War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  The Bosnian soldiers let them pass. After about a half hour, they reach the spots where the other vehicles and General Morillon have stopped to await them. They are still far from Srebrenica. The sun has set and the countryside is dark and quiet, so different from the city. So seemingly peaceful. Eric borrows night-vision goggles from one of the soldiers and gazes at the snow-covered forest. The moment is magical.

  They pack into the APC with the general and are jostled and bumped as it lists from side to side during their progress along the hilly path. At last the vehicle grinds to a halt. Eric pokes his head through the top hatch, behind a U.N. soldier at the machine gun, and sees rifles pointing back. They’ve been stopped by another group of soldiers outside the city. They quickly distribute cigarettes, repeating the words “United Nations” and “Morillon.” After checking their identity cards, a few of the Bosnians climb onto the armored personnel carrier and lead them into town, heralding their evening arrival with bursts of gunfire.

  * * *

  ERIC EMERGES FROM THE APC, its motor still humming. In the beams of its headlights, he sees a crowd of people staring back at him, silent and unsmiling. He becomes acutely aware of his good shoes and pachydermatous jacket, his warmth and his comfort.

  He half expects someone to demand, “Give me your jacket; I need it.” This time he doesn’t feel he has landed on Mars. The bitter eyes make him feel as if he has come from there. Eric has never known Bosnians to receive guests with anything other than exaggerated hospitality. The cold stares unnerve him. To try to get more comfortable, he ventures into the crowd and walks among the people for a few minutes. Morillon and the others discuss what to do next and decide to hold an impromptu evening meeting with town leaders. Everyone troops to a room on the top floor of the PTT building.

  Morillon makes introductions and describes what each group of foreigners has come to do, and then a laconic Bosnian soldier provides a description of the situation in town. Soldiers hand around samples of what passes for bread in Srebrenica, the hard, terrible-tasting loafs made from corncobs, hazelnut tree catkins, beech tree buds, or dried apple and pear pulp milled on water-powered grinding stones. It is a skill remembered by World War II survivors and not a bad one considering that some residents of the area have stooped to eating cornhusks, tree bark, and animal feed.

  The meeting ends with an agreement to gather again tomorrow morning for a more detailed discussion. Finally Eric is free to do what he has been waiting three months to do. He leads the MSF team out of the post office and into the night. The three-story hospital stands before them on its hill, miraculously intact. They cross the crowded street and make their way up its icy driveway. Armed guards control the hospital entrance.

  The air inside is dark, thick with wood smoke, and permeated by a putrid stench, but the hospital is far from the empty and abandoned place Eric had feared. Wood-burning stoves keep rooms full of patients warm; the beds are in place, the staff at work. Eric notices these details with relief. He presents his metal emergency case to the staff as a token gesture, because ten tons of donated medical aid supplies will spend the night in the abandoned truck back on the mined forest track.

  It is enough for one day. Just before leaving the hospital, Eric remembers he’s stowed his personal flashlight in the emergency case. He asks to have it back and a young woman wearing a white coat flashes him a coquettish smile.

  “You gave it to us,” she says. “Now it’s ours.”

  * * *

  ERIC FINDS NEDRET AT THE DOMAVIJA HOTEL, freshly returned from the front line. He is shivering in a blanket before a fireplace, but stands up when he sees Eric. The two men share an emotional embrace.

  In a few words the Bosnian doctor conjures the winter’s stew of disaster—siege, hunger, cold, and now the fierce Serb attack. It has resulted in a hospital overflowing with casualties and a staff and population bereft of hope. Or nearly so.

  He looks closely at his guests.

  “Your arrival could change everything,” he says.

  The hospitable instinct of the Bosnians returns with a flourish. Nedret welcomes Eric and his team members as old friends, offering them dried meat, which they cannot refuse, and surrendering his bed so that two of them may sleep on it. Upstairs in the hotel room, Nedret’s girlfriend insists Muriel use the meager store of soap and water to ready herself for bed.

  “What’s the outside world like?” she asks.

  At last it’s time to sleep. Eric stretches his long frame out on the bed with Muriel. He is exhausted, but the freezing cold air that breezes into the room through the shattered, uncovered window keeps him awake. Muriel arranges herself on the opposite side of the bed. Eric supposes the idea of having to sleep with him disturbs her. He has no intention of trying anything, but as he lies there shivering, unable to sleep, he wishes he could huddle against her for warmth. He doesn’t dare suggest it.

  He finally falls asleep, but a loud buzzing noise awakens him. Airplanes.

  Nedret leads him down the staircase and out onto a terrace over the hotel’s entrance. They look across the narrow valley at the snow-covered Bojna Mountain, rising 2,000 feet above sea level. Eric sees fires burning and, in the light of the waning gibbous moon, makes out an unreal sight—long, black snakes wriggling slowly across the snowy white mountainside. He is spellbound. The true meaning of the image sharpens under Nedret’s narration.

  The snakes are lines of hungry, exhausted Srebrenica residents who struggle up the mountain desperate for manna-like provisions falling from the sky. Awaiting supplies being airdropped by the U.S. air force, a small city’s worth gather around burning car tires. Many, recently expelled from their villages by the Serb advance, have walked miles to Srebrenica only to find themselves stuck outdoors in the freezing cold with no food.

  Airdrops such as these originated in World War II and have been used to replenish military supplies and deliver humanitarian aid in U.S. wars, military actions, and many humanitarian operations ever since. U.N. refugee officials, repeatedly failing to reach eastern Bosnia with overland supply convoys, appealed to NATO for airdrops in January. Days later, an internal U.S. State Department report, leaked to American newspapers, said the United Nations had “almost no success to date in reaching groups of people critically at risk” in eastern Bosnia and elsewhere and had given significant quantities of aid to Serb authorities to appease them. Ham radio reports from Srebrenica described people “surviving on the chaff from wheat and roots from trees.”

  Adding to the pressure, on February 12, Bosnian officials declared a “hunger strike,” refusing to distribute aid in the capital while people in the eastern enclaves were starving. In frustration, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, astounded world leaders by suspending most of UNHCR’s activities in Bosnia, curtailing an operation that brought 30,000 tons of aid a month to an estimated 1.6 million recipients.

  During his campaign for president, Bill Clinton had slammed the Bush administration’s handling of the war and had raised the possibility of undertaking military action against the Serbs. The news had made it to Srebrenica, where Ilijaz and the others had high hopes that it was true. Instead, aid took precedence, as usual, while Clinton’s team reviewed the situation. Days after inauguration, the president announced emergency airdrops over eastern Bosnia. This effort, Operation Provide Promise, shared more than half a name with Operation Provide Comfort, which had supplied and protected the Kurds in northern Iraq, a last-ditch effort to aid a displaced population the United States had at first chosen to ignore. It was the operation where Eric Dachy cut his teeth on aid work in 1991.

  Military leaders from UNPROFOR publicly disapproved of the Bosnian airdrop plan. Chief among them was General Philippe Morillon, who warned that the Serbs would think the U.S. planes were delivering arms. “If the Americans start dropping supplies by parachute, there will be an explosion here,” he briefed reporters at U.N. headquarters in Sarajevo. “In the current climate of paranoia, everybody will sh
oot at everything in the air.” Morillon called the airdrops “absolutely unnecessary” and assured reporters that the United Nations could deliver supplies by road to those who needed them.

  Of course the United Nations could do nothing of the sort. Newspapers such as the New York Times opined that Morillon and other UNPROFOR brass hats opposed the airdrop idea “because it would require the United Nations to move beyond the posture it has adopted since arriving here of doing almost nothing that has not been approved by the Serbian forces.”

  Perhaps embarrassed, General Morillon quickly retracted his opposition and the airdrops began on February 28, a little over a week before Eric’s arrival in Srebrenica. U.S. Air Force 435th Air Wing soldiers flew out of Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany and, at more than 10,000 feet over Srebrenica and the other eastern Bosnian enclaves, shoved 1,550-pound food crates and 760-pound medical supply crates out the open cargo ramps of their C-130 transport planes. The airdrop operation is one of the largest and most complex in history. At $2,800 a ton in U.S. dollars, the operation costs three to four times more than land aid convoys.

  While the supplies are desperately needed, spreading the staff of life has spread suffering and death, too. The first attempts at airdrops fell into areas near Serb control, and Srebrenicans fetching the supplies came under sniper fire. The airdrops have also lured soldiers from their posts, leaving front lines vulnerable to Serb attack. Even worse, the huge pallets, although tied to parachutes, have crushed several people. The desperate have fought and killed one another over the contents. With no clear distribution system, gathering supplies is a fight of the fittest.

  Eric watches, transfixed. When he finally returns to bed, the scene that burns behind his eyes is that of a Sisyphean struggle—people crawling on all fours, clawing their way up the mountain in a bid for survival. He dreams of apocalypse.

  15

  THE VELVET GLOVE

  DAY BREAKS, GRAY. The once-forested hillside above the hotel, snow-covered and stubbled with freshly cut tree stumps, looks like a man’s thinning pate.

  Eric and the MSF team walk back toward the post office building where the other internationals spent the night. They pass destroyed houses where snow has collected on jagged façades. It rims balconies that jut from nonexistent rooms, leaving a thick white layer on their bent railings. It frosts the long chimneys rising over the ghosts of rooftops and sits atop pocked stucco walls and the bottoms of empty window frames. Smoke stains accent the windowless, gray-faced buildings like eye shadow over empty eye sockets. Scavenged cars are banked on the snowy side streets. Mangy dogs weave back and forth between piles of trash. The streets are littered with empty brown plastic meal packages from the airdrops whose contents have been devoured on the spot. Groups of people camp out in the freezing cold. Last night saw them dotting the road, setting quick-burning plastic crates afire for some semblance of warmth. This morning, faces and palms stained black, they wander aimlessly while new arrivals—carrying bundles, pulling rough wooden sledges, leading horses, and pushing wheelbarrows and sleigh-bottomed carts—search for a place to stop and live.

  Women wear layers of sweaters in lieu of coats, scarves around their heads and mud-covered baggy dimije on their legs. They walk in rubber boots, bent under immense bundles, holding babies in their arms. Children, some wearing socks but no shoes, carry their own, smaller bundles. A few lick orange drink powder directly from the air-dropped pouches. The observant British refugee worker, Larry Hollingworth, calls the sight of the thousands in the streets “Dickensian.”

  Inside the post office, the internationals again receive an icy reception from town authorities, cold enough to match the weather. The fullbearded locals sit on one side of a long table. Eric and the others seat themselves across from them, Morillon closest to the stove.

  This time the chief commander, Naser Orić, is present, having arrived from Konjević Polje where the medical evacuation Morillon had promised him last week has still not materialized. Orić is well aware of the way Morillon publicly downplayed the situation after his departure and his failure to “smell the odor of death.”

  “How long do you intend to stay?” Orić asks coolly.

  Morillon turns to his translator.

  “How long do I intend to stay?” Morillon repeats in French. “As long as it takes.” He breaks into the kind of sheepish grin that makes a man look as if he’s trying to hide something, as if he might be lying. When he speaks he avoids the Bosnian commander’s eyes.

  Eric Dachy grows impatient. He wants to return to the hospital, where real priorities can be set, plans can be made, and where maybe they can actually do something. At last the meeting ends and he leads the aid workers up the hospital’s two flights of stairs to Nedret’s room. The Bosnian doctor greets them enthusiastically, but the daylight streaming through the broken, taped windows casts dark shadows beneath his eyes. His energy comes in fits of spastic motion, as when he discusses the assessment done by Simon Mardel, the World Health Organization doctor who hiked to Srebrenica last week. Mardel found that dozens of patients required urgent evacuation for specialized treatment: bone infections, large skin defects, and chronically discharging infected wounds. Several hundred patients need rehabilitation, chief among them amputees and paraplegics.

  Dr. Ilijaz Pilav takes them on a tour of the fourteen patient rooms. He strikes Eric as quiet and passive. Foul smells, soiled bandages, and pained faces blur before them. Eric focuses on the medical side, cataloguing patients with his colleague, Georges, as the U.N. refugee team looks on, holding their breaths against the stench.

  In a mixture of Bosnian, Russian, and broken English, Ilijaz tries to explain the injuries and operations the patients have had. Without asking her permission, he pulls back the blanket of a woman to reveal the stumps of her amputated legs. Muriel watches, touched, as Eric covers her back up and tucks her gently into bed. It is a cultural difference.

  In the midst of the ugliness, Eric drinks in a pair of intoxicating eyes. The woman to whom they belong wears makeup and has a halo of red hair that reaches the shoulders of her white coat. She would stand out in any city in the world. It strikes Eric as strange, somehow, to find her here in Srebrenica.

  The number of heavy injuries overwhelms Eric and convinces him of the need for an evacuation. He takes it as his mission to convince Morillon to make it happen. While the MSF doctors assess the situation, the armored M113 and the Belgian army jeep recover all the medicines and part of the sugar, and the U.N. military observers and Canadian battalion engineers try to unblock the road by pushing the truck off it. Eric’s car is pushed out of the snow and driven into the pocket. He watches from the hospital as donkeys troop into town carrying rescued medical supplies and sugar on their backs.

  * * *

  THE SUN POKES THROUGH THE FOG. It throws shadows on the faces of dozens of purse-lipped women who stand on the sloping, snow-covered yard of the hospital, some of them holding babies. Their layered sweaters and baggy patterned pants make them a panorama of color. Their silent, unsmiling faces make them a wall with eyes. Around them, families scattered on the ground with their bundles of belongings look as if they’ve been dropped from the air. A man sits, leaning on a pair of crutches. Another, very thin, stands with a bag on his stomach stitched from a humanitarian parachute. A child’s head peeks out from it.

  Across the road, Morillon emerges from the PTT after a final meeting with town authorities. He has promised to organize land and air corridors to bring in aid and evacuate the wounded. He has also offered to leave a small contingent of U.N. military observers behind and to try to arrange for more to join them. He stands before the PTT ready to depart, wearing a light blue beret with a gleaming United Nations medallion. The French flag and the four gold stars of a French lieutenant general emblazon the front of his green, hooded jacket.

  He begins to walk toward his vehicle, stopping to speak with a gray-haired woman whose face is stained with tears. His translator, also in military uniform,
stands beside him. The woman’s shoulders heave with sobs. She writes something in a notebook and then gives Morillon a beseeching look, the angle of her pitiful body giving her the look of a supplicant.

  “We’re coming back,” Morillon says and extends his hand toward her like a priest giving a benediction. The woman shakes her head slowly. Morillon continues past her and enters the passenger seat of the white Nissan four-wheel-drive marked “UN,” its tires readied with chains.

  When the motor starts, a rumble erupts from the crowd, and hundreds of people press close to the vehicles, blocking them. Women and children raise their hands. At first they appear to be waving. But their fingers wag back and forth, back and forth—a silent, “No! No!”

  “We want you, we want you!” they chant in Bosnian. The noise draws Eric to a hospital window.

  A young woman wearing a blue-green cardigan over a white blouse knocks on the driver’s side window of Morillon’s car. It opens, and she unleashes a gush of words. “It’s a shame for the entire world!” she cries hoarsely in Bosnian and tells him they won’t let him leave for a year. “I’ve been kept from my home for over a year…. Thank you America for the food…. Everybody here knows about the little food packages, but that’s not enough. A year!”

  The wall of women is a dam. A sea of frustration presses at their backs. They have held it back for a year and now it flows from the mouth of this one woman, and the others clap and cheer her from the gaptoothed mouths of their lined village faces, long and drawn beneath their kerchiefs. The stream of words is so strong that it detaches Morillon from his vehicle. He pushes his way around the car and clambers backwards onto the hood, seeking high ground.