by Sheri Fink
“You may find fresh dead bodies in the back of the hospital,” the Red Cross delegate told him. But Eric didn’t feel he was there to risk his life collecting crime evidence—his job was to help the living.
Eric watched soldiers manhandle bedridden patients, pulling those with fractured limbs out of their beds and depositing them onto the seats of buses supposedly bound for hospitals in Croatia and Serbia. Faced with dozens of menacing soldiers, Eric felt unable to protest the nature of the evacuation and resolved to register a complaint with the army later.
A group of the Yugoslav soldiers, perhaps eager to remove a witness, lured Eric away from the hospital with a story that Serb babies had been killed by Croats in a nearby suburb. “Why is everyone so concerned about the Croats?” they goaded Eric. “What about the Serbs? Show some impartiality.”
Their appeal worked. Eric and his translator returned to their car and followed a shiny Mercedes toward the supposed crime site. A few miles outside of Vukovar, the car took off without them.
Meanwhile, back in Vukovar, the nervous Red Cross representative protested the military takeover of the hospital, cornering a dark-haired, mustachioed Yugoslav National Army major named Veselin šljivančanin in front of a TV camera.
The tall officer glared down at the pipsqueak Red Cross delegate as if he were an ingrate.
“It’s a shame for you to behave this way toward me,” the officer chastised him. “I gave you everything you asked for.”
The same camera found the Red Cross delegate later, brandishing a copy of the previous day’s agreement. In a tremulous voice rent with dramatic pauses, he read it point by point, frequently enunciating his words.
“No weapons were allowed in neutralized zone!…”
“The compound and the hospital should have been clearly marked by Red Crosses…”
“…the Croatian authorities and the JNA will give all necessary collaboration to the ICRC…”
“Now gentlemen,” he said, to the woman and several men gathered around him, “you are witness, as I am, the present situation. Ahem.”
“As you may notice,” he continued a few moments later, “the International Committee of the Red Cross is completely unable to perform the task that was entrusted to it by the parties and cannot be in any way responsible for what has been happening early on this morning and now.”
What that was, exactly, he could not say. He did not flinch as the sound of an explosion underscored his ominous statement.
Several journalists later sought out the Yugoslav Army officer for an explanation.
“I am very proud that I am commander of these soldiers,” he said through a translator as a gaggle of young uniformed men stood behind him stifling giggles like fifth-graders trying to keep poker faces. The officer accused the Red Cross representatives of wanting to control both Vukovar and the Yugoslav Army, and he questioned the neutrality of the humanitarians because “they have never given us the help in food or medicines for our soldiers, our people.”
The sight of a commanding officer whose forces had pounded the hell out of a city of roughly 20,000 civilians just days before requesting pity for his soldiers was almost farcical. So, too, was the sight of the strung-out ICRC representative insisting on the observance of numbered rules and international laws and red-crossed white flags, while being so clearly impotent in the face of actual events. And Eric Dachy, who had labored so long and hard to enter Vukovar and care for its injured civilians, had been suckered into a wild goose chase out of town.
Comical, if it weren’t for the fact that at that very moment, 200 or more of those hauled away from the hospital that morning were being taken by Serb paramilitary and Yugoslav army soldiers to a farm called Ovčara, two and a half miles southeast of Vukovar. There, they were forced to run a gantlet, beaten, driven in groups to a dirt field, shot, and their bodies buried by bulldozer in a mass grave.
These were the first mass killings of the war. They were atrocities for which the cocky Major šljivanćanin and three of his associates would later be indicted by an international war crimes tribunal for crimes against humanity. News of the incidents spread amongst Yugoslavia’s doctors, patients, and civilians, robbing them of their trust in hospitals as safe places.
The experience of Vukovar devastated Eric Dachy. It taught him the character of the war. It made him swear that somewhere else he’d find a way to intervene before the worst occurred.
* * *
WITH VUKOVAR NEARLY EMPTY and his MSF mission a failure, Eric thought of leaving the Balkans, but the war in Croatia continued to spread, and a visit home to Belgium at the start of December changed his mind. At a friend’s birthday party, he found he could only think of Yugoslavia. Many people he knew and liked approached to ask him, “Hey, how is it there?” but their eyes glazed before the end of his answers. He was furious about what was happening in the middle of Europe, and people back home didn’t seem to realize it. He knew his friends, polite as they were, weren’t really interested.
He went to the MSF office in Brussels to discuss some things MSF might do to publicize the situation and the impotence of the European Community to stop the conflict. One idea was to place a huge ticker in front of European Community headquarters depicting the rising number of victims of the war similar to the ticker in New York City showing the rising U.S. national deficit. Another more radical idea was to stage a mock hostage situation at the airport to symbolize MSF’s utter revulsion over the situation. Still, when Eric was asked to give a radio interview, he was briefed by MSF’s communications director not to take sides and expressly forbidden to call for international military action to end the conflict. As a humanitarian, he could only describe what he’d witnessed and let the listeners make their own decisions.
Brussels, his old world, seemed unreal and artificial. For some reason he couldn’t quite verbalize, he felt drawn to the war zone. Nothing matched its intensity or reality. It felt strangely like home.
Eric returned to Belgrade and spent the winter bringing medical aid to places where war disrupted normal supply routes. In January, Croatia was recognized as an independent country and in February, peace dawned on the horizon. Both Serbs and Croats agreed on the deployment of the second largest international peacekeeping force in history. The 12,000 U.N. peacekeepers from more than thirty nations, led by an Indian general, were to supervise a ceasefire, disarm Serb militias, and oversee the withdrawal of the Yugoslav National Army from Croatia. The operation’s command headquarters would be in the neighboring Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the troops would be known as the United Nations Protection Force or UNPROFOR.
Eric settled into his job that winter, making needs assessments of wardisplaced populations, helping rehabilitate a health center serving the elderly in a Serb-held suburb of Vukovar, and supporting existing medical structures with donations of medicines and basic surgical equipment. He purchased some personal items to make Belgrade homier. He went shopping for a winter jacket, and the one that caught his eye was black leather, with a silver zipper set to the side. Before he spotted it, the biker’s jacket was probably destined to be an elytron on the back of one of the Belgrade paramilitary toughs who roared around town after service in Croatia, suspiciously flush with cash.
Eric took the leather between his fingers. It felt thick, like elephant hide. He tried it on. Encased in the sturdy, supple jacket, he felt protected. He bought it, along with a few suit jackets, in an effort to “refine” his image after noticing that most people in Belgrade, unlike him, didn’t slouch around in tennis shoes and T-shirts. However, the leather jacket, which he wore like a talisman, only served to heighten his already conspicuous appearance and attract the bemused attention of his colleagues.
On a Sunday afternoon in the first week in April, Eric sat in his living room watching live television coverage of a peace protest in Bosnia, another republic that was breaking off from Yugoslavia. Eric had visited Bosnia numerous times and the people in the multiethnic repu
blic always insisted, “We won’t fight here.” But lately that had changed. “If we fight here,” someone told him, “it will be worse than Lebanon.”
When he visited a few days ago, the roads were studded with checkpoints, the evenings were disturbed by shelling and gunfire, and the word on the street was, “It’s going to be soon.” He passed through a city, Bijeljina, where Serb troops had recently taken control. Frightenedappearing Muslim men were gathered on the sidewalks, and they told Eric they were trying to prove they didn’t have weapons. At the hospital, the former director, a Muslim replaced the previous day by a Serb, whispered that the mortuary was full—executions.
The previous month, Bosnians passed a referendum to leave Yugoslavia and—although the vast majority of Serbs boycotted the vote—on March 6, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović had declared Bosnia-Herzegovina an independent and sovereign state. Just as in Croatia, nationalist leaders rallied Bosnia’s Serbs against becoming a minority in a newly independent country. Beginning April 1, Serb paramilitary groups opposed to Bosnia’s independence occupied ethnically mixed Bosnian cities such as Bijeljina, Zvornik, and Foća, murdering some non-Serbs and triggering the flight of the non-Serb populations.
Thousands of marchers were now gathered in the capital, Sarajevo, taking a stand against interethnic distrust and trying to prevent the outbreak of all-out war. Eric heard shots ring out and watched as the camera panned to some felled marchers. People looked panicky. Then Eric saw something that amazed him—the protesters refused to flee. They stood steady and raised their fists toward the killers, howling in indignation. Eric felt his throat tighten. A medical student on the peace march was killed. The flames of war leapt up to consume Bosnia.
3
ILIJAZ
THAT SAME FIRST WEEK OF APRIL 1992, Dr. Ilijaz Pilav, a twenty-eight-year-old general practitioner at the Srebrenica health clinic, also sat glued to his television set, watching images of a reality he had, until then, failed to imagine. With small, intense eyes beneath thick, worried brows, he took in news of the violence kicking up in nearby towns, hopping like a tornado toward Srebrenica. In spite of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the fighting in Croatia, the possibility of war in Bosnia had merely tickled the edge of his conscious mind, a mind more focused on personal concerns and a major family illness.
These days, Ilijaz often made the half-hour drive to his boyhood home, guiding his new, white Yugo south on the main road out of Srebrenica, then west into the hills to the tiny rural village of Gladovići. Despite years of city living and a professional education, Ilijaz’s countrified appearance clung to him.
His family raised livestock and grew vegetables and fruit on a hillside that inched down to the Drina River canyon, the natural border between the Yugoslav republics of Bosnia and Serbia. As a young boy, his typical day began with the crowing of roosters. From the windows of the family’s two-story house, Ilijaz would peer across the blue river to the biggest mountain in western Serbia, Tara, tracing the road that zigzagged from a height of more than 4,200 feet down the face of one of its peaks toward the Perućac hydroelectric dam.
The crisp, fresh air filled with the lowing of cows and the yodels loosed by villagers. His mother labored in the kitchen, stooping over a table to roll thin leaves of dough that she layered into pans to bake meat pies called burek or, when guests appeared, swiveling the handle of a copper coffee grinder in her lap, elbows akimbo. His father worked the land with his older brothers, angling groundward to chop wood, harvest crops, pitch hay, and slash the tall grasses. Ilijaz, the baby of the family, watched and begged to wield the scythe.
“You’re too little!” they cried as they shooed him.
When he asked what he could do to help, they told him to stay out of the way. So Ilijaz found other children to lead in games. He picked fights when he thought he had good cause, learned to read and write by looking over the shoulder of a school-aged friend, and gamboled through the woods and meadows.
At day’s end, the waning sun flooded the land with light, gilding the cornstalks and tree branches, illuminating the haystacks and brushing the bends of the river with red. Light still dappled the plains on the Drina’s opposite bank after evening shade had blanketed Gladovići. A lick of fog sometimes advanced and covered the village with a ghostly glow. Later, separated from his birthplace forever, it would seem to Ilijaz that winters in Gladovići never felt cold and summers shimmered with more sunshine than anywhere else.
The idyll ended when he entered school. The schoolhouse walls and the daily commitments impinged on Ilijaz’s freedom, and he burst out to do his homework in the light of the open sky. Accidents of fate had guided his destiny from birth when his parents named him “Ilijas,” but the clerk writing the birth certificate misheard and wrote down “Ilijaz.” School was no different. His fate changed when a first-grade teacher failed to pick him for her class of “best” students. He started studying harder, resolving to disprove the teacher’s pessimistic forecast.
His father encouraged his studies and hoped, without pushing him, that he would become a doctor. He also taught him about God, called Allah, and their religion, Islam, stressing that it counseled respect not only for himself and his own people—all of Gladovići’s 500 or so inhabitants were Bosnian Muslim—but also those who practiced other religions.
Ilijaz mostly ignored religion, focusing instead on his studies. When he finished primary school as one of the top students, there was nowhere to go but out. The hillside villages had no high school, so his father sent him to live with a sister and study in Srebrenica, a city of 6,000. Ilijaz missed nature. He missed his parents. Still, he did well in math and physics and planned to become an electrical engineer. A few days after high school graduation, he and a group of classmates traveled to Bosnia’s capital to enroll at the University of Sarajevo. The thought of living in Bosnia’s biggest city filled the small-town teenagers with excitement. The university departments were spread around the unfamiliar city, and Ilijaz stopped a police officer to ask for directions to the school of engineering.
“Oooohhh,” the officer said, “engineering is all the way in Lukavica, seven and a half miles from here.”
Ilijaz certainly had not come to the big city to spend four years in a suburb. That moment he ruled out a career in engineering.
“What department is closest to here?” Ilijaz asked the policeman.
The man put a finger to his mouth and thought for a second.
“The medical school’s over there.” He pointed up a hill. Ilijaz thanked him.
What was a doctor? Ilijaz barely knew. He’d had only a few brushes with the type. He remembered vaccination day at school, when he’d sneaked out of line after watching white-coated adults stick needles into children’s arms. He’d considered their actions an injustice, and leaving was his form of protest. Only once, when he’d had a sore throat, had he met a doctor face to face—Sabit Begić, a pale man in a white coat that blended with the colorless walls that surrounded him. Ilijaz had grown up healthy in a place where yearly checkups were not the norm.
But recently, while flipping television channels, he’d come across a program showing a doctor performing cardiovascular surgery. He’d watched the whole broadcast, fascinated. These thoughts propelled him up the steep, winding street and into the drab brick medical school building. In the hallway, a woman bustled past carrying a cage with white mice. He fought the urge to run back outside. Let’s move on, he told himself. He found the admissions office and handed his high school records to the secretary.
“Young man,” she said, “you’re the 918th candidate to show up here. You’d better try somewhere else since we only accept 200 students.”
Ilijaz had no time to try somewhere else. He had to meet his friends and return to Gladovići. In a couple of weeks, he would be leaving for his required year of army service.
“Just take these documents,” he insisted, “and let’s try.”
On his way out, Ilijaz bought books to p
repare himself for the entrance examination. He went home and closeted himself in his house to study. Days later, he achieved the highest possible score on the examination and was admitted to Sarajevo medical school. On July 5, 1983, he went to enroll, and the following day he left for the army.
He found military service a waste of time, though he proved himself a wit with Morse code and learned, battling seasickness in a ship’s radiotelegraph room, that he could perform his job in the face of physical distress. After serving out his year, Ilijaz started medical school. He had a layman’s distaste for the “ugly” things in medicine, and the goriness of anatomy, pathology, and forensic medicine classes allayed his initial enthusiasm for a career in surgery. By graduation in December 1989, he was ready to forsake blood and gore and enter a field like pediatrics—the nurses could give injections, not him!
Not long before, eastern Bosnia’s villagers had buzzed with excitement when one of their own, Ejub Alić, finished medical school and went to work with the city folk in Srebrenica. It wasn’t a common occurrence for a peasant to become a professional, and Ilijaz Pilav’s parents had taken note. Now they, too, could boast as their son followed in Ejub’s footsteps, beginning work as a general practitioner in the Srebrenica health clinic.
Ilijaz took a bachelor pad apartment in a town just north of Srebrenica called Bratunac. Each morning he drove south down a straight, paved road into Srebrenica. Just past the town’s entrance he turned his car up the steep driveway of the hospital and health clinic. On the left the rectangular, three-story hospital building loomed over the road, its whitewashed and brown-tiled exterior framed by hills. Before it a polelike evergreen stood a lonely guard, its branches blooming high on its trunk like petals atop a delicate stem.