Such poignant scenes occur every day in Sarajevo, where 300,000 remaining residents inhabit a frozen, blasted wasteland. Thousands of men and women plod to work past the charred hulks of buildings. Frost hardens the soil of once forested hills, stripped for firewood that is hauled away on the roofs of cars, aboard children’s sleds or on someone’s bent back. Intermittent relief shipments from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), together with gleanings from the black market, are the only sources of food for most people. Car theft and other crimes, often perpetrated by police and military who act as local warlords, are a persistent menace. Faces that shone last summer with the hope of foreign intervention have now turned yellow from vitamin deficiency.
“If you ask me how we manage, I really don’t know,” Dr. Mufid Lazovic says as he begins another 24-hour shift in the trauma clinic of the dimly lit Kosevo hospital. The clinic has been the scene of 962 major operations since the siege began. “We simply can’t allow ourselves to think that we could be hit by shells, too,” the doctor says. Yet earlier in the week, a woman, nine months pregnant, was hit by shrapnel while lying in the Kosevo maternity ward. Her child was killed within her; its body lies in a tiny blanket on the floor of the Kosevo morgue. Later a tank shell crashed through the walls of the hospital’s internal-medicine clinic, landing in an unoccupied bed; miraculously, no one was killed.
TV Bosnia-Herzegovina brings regular updates from Geneva, site of the U.N.European Community-sponsored peace conference on Bosnia. Chaired by former secretary of state Cyrus Vance and Britain’s Lord David Owen, the talks are aimed at drafting a new constitution that would keep Bosnia’s nominal sovereignty but divide it into ethnically separate, self-governing districts. In survivalist Sarajevo, the diplomatic machinations of Geneva seem like something taking place on a distant planet. The Vance-Owen plan has few supporters. “We want peace, but not without justice,” says Edin Trokovic, 19.
The Vance-Owen map of Bosnia has been rejected both by the Serbs, who insist on a “corridor” connecting their conquests in Bosnia with Serbia proper, and by the Sarajevo government, which says the plan would ratify Serbian “ethnic cleansing.” Sarajevo has also been contending with another flare-up of fighting between its forces and its nominal allies, the Bosnian Croats, who are trying to seize areas designated for Croatian control under the Vance-Owen plan. Croats have diverted weapons shipments bound for Sarajevo and kept UNHCR relief convoys from reaching snowy areas of central Bosnia that are even more desperate than the capital.
Vance and Owen want to raise the pressure for a deal by taking the talks to the Security Council in New York. Bosnian officials say their president, Alija Izetbegovic, is negotiating with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic only in order not to appear obstructionist. Izetbegovic might face rebellion if he tried to sell his troops something that looks like the partition of Bosnia. His forces have been radicalized by months of savage defensive combat waged with little help from the outside. “It simply will not be accepted by the men with guns in their hands,” says military commander Sefer Halilovic. Encouraged by his troops’ recent gains in the Drina valley of eastern Bosnia, Halilovic says what Bosnia really needs is an end to the arms embargo so his forces can break the siege of Sarajevo themselves. “If the international community does not undertake serious measures to stop this unjust war, we will punish them through terror in democratic Europe,” he warns. “Many European capitals will be set on fire.”
Idle or not, Halilovic’s threat shows how desperate his army’s mission has become. At the moment, Bosnia does not exist, except as a conception of communal tolerance too utopian, apparently, for the poisoned climate of post-communist Yugoslavia. Though no one here likes to admit it, another reason Izetbegovic must talk to his enemies is that he is caught between the Serbian hammer and the Croatian anvil. The conquests of those two groups add up to 85 percent of Bosnian territory and are all but irreversible-barring outside intervention. All that remains is the shattered, surrounded city of Sarajevo, alive, barely, but not free.
