Bosnia's Tide Of Human Misery

The Observer News Service 25-05-1992

From Christopher Long, in Split, the first foreign correspondent to visit the last vital Bosnian refugee escape route in Hercegovina.

N

ot since World War 11 has Europe seen a trail of terrified human misery on the scale of that now pouring out of the mountains and valleys of war-ravaged Bosnia-Hercegovina to the relative safety of Croatia.

An estimated 1.3 million refugees are on the move, a number that the UN High Commission for Refugees thinks could soon reach almost two million. They are mostly Muslim and almost exclusively women and children who now find themselves homeless, helpless and with little hope for the future – victims of what has now become the most vicious, ruthless and hate-fuelled war anyone can remember.

Thousands arrive daily to the sweltering heat of the harbour bus depot in the Mediterranean Croatian port of Split in battered buses – many riddled with machine-gun bullets – and disgorge their cargo of often dehydrated children and gaunt exhausted mothers who have already learnt to cover their mouths with their hands in a reflex action better known to relief workers in Ethiopia or Somalia.

But these people are not starving, not economic refugees. They are the normally successful teachers, civil servants, farmers or nurses that make up any south European community – people who only want to stop running and go home.

But how much longer they can continue to escape the intimidation of war in Bosnia-Hercegovina and the torching and looting of houses and whole villages is now in some doubt. After a long and often very dangerous detour north and then south through Hercegovina, the single escape route to Split from Sarajevo via the now devastated city of Mostar depends on a 15-mile stretch of mountain track. This road, leading out of northern Mostar, by-passes the now impassable main road and leads eventually to the Croat-Hercegovinan military headquarters at the small front-line town of Grude.

The author in Mostar in October 1994, two years after the events described in the article. In the background can be seen the almost total destruction of the city along the banks of the river Neretva.

At two or three points this road is fully within range of Serbian snipers and heavy machine-guns. It's this road which was taken by evacuating UN, EC and Red Cross officials from Sarajevo and Mostar. It is this road which receives regular air attacks despite being the only hope for the refugees. And it's this road which Col. Petkovic, operational commander of 7,000 HVO troops, is trying to keep open.

Speaking to him in his bunker beneath a hotel in Grude during the fifth air-alert before lunch, he told me he was optimistic of success in the long-run, despite having no air-cover. His men are armed with the same weaponry as his Serbian opponents, an enemy now led by his former brother-officer in the old JNA, General Panic – a man who Petkovic regards as a ruthless hardliner's hardliner. The EC monitors make valiant efforts to achieve temporary ceasefires for humanitarian purposes, but as their leader in Split, Dieter Waltman, admits, with no great confidence that many will be observed.

The majority of the victims of the insanity which has gripped Bosnia-Hercegovina are Europeans, often blonde-haired and blue-eyed, who converted to Islam under pressure from their Turkish rulers hundreds of years ago and who are now being 'cleansed' from their towns and villages as the Serbian minority of ex-Yugoslavia extends its greater Serbia plan – "Where there are Serbs, there is Serbia".

Sadly, by this week there were few if any official reception arrangements for the refugees flooding into Split. Three young Swiss women from the International Red Cross spend their time trying to arrange bulk consignments of food, drugs and other supplies from Western Europe, while Bayisa Wak-Waya of the UNHCR admits that he and his one colleague cannot begin to cope with the individual human needs of so many.

Local aid agencies such as Caritas (which reserves its help for Roman Catholics) are equally swamped by the sheer volume of people who have left and lost everything behind them.

Split, it is said, is full and so families find their own way to car ferries which drop consignments of refugees on islands such as Hvar, Brac and Korcula where the pressure of thousands of hungry, unemployed and unemployable people could well spark trouble before long among such small, intimate communities.

All along the coast near Split refugees fill the hotels so well known to tourists – refugees relieved to be safe, heart-broken to be homeless and hopeless, and mildly alarmed by the increasingly visible spectre of Croat nationalist extremism. The cohorts of intolerant Croatian HOS 'Rambos', the sinister black uniforms of freelance paramilitary fascists and walls daubed with Swastikas and Deutchland Uber Alles are unforgiving and ominous signs for those Muslims whose presence in increasing tens of thousands may one day be resented by their Croatian 'hosts'.

Zenaida, aged 16, is typical of thousands. She arrived in Split on April 24 from her home town of Donovac in Bosnia-Hercegovina, after a hair-raising 24-hour journey in which the bus ahead of hers was shot up by Serbian snipers and machine-guns. In Split she was immediately sent – with her mother, brother, sister and grandmother – to one of the two large city sports stadiums where she has lived for four weeks with dozens of other families in a squash court.

The food is monotonous but adequate. The lavatories and washing facilities are quite inadequate for the unexpected thousands who sleep cheek-by-jowl amid screaming babies and quietly weeping grandmothers. Her father, an illegal worker in Germany, cannot come to the aid of his family without being called up to fight – which would help no-one, she says. No-one from the aid agencies has visited them in four weeks or asked them what they need, or told them when or where they will go next.

At the plush Hotel Split, a semi-permanent home to more than 1,000 refugees, two little girls arrived at reception. Hana Kafedzic, 12, and her sister Nadija, 15, said they had no money, no food, no water and knew no-one. They had arrived the night before on a Children's Embassy bus from Sarajevo, evacuated by their father, a mathematics professor, who stayed behind. Their mother was trapped abroad and they had walked four miles to the hotel.

The hotel at first refused them baths, food or any assistance because "they haven't got the proper documentation" – until furious foreign journalists shamed the manager [Tonci Pejkovic] into action, demanding to know how a 12 year-old was supposed to know how to jump the hoops of bureaucracy after two sleepless nights, a machine-gun attack on their convoy and no idea whether their father and the rest of their family were alive or dead. Did he have children of his own, the journalists asked. How would he react if a hotel in London or Paris had turned them out onto the streets at night, homeless, unfed and unprotected. Clearly shocked, the manager instructed staff that these girls at least were taken in while the journalists themselves adopted them, making arrangements to escort them to safety.

Hana and Nadija are now safely in the hands of friends in Rijeka. But they are among the lucky few. [Subsequently, after months in refugee camps and a year or more in limbo in Zagreb, the entire Kafedzic family was reunited and offered a home in New Zealand]

Today the UN, the Red Cross, the High Commission for Refugees and most journalists are targets for snipers and artillery throughout most of Bosnia-Hercegovina. The whole region is in the grip of anarchic insanity on a scale which needs to be seen to be believed. Sadly there are now very few people who dare to go and see and the Balkan tragedy will continue to unfold – perhaps spreading further south – with few to witness its appalling reality.

The Road Out of Bosnia (The Daily Telegraph)

Bosnia's Girl Refugees (The Evening Standard)