelling, more than 60 percent of its housing have been damaged, more than 2,800 people have been killed, more than 48,000 have been injured. Hundreds of amputees clog the hospitals. Winter is taking hold in a city without regular supplies of heat, water, electricity or natural gas. The temperature drops below freezing every night, and dawn comes drenched in a brackish soup of fog. Rain is collapsing shell-damaged roofs. Most people have retreated, if they can, into one central room in their apartment or house. There, they burn wood for heat and cooking. Parks that last sum- mer were transformed into makeshift graveyards have this fall been stripped of trees for firewood. Fighters at the front com- plain that the city's feverish hunger for wood is depriving them of cover from Serb guns. "I was a very, very big optimist, but I have to live on this Earth. Winter is here and hope is lost. It is very difficult to live," said Miro Purivatra, a Muslim theater director here. When Serbs laid siege to this city in April, they demanded ethnic apartheid. Until the intermixed and intermarried Muslim, Serb and Croat residents of Sarajevo separated into ethnically pure neighborhoods, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic said he would keep the Muslims who control the city "trapped like mice in a pumpkin." Nearly eight months after it began, the siege still holds, and ethnic apartheid is gaining ground. The artillery-enforced seal that Karadzic's army has built around this city is deliberately leaky. It allows through Serbs, Croats, Jews, Slovenians - but the Muslims who resist the ethnic carve-up remain trapped. Sarajevo is not yet dead, but, as an ethnically mixed city, it is dying. "The siege has taken the guts out of the city," said Jasminka Baros, 44, a Muslim optician married to a Serb, who has managed to send away her two children and her mother. "When the war began, most city people did not feel they belonged to any nationality. But if we can dig up a national identity or any excuse that can get us out of here, we do it," said Baros. About 200,000 of the city's prewar population of 500,000 have been allowed out, while about 100,000 refugees, most of them Muslims from "ethnically cleansed" Bosnian villages who have no- where else to go, have been allowed in. They have taken over apartments of those who have left. Inside this curious semi-siege, Serb gunners in the hills have waged a campaign of terror designed to give every non-Muslim resident a compelling reason to declare his nationality and leave. In the past 10 days, the Serb guns have gone oddly quiet. A cease-fire, the most successful of the war, has drained some of the horror out of daily life. The average daily death toll has slipped from 12 to three, as mortar and artillery explosions have given way to the odd sniper's bullet. Gen. Philippe Morillon, the French commander of the U.N. Protec- tion Force in Bosnia, said he finally has convinced Karadzic and his military commanders of the public relations folly of killing unarmed people in a city filled with foreign television cameras. "They have begun to understand that every shell that hits the city, that every targeting of civilians is adding to the condem- nation and pressure from the whole world," Morillon said, adding that U.N. observers are now in place to identify which side is doing the shooting in Sarajevo. The United Nations releases a scorecard every day. The cease-fire, though, is both wobbly and discomforting. Residents say they do not trust it. Since last Thursday, the am- bient level of machine-gun fire and sporadic shelling has in- creased. Yesterday, shells again started falling on apartment blocks. Elsewhere in Bosnia, more than 70 percent of which has been swal- lowed up by Serb forces in the last seven months, the cease-fire means nothing. Just 55 miles away, the refugee-filled Muslim city of Travnik is under Serb artillery attack. What the quasi-successful public relations cease-fire has done here is cause yet another shortage. Without ear-shattering explo- sions and a daily harvest of mutilated bodies, adrenaline has stopped flowing. The city is merely dull, cold and miserable. The mice are not being shot, but they remain trapped. Perversely, that trap is now being enforced by the city's primarily Muslim defenders. To head off a mass exodus that they say would weaken the city's capacity to defend itself, Bosnian commanders are in- sisting that no residents except the sick, the very old and the very young be allowed to pass to freedom through the Serbs' eth- nic filter. In the name of fighting ethnic apartheid, the Muslims have made Sarajevo a prison. Inside that prison, the United Nations and other international relief agencies are free to feed the inmates. With several months' experience under their belt, these agencies have cali- brated the city's survival needs with bureaucratic precision. Each resident is alloted about 26 ounces of relief food per day. That is divided up from the 308 tons that the U.N. High Commis- sioner for Refugees (UNHCR) tries to fly in or truck past the Serbs every day. Delivery problems, bad weather and distribution inequities have led UNHCR to guess that the average resident of this city has lost between 10 and 20 pounds since April. UNHCR says that 40,000 people - 10 percent of the population - are "moderately malnour- ished." That puts Sarajevo, in relief agency argot, "at developing-country level." If the delivery of food were to be in- terrupted for a month, UNHCR estimates, the moderately malnour- ished would become "seriously threatened." For now, though, food is moving moderately well. Starvation and nutrition-related illnesses of the sort that would cause mass death - and television images the would embarrass both the Serbs in the hills and the U.N. officials in New York - seem unlikely, at least in the short term. What UNHCR and other agencies do not supply is heating oil to keep city residents warm as they eat their 26 ounces a day. "Heating is a bigger problem than food. It may cause more death than the shortage of food," said Sarajevo Mayor Mohamed Kresevljakovic. U.N. agencies do not truck or fly in large quan- tities of heating oil because the Serbs with the guns in the hills will not let them. The Serbs considers heating oil, which can be used as diesel fuel for trucks and tanks, a strategic com- modity. Too much of it could help the Muslims in their stalled campaign to break the siege. "Delivering fuel is a very delicate issue," said Peter Kessler, a spokesman here for UNHCR, which has managed to bring in some heating oil for hospitals and diesel fuel for garbage trucks. "If you start sending in trucks and trucks of fuel, that would raise eyebrows. Everything has to be issued on a case-by-case basis." The carefully regulated, Serb-vetted trickle of fuel and food en- rages residents of Sarajevo. "We are humiliated persons. Western countries don't realize what it means to be in the dark for half a year, without shower, without fresh food. The spiritual life of human beings depends on the provision of these very simple things," said Srdjan Vuletic, 21, a Serb who studied acting be- fore the siege. But as a Sarajevo Serb who has chosen not to leave, Vuletic is at pains to explain what Karadzic and his gun- men in the hills have not yet been able to achieve. "Tolerance still survives in this town. Here in Sarajevo I have all the rights that any citizen should have. I am not one of the creeps in the mountains, and I am not blamed for their crimes," said Vuletic. Other Sarajevo Serbs who have chosen to stay on in this tormented city agree. The Serbian Orthodox Church here has not been de- faced, except by errant Serb artillery, nor has its priest been arrested or forced to leave. In Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia, by contrast, the Islamic Com- munity Center of Sarajevo reports, 22 imams have been killed, most of them by their throats being cut. The Islamic center also says that 650 mosques have been destroyed or damaged. Longtime Muslim residents of this once-cosmopolitan and still class-conscious city complain far more loudly about the bumptious behavior of arriving Muslim refugees than the supposed ethnic sins of city-born Serbs. "You find yourself much closer to the Serbs from Sarajevo than these Muslim refugees from towns that no one has heard of," said Baros, the optician who is married to a Serb. "These new people throw garbage out windows." Yet, for everyone who remains inside the siege of Sarajevo, ei- ther by choice or by virtue of being a Muslim, the prospect of life this winter is one of dreary survival amid artifacts of what had been a good life in a comfortable city. The winter ahead of Hidejeta Rasidagic, 63, a Muslim woman recently widowed by random Serb shelling, is bleakly typical for a city where everyone has memories of the dead. Her husband, Irfan, was killed on Aug. 26 by an artillery shell that cut through the kitchen and bedroom walls. It caught him in the stomach and his body exploded. His widow, his son and his neighbors had to clean up his remains before the apartment could be repaired and made livable. The widow says she remembers seeing neighbors carrying out a blood- drenched sofa with a piece of her husband's leg showing beneath a cushion. The blood has been scrubbed off a 19th-century sideboard that was in the room with Irfan Rasidagic when he was killed. But it is peppered with shrapnel holes. "If I can find a wood-burning stove to heat my kitchen, I will cut that thing up for firewood for the winter," his widow said one morning last week. Rasidagic's hands were trembling as she spoke. She apologized for it, saying that she always trembled and wept when she remembered what had happened to her husband. She said she takes tranquiliz- ers that allow her to get on with her preparations for winter.< Western Alliances Launch