War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  When gunfire erupted in that first military action, the sound surprised Ilijaz. It was like a roar. Thoughts raced through his brain:

  This is war. We could be killed at any moment, could die in the fight. Just like that.

  He returned to the village at day’s end with a sense of shock, unable to meet the frightened eyes of neighbors who he imagined blamed him for stirring up trouble. Overwhelmed, he asked his cousin, Sulejman, to tell the family he was alive. Then he went back to the woods. He spent the night there alone doing nothing, not eating, not speaking, only thinking, surrounded, like the battle-shocked main character in Meša Selimović’s Fortress, “by the only victor: the utter silence of the ancient earth, indifferent to human misery” and filled with “that deepest of all sadness, of defeat that follows victory.”

  War was not about fear, Ilijaz realized, it was about dying. It was about killing. It was about the ability of human beings to destroy others of their own species without feeling a thing. Ilijaz racked his brain to think of any other animals that killed their own so easily. He thought of none. Life, which he had dedicated himself to sustaining, was worthless in war. Taking a life came so easily. So quickly.

  He felt sick to the depths of his soul, a sickness he was sure was here to stay. He had dedicated himself to saving lives, not taking them. What he had done today so contradicted his own being that he wanted to die himself.

  “In that long, sleepless night,” wrote Selimović,” in the black fear that was not of the enemy, but of something within me, I was born as what I am, unsure of all that is me and of all that is human.”

  * * *

  THREE DAYS PASSED before Ilijaz decided to emerge from the woods and live, not die. It took an extreme concentration of his will combined with the realization that the people he cared about needed him. From now on, he resolved, he would put aside all these tortured reflections. He would not think or feel, only act.

  On May 17, 1992, exactly a month after Ilijaz fled to his village, a military runner arrived with a message from a young nurse Ilijaz knew from Srebrenica. She begged him to come quickly to Osmaće to treat a man with a bullet wound to the leg. As a twenty-year-old fresh out of nursing school, she had no idea what to do. The day was clear and warm. Ilijaz hiked uphill to the main Srebrenica-Skelani road, followed it north for two miles, and then wound another two miles up a dirt road to Osmaće, reaching the village at nightfall. By the time he arrived, the patient, whose wounds were not serious after all, had gone.

  Ilijaz decided to stay overnight rather than make the trip back in the dark. Without warning, the thunder of an explosion punctuated the air. Then several more. A grenade attack, someone said. Ilijaz could barely remember, from his days of military service, what a grenade was. A man came to tell him that injured people were lying behind the schoolhouse. Several of the small bombs had exploded there, showering the area with splinters of metal.

  When Ilijaz arrived, the wounded had been moved inside the schoolhouse clinic. A teenage girl was moaning in pain, most of her knee blown away. Her mother lay dead. A pregnant woman was dead, too. Several others, including the girl’s two younger brothers, had what appeared to be less severe injuries.

  Ilijaz examined the girl’s leg. He could tell from the damage that it probably required amputation, but he had only a scalpel with him. Everything was happening so quickly. He wasn’t prepared to do something he had never done before, something that, for the moment, seemed so radical. Someone found some antibiotics and gauze, and Ilijaz cleaned the wound and pressed on it to stop the bleeding. He and the nurse stayed with the girl and her two brothers all night, wondering what to do.

  The next morning, a man volunteered to row the children upstream along the River Drina to a small town, Žepa, where an organized hospital was rumored to exist. Their father agreed. After the injured left, Ilijaz and the nurse sat for a moment to process what had happened. In spite of Ilijaz’s long history of squeamishness, the blood and torn flesh hadn’t bothered him much. What disturbed him more was the terrible sense of helplessness he felt, and the realization that the girl would probably not be his last war-injured patient, or his worst. Without knowledge, without colleagues or books to consult, without supplies and equipment, what would he be able to do?

  Over the next weeks, the group of armed men and women from Ilijaz’s region grew to about a hundred. They established a base at a high point called Kragljivoda, where several village roads met the main road that stretched from Srebrenica down to the border town of Skelani and the bridge to Serbia. They dug trenches on either side of the road and constructed a real front line. Ilijaz’s neighbor, the minaret builder šefik Mandžic, came to lead the “troops.” A large post office building and a smaller building that had housed a market sat at the forest crossroads. From the windows of the post office building, Ilijaz and the others looked across the Drina River to Serbia and saw tanks firing toward them from the road that zigzagged up Tara Mountain. During the war’s quiet moments—and war has many of these—they sat on the balcony playing cards.

  With supplies found in a nearby clinic and the assistance of two medical technicians—his cousin, Sulejman, and a dark-haired refugee named Naim—Ilijaz organized a medical station in a newly built house a couple of yards away from his family’s home. He spent most of his time outside of it, visiting the ill and those injured by mines, shells and bullets. During military actions, he had to stay behind the lines in case one of the men was hurt. It frustrated him to sit back like a child watching his brothers and sisters at work. He wanted to take the same risk as the others and felt fully capable of fighting.

  Keeping busy kept his mind off the most difficult subjects—his father’s illness and the whereabouts of his girlfriend, Fatima. She was rumored to have been captured and killed in Bratunac, where paramilitaries had set up a detention center in the primary school and about 700 prominent Muslims were interned, subject to a “trial” presided over by a local Serb nationalist physician. Hundreds were tortured and executed.

  One day soldiers from another region crossed Serb-controlled territory to attend a meeting in Ilijaz’s village and brought with them good news. Fatima had left Bratunac in time and was staying with relatives in her deceased father’s birth village. All these weeks, she’d been only eight miles north of him, but, with Chetniks holding much of the mountainous territory in between, she might as well have been on the moon.

  Ilijaz wrote a letter on a tiny piece of paper to tell her he, too, was alive. Please send an answer, he wrote, so he could be sure that she was OK.

  Some days later, another soldier came with a reply, a small note in Fatima’s handwriting. It confirmed that she had escaped Bratunac unharmed and had gone to live with her mother and younger brother in the village. There, like Ilijaz, she was treating war wounded on an island of territory surrounded by a sea of Chetnik soldiers.

  * * *

  ON THE FIRST OF JUNE, Ilijaz and a few soldiers lay on their backs in a grassy ravine near Kragljivoda, propped on their elbows, taking advantage of the sunny day. Other soldiers manned front-line positions near a point called Vitez, about a half mile southeast along the Srebrenica-Skelani road.

  The bright atmosphere belied the ominous situation. The Serbs had destroyed village after Muslim village, first bombarding them from afar, then, after their populations fled to the forests, arriving with infantry to burn the houses and kill anyone who remained. They had come within a mile of Ilijaz’s village.

  For weeks, the Serbs had controlled the local airwaves and broadcast repeated appeals for all Serbs, everywhere, to join the fight against the Muslims. The Muslims had started the war. The Muslims were the aggressors. Even Serb TV, though, was better than what Ilijaz had now, which was nothing. Electricity had just been cut off, and he assumed that the Serbs had interrupted the link to the power plant in Serbia.

  To Ilijaz’s surprise, a group of men whom he recognized from the southern part of Srebrenica, an area known as Stari Grad, or Old Town,
approached unannounced. Behind them, riding bareback on a tiny horse with his feet nearly dragging on the ground, was their leader, a man in his forties whose name had grown synonymous with fearlessness: Akif Ustić.

  “Where’s the doctor?” thundered Akif, Srebrenica’s fit former gym teacher. Ilijaz knew him from before the war, as everyone knew everyone in Srebrenica. Ilijaz stood up, and the commander flashed him a toothy smile framed by a thin mustache that ran along the sides of his mouth. He gave Ilijaz a bear hug and a hard pat on the back.

  When the war started, Akif had organized this homegrown battalion with guns from the Srebrenica police station, and soon stories of his courage under fire spread throughout the region. He announced that he was here to help the Kragljivoda troops defend their shrinking territory.

  His arrival failed to lift some of the men’s pessimism, and one grumbled in a stage whisper, “People come here and they go away and nobody ever does anything.”

  Akif grabbed the man. “OK, we’re going, you and I, for an action to Vitez.”

  “OK, fine!” said the other. “But I don’t have a gun.”

  Akif gave him his rifle, took another from one of his soldiers, and the two of them trudged toward the front lines, quarreling as they went.

  Ilijaz watched them go, sure that they would turn back around. This was no way for a small band of soldiers to start an action. A clear day made it impossible to reach enemy front lines without notice. Success depended on the element of surprise.

  But the two kept walking, blind but for each other and their desire to prove themselves courageous. Ilijaz and some others picked themselves up from the grass and followed what Ilijaz considered the fools leading the way.

  When the battle broke out, they had about thirty local soldiers assembled on their side. In the ensuing chaos, they began to advance and take the Serb position.

  Ilijaz stayed back to help guard the original line. Eventually the clamor of shooting died away. Everyone wondered whether Chetniks had captured their men, and, at the sound of an approaching vehicle, they quickly drew their weapons. A Russian-built Lada Niva appeared. For a split second, they held their fire, just long enough for the driver to stick his hand out the window and scream at them by name not to shoot. They dropped their weapons.

  Ilijaz peered through a car window and saw the cocksure leader, Akif, lying on his stomach, clearly in pain.

  “What happened?”

  “We destroyed them!” Akif grunted, “There’s as many weapons as you like, and now we’re moving on.”

  At Ilijaz’s insistence, several men lifted Akif out of the car and Ilijaz surveyed his body for injury. A wounded Serb soldier had thrown a grenade at him when he entered the garage of the hunting lodge in Vitez. Fortunately, a piece of shrapnel appeared to have little more than glanced his right flank. Ilijaz bandaged his wound to stop it from bleeding and prepared to move him to the house that served as an improved clinic.

  But Akif stubbornly insisted on returning home to Stari Grad in his captured car, in spite of the fact that Chetniks controlled part of the main road. The only other option was a treacherous journey over unpaved mountain paths—one that the Russian-built car, and the men, would likely not survive.

  Akif asked for a man brave enough to drive him and very quickly more than one daredevil disciple offered. Ilijaz considered the trip senseless, but joined it out of duty. Someone had to look after Akif and reassure the soldiers, and Ilijaz wouldn’t pass the risk to one of his two medical assistants.

  His brother, Hamid, begged him through tears not to go. Ilijaz handed Hamid his beret and white bandanna to keep until he came back.

  IF I come back, he thought to himself.

  As he entered the car, a juicy thrill of fear-tinged excitement coursed through him. They took off for the main road with a rifle-toting soldier perched on the hood. A messenger galloped ahead on horseback to alert friendly soldiers to clear the route and repair a partially destroyed bridge that served as a barricade against Serb forces.

  When the car reached the bridge, a soldier carrying an automatic weapon joined the other soldier on the hood. The car crossed and entered a zone controlled by Serbs. The men fell silent. Akif, lying on the back seat, quietly removed a pistol from his belt, checked it to see if it was loaded, and handed it to Ilijaz. “Doctor, if something happens, take me first and then do whatever you can.”

  Ilijaz looked out the windows, dazed. He had traveled this road hundreds of times before the war, knew its every curve, loved its shifting views of trees and hillsides. Nothing on the surface had changed, and yet the place felt foreign to him now, every seemingly innocent stretch of forest a potential hiding place for something sinister. Only yesterday, he would have described this area as his area, his region, his own. And now it belonged to someone else. How strange that the land that had always provided him sustenance now threatened to take his life away.

  Ilijaz caught sight of three men sitting no more than thirty feet from the roadside beside a mound that appeared to be a bunker. Their hands and mouths were busy with food while their rifles lay beside them. As the car drew nearer, the men stood up. They followed the car with their eyes as it passed, but did not reach for their rifles. Nobody shot.

  The Lada cruised through the rest of Serb-controlled territory, and it was Akif who realized they now faced a greater danger: friendly forces. Certainly none of the Muslim soldiers expected them to travel this road, especially not in a vehicle.

  Akif slowed the driver to a crawl and the two men on the hood of the car began calling out to the local commander. They curved around a bend and came within clear sight of the Muslim gunners—who thankfully held their fire. “Are you guys crazy?” one came up to the car and shouted. “What if someone behind his machine gun had gotten scared and started shooting?”

  Now they were firmly in friendly territory, and they continued downhill into the valley of Srebrenica, where houses began to dot, then line, the roadside. Ilijaz looked around himself. How different the old part of town appeared. It even smelled differently; acrid smoke and rot wafted through the open car windows. A few women with wan, scared faces hustled along the sides of the road, but Ilijaz didn’t recognize them. They must have been refugees from outlying villages. Most of Srebrenica’s original population, including its doctors, had fled at the start of the war. The car reached a vista offering a view of the center of town, and Ilijaz looked down through missing rooftops into the burnt, empty rooms of dozens of homes he’d known so well.

  The car pulled up to the house of Dr. Nijaz Džanić, an experienced internist who had turned his home into a hospital and was treating patients with materials someone smuggled out of the hospital pharmacy. The forty-two-year-old doctor had never left Srebrenica, not even when Serbs held the town the first three weeks of the war. Nijaz stayed behind to care for his ailing parents. He had long commanded respect—perhaps that is why Serbs spared his house when they torched those of his neighbors. After a group of Muslim men set an ambush that killed the leader of the local Serb forces on May 7, nearly all Serbs, armed and civilian, abandoned Srebrenica the following day. Since then, some of the Muslims who had taken to the woods for safety ventured back to the southern parts of town.

  Ilijaz greeted Nijaz and studied him. Before the war, the thin, dark-haired physician had suffered a heart attack and wasn’t well enough to work full-time. It shocked Ilijaz to see him looking fresher than ever, apparently revitalized by the fact that people needed him.

  Because Nijaz was more experienced and had better equipment, Ilijaz had sent several heavily injured patients to him over the mountain paths. One, just a few days ago, had a broken femur. Nijaz told Ilijaz the man was improving.

  “It must be hard to work under fire every day,” Nijaz said. For the first time in the six weeks since the war began, Ilijaz had a physician colleague with whom to commiserate. Together, they quickly cleaned up Akif’s wounds and rebandaged him. Ilijaz and the volunteers from Gladovići had to return be
fore nightfall.

  Ilijaz was somewhat sorry to be leaving. How much more he could accomplish pooling his knowledge and resources with other physicians in a central location. Out of Srebrenica’s original forty-five doctors, pharmacologists, and dentists, Ilijaz knew of at least three who remained in the area besides Nijaz and Fatima. But if they all left their villages for Srebrenica, who would care for injured patients who couldn’t easily be transferred here? Besides, Srebrenica’s hospital and clinic buildings remained closed and abandoned in the northern end of town, still too dangerous to visit.

  Something needed to change, but for now, Ilijaz, Nijaz, Fatima, and the others could do nothing but work alone.

  6

  A BLUE FEAR

  THE SAME FIRST WEEK OF JUNE 1992, Eric Dachy, quite unaware of the goings-on in Srebrenica, was feeling pretty useless. With Bosnia engulfed in all-out war, distributing drugs and medical supplies to hospitals in peaceful Serbia seemed rather beside the point. Getting aid into Bosnia, though, would require navigating through a maze of multiple armed groups and rapidly shifting combat zones that were only now starting to stabilize into recognizable front lines. Serb nationalist military forces blocked access for humanitarian aid, and rumors abounded of widespread atrocities against civilians. It mattered little that two weeks ago the International Committee of the Red Cross convinced all warring parties to agree to respect the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing the protection of the wounded, sick, prisoners of war, and civilians.

  The day of the agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia became United Nations member states; their existence as independent countries was now recognized worldwide. This also gained them the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. charter. However, the arms embargo that had been placed on Yugoslavia the previous year was still in effect for the entire region, and Bosnian government forces remained at a significant disadvantage in heavy weaponry compared with the Yugoslav-backed Serb forces.