War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  His first casualty awaits him on the other side of the road. Ejub’s frenzied cousin has run into a wire fence and dislocated his ankle. Ejub wraps it, teasing him that God is punishing him for having failed to give his horse a proper rest the first night of their journey.

  They continue through the night, walking in a line through the forest, single-file in each other’s footsteps to minimize the chance of detonating a mine. In the quiet darkness, even the cracking of twigs beneath their shoes sounds loud to them. A fox slides past. They communicate in whispers only when necessary. But as the lonely night wears on, the forest seems to belong only to them, and the men, forgetting their carefully observed silence, begin to chatter. Ejub refuses to go farther while people talk. For a while quiet reigns again, but after a time the men forget themselves. Even though they are only a small group, Ejub has to stop them twice to restore quiet order.

  By the fourth night of walking, the men are exhausted and shivering from the cold. Toward morning, just as it begins to rain, they reach the set of front lines they plan to cross near a Bosnian government–held town called Kladanj, about thirty-five miles from Tuzla on a main road.

  Over the next several hours, they tiptoe past empty Serbian trenches, ford two rivers, climb down and up two canyons, and finally, at midday, descend a steep hill to an asphalt road that marks the Bosnian government side of the front line. Ejub stands with his arms out in the rain and turns his face up to the sky. An intense happiness and a sense of accomplishment far greater than his previous greatest accomplishment—finishing medical school—fill him. Men around him weep. With gratitude, Ejub slaps 500 Deutschemarks into the hand of his guide.

  They proceed straight to Bosnian army headquarters in Kladanj. The first thing Ejub does is ask to use a telephone and call his beloved Mubina. When she picks up the phone, he flirts with her without identifying himself.

  “Mr. Ejub is that you?” she asks. “Only you talk like that!”

  It takes a while to convince her that he is calling from Kladanj. She bursts into tears. He tells her to prepare for a celebration.

  “Buy lots of alcohol and lots of meat; I’m going to bring the guys with me to Tuzla!”

  The men change their clothing and eat at the army headquarters. Then they undergo questioning about the situation in Srebrenica and their reasons for leaving. After two hours, the group is ordered to wait in Kladanj for the return of some officers. Ejub calls Mubina and tells her to cancel the party.

  Most of the guys wait around headquarters, but Ejub heads into town to have a drink with one of the commanders. He’s just met the man, but one drink turns into two, turns into four… Inhibitions lost, Ejub goes on his usual drunken riff about missing his wife. He tells the commander he can’t wait to get to Tuzla to see her and his son.

  “Oh, doctor, don’t worry about it, you’re with me,” the commander says, and at 3 A.M. they slide into his chauffeur-driven car singing a Balkan pop song, “Love Is Where You Are.” Two hours later, Ejub gathers his wife and his son in his arms.

  24

  OVERTURE

  AFTER NEGOTIATIONS WITH NEDRET ENDED IN LATE 1993, life quieted down for the artful doctor, Boro Lazić. He worked with four other Serb physicians in the health center of his small town, šekovići, in the Serb-held part of Bosnia, treating townspeople with typical illnesses, such as influenza, that were sometimes complicated by exhaustion, stress, and poor nutrition. šekovići was a fairly safe location, but as time went on, fighting shifted closer to the town and his side had its share of hardships. Bosnian government forces near Kladanj clashed with Bosnian Serb forces near šekovići, and grenades sometimes exploded in town. Occasionally, Boro treated someone injured by one of those grenades or by a mine. Electricity sometimes went out, and the phones usually didn’t work; rumor had it that they’d been disconnected to prevent people from passing “secrets.” Boro and other townspeople traveled from Serb-held Bosnia across the Drina River to Serbia to buy food. About once every month or so, Boro’s commander recalled him to participate in field actions as chief of the medical services of šekovići Brigade, typically in response to Muslim attempts to break the battle lines and retake certain areas near the frontiers of their territory.

  Then, in spring 1995, Bosnian government forces in the capital, their leaders swearing not to endure another winter under siege, attempted tobreak southward out of Sarajevo. The area they attacked was a strategically important area for the Serbs, as it connected the central part of their self-declared republic to the geographical area known as Herzegovina.

  Boro’s unit was called to participate in the defense. Fighting was heavy and many of the infantry soldiers, teenaged inductees, were facing their first major battle. During a thunderstorm, Boro, along with an inexperienced sergeant and about fifty of these young men, found himself stranded without vehicles or other officers on a plateau called Umchani, cut off from two sides and under heavy attack. As grenades fell, so did the men, and it was hard for Boro to tell as they fell whether they’d been hit by shrapnel or, as often happened, had grown hysterical and fainted away from fear. The group retreated three to four miles under shellfire, first cautiously, then running for their lives down a winding road in the rain toward a dark forest to the sound of thunderclaps and explosions.

  Boro’s resourceful nature was a boon to his fellow medical workers. One evening he caught sight of a set of radios that an officer had carelessly left behind in a car. Boro snatched them for his medical teams, which lacked communications equipment. The heist was successful until it was discovered, and Boro was reprimanded for his mischief.

  Times grew tougher as the Bosnian government grew more determined to break out of Sarajevo. Boro’s unit was sent to rest, but was twice called back to the area around Sarajevo. In late June, Boro took charge of three teams of medical technicians providing aid to a unit responding to a Bosnian army offensive. Boro’s unit took eighty casualties, injured and killed, in that action.

  * * *

  THE LAST WEEK OF JUNE, a few Bosnian Serb soldiers cross a mining tunnel and emerge inside Srebrenica enclave, on a hilltop community above the hospital. They set a house on fire, kill a man, and fire their M85 machine guns and zolja anti-tank rockets in the direction of the hospital, frightening everyone inside, before retreating.

  Two days later, early in the morning of June 26, Srebrenica soldiers—urged by the Bosnian army headquarters to conduct a diversionary action to help draw even more Serb forces from the capital—raid the Serb village of Višnjica, three miles west of the enclave. They torch houses. They lead sheep away. They kill a few people.

  It is not a major offensive. U.N. analysts assess that Srebrenica forces, although greater in number than the 1,000–2,000 Serb soldiers surrounding them, are so disorganized and poorly armed that they pose no real threat to the Serbs. Still, General Ratko Mladić, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, uses the occasion to lodge a protest with the U.N. Protection Forces. Attacks from Srebrenica “brutally violate the status of the Safe Area,” he says, and he issues a grim warning: “We will not tolerate such cases in the future.”

  * * *

  SIX DAYS LATER, the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army Drina Corps issues two orders laying out plans for an attack on the enclave of Srebrenica and ordering various units of the Bosnian Serb army to ready for combat. The plan, Krivaja ’95, directs the Drina Corps to “split apart the enclaves of Žepa and Srebrenica and to reduce them to their urban areas” and “to create conditions for the elimination of the enclaves.”

  The commander of the šekovići Brigade calls Boro and tells him to be ready to leave for an offensive on Srebrenica the following day. The goal, Boro assumes, is to take the city, which seems farfetched. He doesn’t worry too much about his friends inside. He gathers medicines and food, and then joins his driver and a nurse to settle in a region south of the Srebrenica enclave borders, not far from Srebrenica’s destroyed water treatment plant. There, his forces await orders to strike.
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  PART FOUR

  “AN ATTACK ON THE ENTIRE WORLD”

  What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land.

  —Euripides Medea [431 B.C.], L. 650

  25

  “OUR SINCEREST APOLOGIES”

  ON JULY 4, 1995, An international humanitarian worker escorting a food convoy from Serbia into Serb-controlled Bosnia sends a coded message to a colleague in Srebrenica. Recently the worker aid heard that the Serbs were planning to shrink the enclave and promised the colleague that if he ever saw any evidence to substantiate this, he’d send the message, “Say hello to Ibrahim.” While traveling south along the Drina River, the worker witnesses signs of military preparations: heavy weapons and tanks being moved along the route from Zvornik to Bratunac. He passes the message to his contact in Srebrenica, who passes it to the U.N. Dutch battalion.

  “Say hello to Ibrahim.”

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN OVER A YEAR, Ilijaz is the sole surgeon at Srebrenica Hospital. When a four-member MSF team rotated out of the enclave two weeks ago, Serb authorities permitted only two MSF staff members to replace them: a veteran MSF nurse from Germany, Christina Schmitz, and an Australian generalist on his first humanitarian mission, Dr. Daniel O’Brien. No surgeon. Ilijaz isn’t pleased about the extra work this is causing him, but at least he’s now competent to handle it.

  Christina, a petite, freckle-faced thirty-one-year-old with red hair and blue eyes of an almost disturbing pallor, has taken charge of coordinating the mission—communicating with Belgrade headquarters by radio about the medical programs, telexing reports, and keeping up contacts with local authorities and the United Nations. She’s been learning her way around with gusto, familiarizing herself with the security procedures, studying MSF’s communications equipment (taking down the radio and checking what cable goes in what hole) and striking those around her as very efficient.

  She takes extra care for a reason. Srebrenica, as a surrounded enclave in an active war zone—an open-air prison, she calls it—is something new for her. Over the past four years she has worked in hot spots from Kurdistan to Somalia, Croatia to Liberia, South Sudan to Chechnya, realizing a childhood vision of working with disadvantaged people. But two weeks ago, when she walked past the yellow bridge and the last Serb and United Nations checkpoints with Deutschemarks for the local staff stuffed in her shoes, she had the creepy feeling that a door was shutting behind her. She comforted herself with the thought that if thousands of Bosnians could live here, she could, too.

  It also reassured her to meet the Dutch U.N. commander, Col. Ton Karremans, at a security meeting at Dutchbat headquarters later that first day. “The enclave will not fall,” he told her. Karremans was sure that the Srebrenicans could hold their positions for at least seven days under attack and that they were strong enough to prevent the Serbs from taking Srebrenica.

  Christina didn’t know much about the safe area—learning about places before going to them has long struck her as rather useless—so when she traveled into town she paid attention to landmarks, including three important military points along the main road. Just inside the northern border of the enclave, in a converted factory complex in an area called Potočari, the Dutch U.N. battalion has its main headquarters and hospital. Dutchbat B Company, with its own medical team and the second largest encampment of Dutch soldiers in the enclave, is located about three miles south in a former textile factory, just before the entrance to the town proper and not far from Srebrenica Hospital. Finally, the headquarters for a team of U.N. military observers is located in the post office building directly across the street from the hospital. The three observers (down from a typical six after Serb authorities refused to permit replacements for outgoing personnel) spend their days visiting the fourteen observation posts manned by Dutch soldiers that ring the safe area: Alpha, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Hotel, Kilo, Mike, November, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, and Uniform.

  The day after Christina’s arrival, Dutch military doctors showed up to work at the hospital. This surprised and concerned her. MSF doesn’t typically collaborate with soldiers.

  “How come we accept their weapons in our house?” she asked MSF headquarters. She fears that getting too close to any military, even that of the United Nations, will threaten the hospital’s neutral, protected status under international law.

  * * *

  THE SOUND OF AN EXPLOSION FILLS THE AIR and rattles the windows of the bedrooms in the Doctors Without Borders house behind the hospital. Christina’s blue eyes snap open. It’s dark outside, still early in the morning on July 6, 1995. She hears more thudding explosions and makes her way to the corridor, huddling with her MSF colleague, Daniel O’Brien, as they listen carefully.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Christina tells him. She has experienced shelling just once before, in Chechnya, but is pretty sure she recognizes the sound. A few days ago she heard the same noises and was relieved to find it was only the Dutch soldiers detonating ammunition. This can’t be the case now, not in the middle of the night. When the barrage fails to stop for forty-five minutes, she sends a satellite telex message to MSF headquarters in Belgrade.

  “Sorry to wake you up,” she writes, informing them of heavy shelling near the town and explaining that she’s dismantling the radio and going with it into the shelter. She and Daniel run to the back of the adjacent medical clinic building, pulling open a cellar door and descending a staircase into a basement built by the Yugoslavs in case of war. The two stay there until daylight.

  Throughout the morning, 200 shells, including tank bombs, artillery, and mortars, hit the enclave from all directions—ten of them landing in the city itself—and several of the U.N. observation posts along the perimeter of the enclave report seeing Bosnian Serb army troops and tanks. The Serbs fire on positions of Srebrenica soldiers, who return small-arms fire, and at U.N. soldiers in their observation posts, who don’t. Rockets zoom over the Dutchbat compound in Potočari in an impressive show of the Serbs’ twelve-tube Multiple Launch Rocket System. The Serbs also lob shells into civilian areas, including a collective center for displaced people in Potočari. The hospital receives several lightly injured patients.

  * * *

  AROUND 1 P.M., the twenty-seven-year-old commander of a Dutch observation post in the south of the enclave, “OP-Foxtrot,” radioes his commander that a Serb tank has fired a round into his defense wall. Less than a half hour later, another round tears into the watchtower, rendering the long-range, optically tracked TOW anti-tank missile atop the observation post inoperable, effectively taking away the observers’ ability to view the Srebrenica-Skelani road, and showering those inside with sand. Two more rounds fired directly at the post narrowly miss it 20 minutes later.

  At 1:50 P.M., the Dutchbat commander requests NATO close air support to protect his targeted observation post. Close air support—the use of air power for direct support of U.N. troops on the ground—is one of two official options for the use of NATO air power and can be requested by a commander on the ground, but must be approved at higher levels of U.N. command. Air strikes, the other option, mean large-scale bombing and must be initiated by those at the top level of U.N. Protection Force command.

  The fact that the Serbs are directly attacking a U.N. observation post in Srebrenica satisfies the strict criteria for the use of NATO close air support. The Dutch commander’s air power request begins its long quest for approval up the U.N. ladder of command—from Dutchbat in Srebrenica to U.N. Sector North East headquarters in Tuzla to Bosnia-Herzegovina command in Sarajevo to the force commander in Zagreb—French General Bernard Janvier—to the special representative of the U.N. Secretary-General, Yasushi Akashi, a famously weak-willed and force-shy official who holds the first air strike “key.” The other is with NATO.

  The humiliating hostage crisis following the last use of NATO air power two months ago helped shape this Byzantine structure and has dampened the already feeble enthusiasm that existed among many in
the U.N. hierarchy for the use of targeted bombing. During hostage negotiations, the Serbs demanded an outright end to the future use of NATO power. The top commander of all U.N. forces in the former Yugoslavia, General Bernard Janvier, held an unpublicized meeting with Bosnian Serb General Mladić on June 4, after which the hostages were released. The Serbs then bragged that he had agreed to their condition. He denied the allegation, but stated publicly that from now on the United Nations would stick to a peacekeeping, rather than peace-enforcement, mission. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stripped the right to request air strikes from the man most interested in using them, British Lieutenant General Rupert Smith in Sarajevo. The secretary-general announced he would personally make all future decisions about air strikes from his headquarters in New York. Many analysts interpret these actions as a veiled promise of non-confrontation with the Serbs.

  Janvier, usually based in Zagreb, is out of town at a meeting in Geneva. However, his wish that air power be used only as a “last resort” is clear to his subordinates. In Srebrenica, Serb firing and shelling fall off by mid-afternoon. The Dutchbat commander’s request for air support hasn’t ascended far along the chain of command before it’s turned down on grounds that the direct assault on the U.N. observation post has ended. This relieves some Dutch soldiers, who fear that NATO strikes might incite the Serbs against them.

  Yesterday U.N. military observers noted numerous new tanks and soldiers to the south and east of the enclave, but the Serb attack takes Dutchbat by surprise. The local U.N. military officers make their assessment. The Serbs are most likely attacking with a limited objective. They have long wished to move the southern boundary of the enclave north to gain access to a strategic crossroads on the main Srebrenica-Skelani asphalt road.