War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  Fully conscious that a major tragedy was about to take place in Srebrenica I deliberately came here and I have now decided to stay here in Srebrenica in order to calm the population’s anguish in order to try to save them.

  I demand:

  1. An immediate halt to the Serb offensive as it was promised to me in Pale.

  2. The immediate and complete implementation of all ceasefire agreements.

  3. The immediate and permanent installation of the necessary U.N. military observers.

  4. The opening of a route corridor from Srebrenica to Bratunac to Konjević Polje to Zvornik. UNPROFOR engineers will repair the small bridge and the road between Srebrenica and Bratunac.

  5. The opening of an air corridor to Srebrenica to evacuate the hundreds of seriously injured by helicopter.

  6. The immediate release of the convoy destined for Srebrenica, which is at present stuck in Zvornik.

  Signed Morillon, Srebrenica 1993

  Eric has a long ride back to the border. It takes time and effort to convince the Serbs to allow the U.N. military jeep to cross over the front line without Morillon. Eric looks out the windows at the radiant, snow-covered countryside, and smiles.

  16

  “THE TIME FOR TALKING IS NOW FINISHED”

  IN THE FEW MOMENTS it takes for General Morillon to read his speech, Dr. Ilijaz Pilav, also peering through a hospital window, feels the course of the war change. For weeks, everything has been going one way—toward catastrophe. They have lost strength, lost lives, and they are in danger of losing the entire Srebrenica area.

  But General Morillon puts his lips to his megaphone like a trumpeter heralding the arrival of hope. Ilijaz smiles with relief at the other doctors, nurses, and hospital technicians gathered in the room with him. He believes in Morillon’s promises. He believes they’ve been saved.

  In the afternoon, Srebrenica authorities offer to escort a team of newly arrived U.N. military observers south along the Srebrenica-Skelani road to Kragljivoda. The hill, where Ilijaz’s men established their first base at the start of the war, provides a view of Serbia’s Tara Mountain and of the Skelani Bridge over the Drina River between Bosnia and Serbia. The goal of the trip is for the U.N. observers to see that some of the attacks are coming from Serbia proper, contradicting Serbian President Slobodan Milošević’s denial that his country is involved in the Bosnian war. In fact, more and more often Ilijaz’s family has had to take shelter in the underground bunker that his brother, Hamid, built for safety against tank fire, artillery rounds, and aircraft bombs from Serbia.

  Upon reaching Kragljivoda, the military observers hear the rumble of airplanes and soon three single-engine propeller planes—one biplane and two monoplanes—are heading toward their position. The military observers take note of the location, Universal Transverse Mercator Grid point 730740, and the local military time, 1640. The aircraft draw dangerously close, but instead of attacking the observers, they drop six bombs on Ilijaz’s village, Gladovići, and three on the neighboring village of Osatica. Then they disappear in the direction of Serbia.

  This tidbit of eyewitness information, like a firework missile climbing the sky, races silently and almost imperceptibly up the layers of U.N. bureaucracy, slipping stealthily from the U.N. observers to the head of U.N. forces in the Balkans, General Lars-Eric Wahlgren of Sweden, to the head of the U.N.’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Kofi Annan, to United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who buries it in a regular reporting of flight ban violations to the president of the United Nations Security Council.

  Then the information explodes. Four days after the incident, at a meeting of the Security Council, someone realizes that Gladovići is the first place where U.N. military observers have reported witnessing air-toground bombing activity in Bosnia. It doesn’t seem to matter that air attacks, such as the one that killed Dr. Nijaz Džanić, have taken place for months, widely reported by local media and detailed in memos sent by local American officials to the U.S. State Department. Suddenly the name of Ilijaz’s tiny village is being invoked to justify a U.N. resolution that brings the United States and NATO the closest they have come to taking military action against the Serbs.

  The previous October, all sides in the war agreed to a ban on military flights over Bosnia. The U.N. Security Council codified the ban in a resolution and requested that UNPROFOR monitor compliance. Since then, U.N. military observers have documented almost 500 unauthorized flights, but the attacks on Gladovići are the first to involve combat activity. Now, the United States, along with France, Morocco, Pakistan, Spain, and the United Kingdom, puts forward a draft resolution that would authorize NATO to shoot down warplanes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  Serbia’s traditional ally, Russia, opposes the proposal. So, too, does the U.N. Protection Force commander, General Wahlgren, who is General Morillon’s only superior. Wahlgren cables his “grave concerns” over the proposed resolution to Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who sums them up in a letter to the Security Council president:

  “In brief [General Wahlgren’s] view is that the activity that has so far occurred from the air has had no significant impact on the military situation. His apprehension is that the proposed enforcement action will have negative consequences for the viability of UNPROFOR within its existing mandate. In particular, he is concerned that the delivery of humanitarian aid, the protection of which constitutes the predominant part of UNPROFOR’s work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, would be seriously jeopardized. The Force Commander is also deeply worried about the safety and security of the most vulnerable elements of UNPROFOR, viz., military observers and civilian personnel in locations in the region where they would become vulnerable, notably, the air fields.”

  A vote on the resolution is delayed. The front line at Kragljivoda begins to buckle under the pressure of the Serb offense. For the moment, at least, the United Nations holds off NATO military involvement that could save Gladovići. Ironically, it does so, in part, to avoid endangering humanitarian aid.

  * * *

  IT IS EXACTLY THIS ATTITUDE—that humanitarianism is the U.N.’s primary concern in the Bosnian war—that has long infuriated Eric Dachy. What Srebrenica needs, first and foremost, is an end to the Serb offensive. To shy from enforcing a military flight ban in order to keep UNPROFOR viable and protect aid workers on the ground strikes him as hypocritical, criminal, and disgusting. Nobody needs anything more than he needs physical protection against the violence.

  On the other hand, Eric knows that NATO is avoiding military action. And the stated policy of the Western world toward Bosnia is humanitarian intervention. All he can do is to seize the long-awaited opportunity that Morillon’s announcement has given him to get medical aid and personnel into Srebrenica.

  He is about to confront yet another irony.

  On the one hand, the major country sections of Doctors Without Borders sit squarely behind him. Srebrenica has mended the split in the movement between those who argued for and against MSF intervention in Bosnia. Everyone now recognizes that Srebrenica needs an international presence for medical aid, witnessing, and advocacy. Even the French section is willing to participate in a mission to Srebrenica. The day after Eric returns to Belgrade from Srebrenica, MSF leaders in Brussels submit a revised funding proposal to the Soros Humanitarian Fund stating that the Belgrade team will “concentrate all possible intervention on SREBRENICA, given the fact that the afflux of people is enormous and the needs of the people are increasing every day and despite of the huge risks these interventions might bring for our team-members. A determination that is highly sustained by the rather Holocaustic visions they were confronted with.”

  However, Eric finds the attitude of U.N. refugee officials markedly different. When the U.N. officials invite Eric to the Belgrade UNHCR office for a debriefing meeting, they argue that Srebrenica is virtually in the hands of the Serbs. The frantic reports they’ve received from their man on the ground, who’s been spooked by some close
calls with Serb shelling, have led them to believe in the town’s imminent fall. The head of office is advocating for safe passage of the civilian population out of the city toward Tuzla. She’s seeing “holocaustic visions,” too, and if this is the Holocaust and the world is again standing idly by, then isn’t it best to get the victims out? She and the other five U.N. workers in the meeting with Eric want to evacuate Srebrenica. It’s so cynical, it makes Eric laugh. They want to do the “ethnic cleansing” themselves!

  Eric urges them to try anything to get in crucial aid convoys. They argue they can’t risk spoiling the agency’s relationship with the Serbs, with whom they must negotiate in order to get aid into many areas of Bosnia. “It’s time to use your credit with the Serbs,” Eric insists, nearly in tears. What situation could be more critical than tens of thousands of people trapped without food supply, without adequate shelter, and on the verge of being overtaken by enemy forces?

  Again, Eric feels utterly alone. Is nobody willing or able to take the risks and make the compromises necessary to get aid into the town? Even his girlfriend, a Serbian woman who works for the IC RC, fails to see Srebrenica the way that he does. She understands the region’s strategic importance for the Serbs as well as for the Muslims living there, and she feels that Eric has lost his objectivity.

  There is still one true believer left. Eric notices that, in spite of the criticism heaped on Morillon by U.N. superiors and inferiors for his actions in Srebrenica, the general still seems convinced, like Eric, that something can be done. Morillon is still living in the enclave, traveling in and out to negotiate with the Serbs, and he personally escorted the first major aid convoy to reach Srebrenica since last December. So a few days later, Eric drives like a maniac to catch up with the general when he is stopped at a Serb roadblock on his way back to Srebrenica and convinces him to take along four MSF workers. Serb soldiers stop the internationals at a checkpoint in Bratunac and send one car back to Serbia. Of the MSF workers, only a surgeon, riding in Morillon’s personal car, remains. At every checkpoint, he shrinks his portly body against the seat in an effort to make himself inconspicuous. They reach a stretch of road marked by signs reading Achtung Minen! The driver hesitates and the general, declaring, “Life is a poker game!” shouts for him to “Go! Go! Go!” The surgeon grabs his hard hat and shoves it under his buttocks.

  * * *

  THOUGH IT TAKES ILIJAZ and the other doctors and nurses a while to accept Dr. Thierry Pontus as anything more than Nedret’s assistant, or to get used to his idea of operating on a schedule, rather than whenever Nedret shows up, they view the arrival of the MSF surgeon as another turning point in the war. The presence of the short, ebullient Belgian, who spouts a constant stream of banter and carries a trademark bottle of iodine with him wherever he goes, singing the praises of the red-brown disinfectant while squirting it on everyone and everything as he operates, makes them feel safer. He makes them smile, too, as he cracks jokes and hands out Rothman cigarettes left and right, spreading encouragement and acting as if he is unafraid to be here. Best of all, the forty-fouryear-old surgeon is brilliant in the operating room. The first time they watch him perform an amputation, Ilijaz and Fatima marvel to each other that the patient didn’t even lose as much blood as would fit in a fildjan—a small Turkish coffee cup.

  Thierry, like most surgeon volunteers with MSF, doesn’t work for the organization full time; he pitches in when needed, using his vacation time. MSF’s call came on a Sunday. By Tuesday, he was on his way to the airport, having gained permission from his colleagues and hospital administrators in Belgium to take an urgent “vacation.” He frittered away the first week on the Serbia-Bosnia border, awaiting a chance to cross. Because his most dangerous foreign assignment to date, he likes to say, was opening an MSF office in Los Angeles, he is, in truth, mortified by the situation he finds here. At first, he simply cannot believe his eyes. How is this possible? he wonders, looking around himself at the shattered town. We are in Europe. We are at the end of the twentieth century; it’s not possible what I see here. The first time he hears a triple boom in the distance, Fatima has to explain to him what a grenade is.

  A seasoned urologist with a steady stomach for foul smells, he is nonetheless overwhelmed by the stench of Srebrenica Hospital. Every time he cracks open the hospital door, it takes him several minutes to catch his breath and habituate to the odors of death and gangrene before he can force himself to walk inside.

  So many injured people have arrived in the days since Eric’s departure that Thierry finds the hospital filled beyond capacity with 124 patients, and two additional buildings—a hotel wing and the town’s former spa—are being used to house nearly 400 additional patients. Thierry quickly judges that by European emergency criteria some 80 patients need to be taken to the operating room immediately. This impossible task is further complicated by the dearth of supplies, the continuing influx of newly wounded, and, perhaps most of all, by the lack of motivated personnel.

  “Why should we work?” the apathetic and impassive staff members ask him. “We will all die anyway.”

  Although it has seemingly taken the Serbs a year to find a way to shell the hospital, which clings tightly to a hill that provides some protection, they have finally done it. Days before Thierry’s arrival, a shell exploded just before the hospital entrance, killing an injured man being carried into the building, and reinjuring a patient recuperating next to a window that shattered. Now the medical workers are even more afraid.

  Whether from this incident or the cumulative effects of a year of war, loss of hope, or pure physical degradation from exhaustion, extreme stress, and lack of food, the workers’ approach to performing medicine is hands-off at best. The structured and formal trappings of medical practice have disappeared. The regular schedule of morning and evening rounds, the hierarchy of experience and responsibility, has, to Thierry’s eyes, drifted into chaos and disorganization. The only remaining principle is authority—the director behaves like a communist functionary and curries favor with the military. He chastises Thierry for distributing sanitary napkins to the female hospital staff, insisting that the first priority belongs to the wives of military leaders. Furious, Thierry grabs a box of napkins and dumps them out the window.

  It is not unusual for Thierry to walk into the hospital in the morning, identify several patients who need operations, and then arrive in the operating room only to hear that the instruments haven’t been cleaned from last night or, perhaps most commonly, to be told: “Nedret isn’t here. If Nedret isn’t here, we can’t do it.”

  Nedret rules the operating room, his authority unchallenged, but his appearances are erratic. When he does show up, he seems eager to operate with Thierry, an older and more experienced colleague, and to learn new techniques. But as operations draw to an end, Nedret often takes off his gloves and gown and says, like a senior surgeon speaking to an intern, “OK, you can close. I have a job to do.”

  That job, from what Thierry can tell, involves matters at the front lines. Nedret offers to take Thierry along with him, but Thierry refuses.

  “I’m not here to make war, I’m here to work at the hospital,” Thierry says and explains that as a representative of Doctors Without Borders, he has to be neutral. What if the Serbs captured him on the front line and accused him of taking part in the Muslims’ war efforts? It could put all of MSF’s other programs at risk.

  “Why are you going there?” Thierry asks Nedret in return. “We have a lot of work here in the hospital. Stay with me.”

  “Oh, no,” Nedret says, “I have to go.”

  And when Thierry presses him with, “Why?” Nedret only answers: “I have to go because I have to go!”

  Nedret leaves and then Thierry must await his return before he can operate on another new patient. Given this situation, Thierry’s first priority is to evacuate the severely wounded, a goal toward which General Morillon has been expending most of his energy. One possibility would be to wait for a second convoy t
o get through and then, after aid has been unloaded, to fill the empty UNHCR trucks with the wounded and take them out via overland convoy. There are two problems. One is that when the first convoy attempted this maneuver a few days ago, hundreds of women and children desperate to leave the city flooded into the trucks, crushing the injured.

  Even if the crowd could be controlled, another, more chilling, problem exists. Roughly 75 percent of the injured are men. They are clearly, under international law, hors de combat, out of combat, and entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. But local Serb commanders have repeatedly said that any male between the ages of approximately sixteen and sixty traveling through Serb areas will be regarded as a combatant and a war criminal.

  This leaves only one possibility, more complicated and expensive: evacuation by U.N. helicopter. In negotiations with General Morillon, Serb leaders insist that any evacuation of Srebrenicans be contingent upon the “evacuation” of Serbs from the Bosnian government–controlled city of Tuzla, a move seen by many to be abetting ethnic cleansing, as many of the Serbs are thought to want to stay there. Morillon goes to Tuzla with a list of Serbs to try to convince the Bosnian government officials there to let them go.

  This action infuriates UNHCR leaders, who see a potential exodus of Serbs from Tuzla as a form of U.N.-backed ethnic cleansing of one of Bosnia’s last multiethnic cities. On March 22, Jose-Maria Mendiluce, special envoy of the U.N. High Commissioner, sends a memorandum of protest to Morillon’s UNPROFOR superior, General Lars-Eric Wahlgren:

  The common objective to save the Srebrenica population could, on the basis of this type of negotiation, become the beginning of the end of our capacity to negotiate on the basis of the most basic humanitarian principles and is further jeopardizing our already limited capacity to maintain, in the most hostile environment, the humanitarian character of UNHCR involvement.