Despite Truce, Bosnian Enclave Still Besieged

GORAZDE, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  Children streamed by the hundreds from the ruins of their homes to greet the arriving convoy of big white cars. They stood by the road, waved and begged for candy.

Women with their babies crossed the bridge over the Drina River, where rigged paddle-wheel contraptions turn water into electricity, enough for a single light bulb. Young men in uniform lounged in the central square and watched dogs play. Old men sat by 10-foot piles of freshly cut firewood, a preparation for winter. A handful of shoppers pushed through the covered market, where a little more than two pounds of salt had fallen dramatically in price to a mere $35.

Gorazde, the last Muslim enclave in eastern Bosnia, is struggling to emerge from the choking grip of 3 1/2 years of siege. In that time, most here have not seen the outside world, not even relatives. They have lived behind a wall formed by the guns of the Bosnian Serb army.

Relief for this starved and strapped city of nearly 60,000 has become a key point in peace negotiations to end the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Under a cease-fire that took effect more than a week ago, Bosnian Serb gunmen who surrounded and cut off Gorazde are supposed to allow “free passage and unimpeded road access” for all non-military traffic.

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U.N. officials and Western diplomats tested the system this week. On Tuesday, for the first time since the war began in the spring of 1992, a U.N. motorcade reached Gorazde from Sarajevo without Bosnian Serb permission or interference.

On Thursday, when a U.N. and U.S. convoy that included U.S. Ambassador John Menzies, Humvees and armored personnel carriers made the same voyage, they were stopped at a checkpoint outside Gorazde by Bosnian Serbs demanding to see identification papers. All members of the convoy refused, and the Serbs eventually relented.

For many of those in Gorazde who have survived through ingenuity and luck, it is too soon to venture out of Gorazde.

Haska Salman, a stooped, 85-year-old widow with white hair, clutched a string of amber-colored prayer beads and rued her plight, an endless time in which she has not seen her three children who live only 30 miles away in Sarajevo but who might as well be on the other side of the planet.

“I want to go to them,” she said in her two-room apartment a little more than 400 yards from a former sniper position on a hilltop. Then she twisted her shriveled face and began to sob, aware it is still not safe enough for her to attempt the journey.

“I’ve been in three wars, and every war was better than this one,” she said. “This war should not be wished on anyone. . . . There were many dead, many girls raped, everything they’ve done is worse than in any other war. I wonder if it would have been better to kill myself, so as not to see Bosnia’s pain.”

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Salman said Bosnian Serbs in 1992 forced her from her home in a village outside Gorazde, after stranding her there for 20 days with only “grass and trees” to eat. In her apartment, without electricity or running water, she keeps clothes folded on the shelves of a refrigerator and three snapshots of her family in the freezer.

Salman was visited Thursday by three reporters who delivered an aid package from a son in Sarajevo. This week is the first time in at least a year that journalists have gotten into Gorazde.

Salman took advantage of her visitors’ presence to send a letter to her son.

“Thank God you are alive,” she wrote. “I am alive.”

By most accounts the war hit its most destructive peak early on, when civilian casualties from shelling were high and food was completely cut off for months. Another punishing offensive in April, 1994, invited the threat of North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes against the besieging Serbs. Over the years, the government army built up and a weapons factory resumed production. Aid convoys got in through nearby Serbia and sometimes from Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, but only with frequent harassment, delays and confiscation of goods, aid officials say.

When U.N.-protected “safe areas” such as Srebrenica began to fall to the Bosnian Serb army over the summer, it was at Gorazde that the West drew the line. As Gorazde became a potent symbol, peace negotiators suggested swapping it to the Bosnian Serbs in exchange for land the rebels hold elsewhere. Diplomats have since backed away from the proposal after an outcry from many Bosnians.

But the future remains uncertain.

“Do you know how many people have lost their lives for Gorazde, and how many are still ready to lose their lives?” asked Rijad Rascic, the regional political leader, after meeting with Menzies, who praised the people of Gorazde for their “resilience and resolve.”

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Tedium is often the cruelest enemy in a siege. The schools have operated only sporadically, the movie house was shelled early on, and there is no electricity for television. Many youths have formed musical groups and entertain themselves and each other at parties and gatherings.

During the war, the population of Gorazde swelled with the arrival of refugees fleeing Serb expulsions from the villages that are sprinkled through the surrounding valleys. Those villages that were Muslim are now distinctive because of the systematic decapitation of house after house.

Many of the refugees in Gorazde are housed in collection centers that now occupy five of the town’s six schools.

Nurka Milic and her husband, Mustafa, live in a converted janitor’s quarters in a building that is home to about 250 people from Rogatica, Visegrad and Foca, sites of some of the Serbs’ most thorough “ethnic cleansing.”

Milic said she has furnished her tiny, dank room with items recovered from the garbage dump. A wood-burning stove heats the air from a corner, a glass shard hangs on the wall as a mirror. Pepper plants line the window.

“I had a car, a big house, many sheep, a cow, electricity, a refrigerator--I had everything. Now,” she said, pointing to her surroundings and weeping, “I have nothing.

“I am doing things like people did 100, 200 years ago,” she added, displaying chapped, reddened hands that must wash clothes against rocks in the river and chop wood.

“The best is where you are born, no matter if you don’t have water, electricity or a bus station,” Mustafa Milic, 55, said. “If we were sure we could be safe, we would leave now. If I live many more years, maybe I will be safe.”