War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  The next day, the head of the U.N.’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Kofi Annan, also chastises Wahlgren in a cable: “I trust you will have advised Morillon that he must coordinate his negotiations closely with UNHCR. I need hardly remind you that UNPROFOR’s role in B&H is to support UNHCR’s humanitarian efforts, and not the other way around.”

  Nevertheless, the Bosnian government agrees that forty-seven Serbs—all of whom it says require medical attention or are verified as citizens of Yugoslavia, not Bosnia—will be allowed to leave Tuzla. Serbian nationalist political leader Dr. Radovan Karadžić, in New York for peace talks, then endorses the Srebrenica helicopter evacuation.

  When the approval comes, Thierry prepares quickly for the evacuation. He inspects the soccer pitch where the helicopters will land, taking note of a shell crater in its midst. He receives information on the layout of the helicopters, which have room for several patients to lie, several to sit, and several to stand. Back at the hospital, with no experience or training for such a vast undertaking, he invents a system of evacuation triage, assigning each patient a priority level from one to four. He first identifies the patients by bed, only to discover later in the day that stronger patients, in a bid to be evacuated, are pushing the weaker, higher-priority patients out of their beds. He then takes to marking evacuation priority in indelible ink on the backs of hands.

  * * *

  U.S. ARMY MAJOR REX DUDLEY, a thirty-six-year-old intelligence officer and one of the two mysterious Americans who entered Srebrenica with Eric, awakens at 4:30 the next morning, March 24, 1993, to coordinate the evacuation. United States European Command sent the attractive, square-jawed officer into Bosnia nearly a month ago on the first day of U.S. airdrops, tasking him with identifying the key Bosnian military players and learning about the military situation. The mobile, secure satellite communications device he could provide then bought him a ride into Srebrenica with General Morillon.

  During his time here, Dudley has labored to improve the effectiveness and safety of the airdrops. Coordinating with the local military, he picked drop zones throughout the besieged area where local soldiers could guard supplies, varying the locations from night to night so that people, not knowing where to wait, wouldn’t get killed by falling pallets. Dudley also worked with the hospital to discover what medical supplies were most needed and was deeply disappointed when told one night that thousands of doses of typhoid vaccine he worked hard to have air-dropped were found by villagers who, not knowing what they were, tossed them into a fire.

  Constantly shadowed by two Bosnian minders, he has also mapped the perimeter of the enclave and attempted to understand what the Muslims and Serbs in this part of Bosnia are fighting about. He has concluded that the valley of Srebrenica is eminently defendable, and identified positions from which it can be protected. He explained to some key Bosnian soldiers that they should dig up the roads and block the trails leading into the town and set up defense in depth—forward positions with multiple fallback positions. This way the light infantry could fight off an armored Serb attack. When the Bosnians argued they couldn’t pull it off, he advised them to get out. The place is the Alamo, he thinks. It isn’t going to last.

  As the senior international officer remaining in the enclave after Morillon left yesterday for negotiations, Dudley is taking charge of the medical evacuation. Early in the morning, he dispatches Bosnian police to the soccer field to secure a helicopter landing zone. Two artillery shells impact beside the field as the police arrive, killing one and injuring another. For the first time in his military career, Major Dudley has sent a man to his death.

  The evacuation is allowed to proceed as planned. Around noon, dozens of wounded men are carried out of the hospital on stretchers and driven in two ancient, hobbling flatbed trucks to the soccer pitch, where short green grass has sprouted just days after the last snow. Three white helicopters marked “UN” await them, rotors churning. U.N. and Bosnian soldiers load the gaunt, bandaged patients onto the helicopters.

  Srebrenicans gather along the graffiti-covered walls surrounding the soccer field, watching the events behind a military cordon. A French pilot wearing dark sunglasses smiles behind the mouthpiece of his helmet and waves from the helicopter window.

  The soldiers fit about thirty of the wounded into the unarmed helicopters and then pull the doors shut and the crafts lift off. On the middle of the soccer pitch, three air controllers stay behind to coordinate the next evacuation from the ground. One wears a set of headphones connected to a radio and antenna held in a knapsack on his back.

  Moments later, an explosion startles them.

  “Turn on the radio, we’re being shelled,” one soldier shouts, pulling on his blue-covered helmet, then taking it off. “Tell him to get on to the liaison officer.”

  The men crouch and talk into their radios. At the sound of a second blast, they flatten to the ground. A dozen Bosnians run for the exit nearby, clinging to the wall of the soccer field like drops of water sliding along a glass. The air controllers are left alone, lying flat on the ground in the middle of the pitch.

  “I think the best is to go on the APC,” one says.

  Before they can move, a ferocious explosion hits the field. The air blackens with smoke and debris. Several soldiers—U.N. and Bosnian—are blown to the ground nearby. A woman screams. Everyone heads toward a low metal fence. Some stop to pick up the wounded. Others jump the fence and make it across the street behind a house, and they huddle against a wall with dozens of children, men, women holding babies, and several of the intended evacuees.

  Major Dudley was with his tactical satellite device beside a concrete wall, partly protected, when one of the shells landed about sixty feet away. The huge craters in the soggy ground suggest to him large-caliber shells shot by a Serb artillery battery. The great accuracy of the strikes makes him think they’ve been called in by a forward observer with a clear view of the evacuation from the hills above.

  After the blasts subside, Dudley returns to the communications equipment and crouches beside the pockmarked wall. Wearing a camouflage military jacket, large dark sunglasses, and a powder-blue helmet, he speaks into the tactical satellite receiver with studied calm.

  “Alleycat, Alleycat, this is Washington, Washington,” he calls in a military drawl to a U.N. Protection Force node outside the enclave. “Clear all nets, I have important communication.”

  He pauses.

  “This is Washington, roger. I have more incoming, more incoming, over.”

  “This is Washington…. I am ordering an evacuation of this area so we don’t have any more hurt or injured personnel. Alleycat, Alleycat, this is Washington…. I believe they are registering on our communication signal. Over.”

  Fresh brown gashes have rent the green field. Smoke billows from the brown hillside above the soccer pitch. A thunder-like boom sounds in the distance. The soldiers light cigarettes and smoke them with nervous expressions.

  * * *

  AT THE HOSPITAL, the MSF surgeon takes care of one of two injured Canadian soldiers, soothing him in broken English while squirting iodine onto the skin of his head.

  “What are you doing to me?” the disoriented soldier whines.

  “I’m cleaning your… what are they called? Oreilles.”

  “Ear,” someone offers.

  “I’m cleaning your hear, because they are so dirty,” he jokes. “Relax, guard! What’s the name of the guard?”

  “John.”

  “Relax, John.”

  Thierry doesn’t say it then, but the blood in the soldier’s ears makes him fear that shrapnel has fractured his skull.

  It has been an overwhelming hour in the life of Dr. Thierry Pontus. As the soccer field was shelled, so, too, was the area around the hospital. Roughly two dozen casualties arrived simultaneously at his doorstep. Voices from every corner beg him to please come, please come. Still, he works calmly and deliberately, communicating with his Bosnian colleagues in fractured German.r />
  Just beyond the soldier on an adjacent cot, face turned toward the doctor, lies a small five-year-old boy with a grave abdominal wound. Overwhelmed by the number of wounded and fairly certain the boy has no chance to survive, Thierry has decided to evacuate the child on the next helicopter rather than attempt to operate, as Nedret wants to do. The boy’s exposed intestines are covered; he is wrapped in an aluminum blanket for warmth. Thierry tries to start an IV to give the boy fluids, but he is in shock, his veins collapsed because of all the blood he’s lost. Thierry has to expose the large saphenous vein on his leg in order to insert an IV catheter. Now the child lies quietly—clearly under the effect of painkillers—but with saucer-like open eyes, face an almost luminescent white, only occasionally furrowing his brow and whimpering. He stretches his hand out to one of the men in the room, who stops what he’s doing to hold it.

  The Bosnian hospital workers stir stiffly around the room, staring at the injured U.N. soldiers and chattering about them in Bosnian. One complains that a Canadian refused to let her touch him. Next to the cot where Thierry works, a local nurse sutures the wounds of a local man. Dr. Ejub Alić stands beside the man, looking tired and uncharacteristically thin, with dark circles under his eyes. Everyone is afraid because General Morillon, their protector, left Srebrenica yesterday to negotiate and hasn’t returned. The Serbs in Bratunac are essentially holding him hostage. Now, with Srebrenica being shelled, the front lines outside of the city under heavy fire and reportedly about to collapse, and two U.N. soldiers injured, the townspeople fear that the U.N. troops will pull out. Many Srebrenicans are considering fleeing for their lives.

  Fatima enters the makeshift emergency room where the injured Canadian soldiers lie surrounded by their colleagues.

  “Fatima, look at this,” a woman says. “What are we going to do?”

  “We won’t leave yet,” Fatima says. “Let Morillon leave; we won’t leave.”

  * * *

  U.N. LEADERS IMMEDIATELY EXPRESS THEIR OUTRAGE at the attacks. Serb authorities agree to stop shelling and allow the evacuation to recommence, but each time the U.N. soldiers attempt to move toward the landing zone with patients, artillery from the northeast open fire.

  The soldiers make a last-ditch effort to evacuate at least their own injured men. At 2:25 P.M., Thierry joins a handful of U.N. soldiers on a hill outside the hospital. One of the wounded soldiers holds the aluminumwrapped boy in his arms as the child’s father stands nearby.

  A U.N. helicopter, this time a British Sea King, swoops down and hovers overhead. Its rotor whips the air into a storm of wind and debris. People gathered on the hillside turn away, hunching their shoulders against the gale and covering their mouths and eyes. The soldier holding the boy tells Thierry that the child has a strange look on his face.

  Thierry examines him.

  “The baby’s dead,” he says, and closes the child’s eyes. The soldier faints. The bearded father takes back his son in tears. His cries are drowned by the helicopter’s roar.

  Two injured Canadian soldiers and three air controllers are winched up, and then the aircraft glides away. As it disappears, people on the ground yell and jeer.

  “Aren’t there any more?” a woman shouts.

  Minutes later someone in Srebrenica, communicating via UNHCR radio, reports that at least twenty-five shells have landed in town. The evacuation is officially called off pending a ceasefire.

  * * *

  FEAR ENGULFS SREBRENICA. Rumors zip from mouth to mouth. The word on the street is that the helicopters landed in neighboring Bratunac and the wounded were taken to jail instead of the hospital! Men from Kragljivoda, near Ilijaz’s village, appear in the hospital to warn him that the front line there is falling and to expect many casualties. At any moment, Ilijaz expects his family to float into Srebrenica on the stream of refugees. And now news spreads that the Serbs are about to enter Srebrenica. Ilijaz walks into the operating room while Thierry is operating on one of the day’s wounded and announces the news in Bosnian. The expressions on the locals’ faces drop. They quickly finish the operation and leave the hospital to make preparations for an exodus on foot through the hills to Tuzla.

  Thierry has no idea what has happened—none of the locals will tell him. He returns to the PTT and a U.N. soldier fills him in, warning that a bad night lies ahead. The U.N. soldiers have made a breakout plan in case they need to evacuate. To Thierry’s horror, it involves “neutralizing” several Bosnian guards. Thierry spends a sleepless night pondering the possible abandonment of his patients. If he stays and the Serbs take over Srebrenica, the locals have warned him, the incoming Serbs will seize him as a spy.

  A UNHCR situation report is sent by radio and distributed overnight in English translation to UNHCR headquarters in Geneva and offices throughout the former Yugoslavia:

  THE TIME FOR TALKING IS NOW FINISHED, IMMEDIATE I REPEAT IMMEDIATE ACTION IS NOW REQUIRED TO AVOID A MASSIVE NUMBER OF VICTIMS OF THE CIVILIANS IN THE NEXT 24 TO 48 HOURS. ALL I REPEAT ALL MEASURES SHOULD BE TAKEN TO GUARANTEE A SAFE EVACUATION OF THE CIVILIAN POPULATION OF SREBRENICA. WE REQUIRE CONVOYS TO EVACUATE A POPULATION OF AT LEAST 30,000 PEOPLE. THE WORSE SCENARIO IS NOW PLAYING IN FRONT OF OUR EYES. OUR QUESTION IS, WHAT IS THE DESTINY OF THE CIVILIAN POPULATION OF SREBRENICA?? WITH OR WITSOUT [sic] OUR HELP PART OF THE POPULATION WILL LEAVE SREBRENICA TOMORROW. IF WE DO NOT EVACUATE, A MASSACRE COULD TAKE PLACE.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, General Morillon and the UNHCR Belgrade team meet with Serbian President Milošević in Belgrade, Serbia. Morillon demands an end to the offensive, telling Milošević that the Americans were ready to intervene, but that he had held them off. Only hours remain before the international community will commence military action, Morillon warns.

  Srebrenica does not fall this day, but Gladovići does. In the evening, Ilijaz finds on his doorstep his mother, two brothers, their wives, five children, several bundles filled with food and clothing, and a horse. It relieves him to see his family alive.

  They recount the past days’ events. The family took shelter in their underground bunker as more than 100 shells an hour hammered the area around Gladovići. On the plateau of the mountain Tara, right across the Drina, tanks fired relentlessly at the local villages. Planes flew over, dropping bombs. Every day, Serb ground troops could be seen crossing the bridge at Skelani into Bosnia. They took more and more territory; the local Muslim soldiers could not resist such a force. Everyone believed that the entire region was going to fall.

  This morning Bosnian soldiers ran into Gladovići to warn the villagers that the line at Kragljivoda had been lost and the Chetniks were coming. Ilijaz’s family quickly gathered some necessities and took to the road. They looked back to see pillars of smoke rising from the villages behind them.

  17

  INTERLUDE

  SNOW COMES AGAIN, freezing the offensive. A late-winter storm blankets the region with more than three feet of whiteness, silencing the guns. A Bosnia-wide ceasefire negotiated by Generals Philippe Morillon and Lars-Eric Wahlgren takes hold, and the injured trickle rather than flood into Srebrenica Hospital.

  “Srebrenica is safe,” Morillon declares. Colleagues toast him with champagne at his headquarters in Sarajevo.

  Because the mass exodus of Srebrenicans that U.N. refugee officials predicted hasn’t taken place, they send a second aid convoy into Srebrenica: twenty trucks filled with 200 tons of food, medicine, mattresses, blankets, and plastic sheeting to repair broken windows and use for shelter. After the supplies are off-loaded, more than 2,000 people—clearly lacking Morillon’s optimism that Srebrenica is saved—storm past guards and U.N. drivers onto the flatbed trucks in a desperate bid to reach Tuzla. Soon there is no space left for the wounded and vulnerable whom Thierry has selected for evacuation. Srebrenica soldiers, called in by authorities overnight, succeed in clearing only three of the trucks for the injured before losing control to the ever-increasing crowds. As the morning hour of the convoy’s departure nears,
hundreds more struggle onto the trucks, screaming and trampling the weak, heedless of the soldiers firing warning shots into the air. Young women heave out old women; mothers throw their babies aboard and try to clamber up behind them.

  Meanwhile, Thierry Pontus is busy wrapping up his work in the hospital. Having reached the end of his MSF assignment, he bids a tearful farewell to the colleagues he’s grown close with over the past week and climbs into a UNHCR jeep at the head of the departing convoy. At the front line, Thierry watches Serb soldiers force all the women and children off the trucks. The soldiers lead away a fifty-nine-year-old man hiding among them. Thierry wants to protest, but others warn him to keep silent, and in Bratunac they take up the man’s case with the head of the Bosnian Serb army, Ratko Mladić, who appears to meet them. Playing good cop, and looking to Thierry like nothing so much as a kind grandfather, Mladić releases the man and promises free movement of the convoy to Tuzla.

  As they proceed through Serb-held territory, villagers pelt the trucks with stones, and armed men subject them to hours of searches, accusing Thierry, who doesn’t have official permission to travel on the convoy, of being a spy. The people on the overcrowded trucks are for the most part eerily silent, but during one long wait, hundreds begin begging for water. Some of the internationals standing on the roadside scoop up snow and pass it to them. The convoy gets rolling again, but the tailgate of a truck breaks open in a tunnel minutes before reaching Tuzla. Twenty-five people spill onto the concrete; some are severely injured and are rushed away in the back of a British army Scimitar tank. When the convoy of trucks finally reaches Tuzla, five bodies are unloaded along with the living.

  * * *

  U.S. ARMY MAJOR REX DUDLEY DEPARTS the same day and reports back to high-ranking individuals. His conclusions about Srebrenica are clear; the Serbs want to achieve free reign over the whole of eastern Bosnia. The besieged Muslim enclave, straddling a key line of communication, stands right in their way. The Serbs desperately want to take it out, and they have a proven modus operandi: Take no prisoners. If the Serbs are allowed to capture Srebrenica, Major Dudley warns, the result will be genocide.