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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.3 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                THE BALKANS, Page 68

Guns Now, Butter Later


Relief flights are bringing aid, but that is not enough to assuage
the anger building in Sarajevo

By JAMES L. GRAFF/SARAJEVO


    There is a stark simplicity to life in Amira Puzic's
war-scarred apartment building in the northern Sarajevo
neighborhood of Ciglane. At dusk the 18 families there prepare
for another night of shelling by bedding down on couches and
mattresses crammed onto landings of the central concrete
stairwell. By day, when the barrage eases, they forage for food.
But hunger has become a secondary consideration in the face of
the almost constant bombardment, now well into its fourth month,
by Serb forces firing from the surrounding hillsides. All day,
every day, the talk in the building hallways is of Western
military intervention or, failing that, distribution of weapons
so that the 300,000 people of Sarajevo can repel the onslaught
with their own hands. "The liberation of the town is more
important than food," says Puzic, 37, an economist and mother
of two. "We all fear that the West now thinks it has done
enough."

    The intent of the Serbs' incessant artillery and sniper
fire is to break the will of Sarajevo, but it has only swelled
the residents' anger. They welcome the international effort to
fly in food and medicine but are worried that the relief
operation is treating the symptom of shortage, not the cause.
What Sarajevans want above all else is to see the aggressor
routed. "A necessary evil" is Bosnia-Herzegovinian Defense
Minister Jerko Doko's blunt term for the United Nations'
hard-won airlift. "I wish the airport hadn't been opened in this
way, because it has actually slowed down the liberation of
Sarajevo."

    Last week the sidewalk in front of Puzic's apartment
building at Ise Jovanovic 21 was still stained brown with the
dried blood of a neighbor mortally wounded by a sniper in broad
daylight two days earlier. Shrapnel burst through the bedroom
window of Puzic's 12-year-old son Damir and ripped the carpet.
On the ground floor, Sandra Makcic's bedroom was gutted by a
shell a month ago, minutes after she left it. Said Ramisa Trtak,
70, who moved into the building after her house in an outlying
quarter was obliterated: "During the World War they aimed at
strategic targets. In this idiotic war they aim at civilians."

    At the once bustling Ciglane market nearby, frustrated
shoppers picked through the meager offerings, then left with
mostly empty plastic bags. There were potatoes the day before,
but they sold out in less than five minutes. On Thursday huge
cans of cucumbers were available for about half the average
monthly wage. Bottles of beer and slivovitz -- hoarded or, as
many mutter angrily, stolen -- are available at outrageous
prices. Puzic bought toothpaste, soap and a bundle of broad
coltsfoot leaves. "I've never eaten it before," she sighed with
a dubious glance at the tough, shiny weeds normally used for
treating asthma. "But what else is there?" In Sarajevo outright
starvation is not a threat, though hospitals are reporting cases
of scurvy.

    In the Ciglane neighborhood, no one had yet seen any of
the more than 900 tons of food and medical supplies airlifted
to Sarajevo since July 3. The battered Zetra Stadium, site of
the hockey competition in the 1984 Winter Olympics, has been
designated one of four warehouses to store the foodstuffs
brought from the airport under escort by U.N. armored personnel
carriers. On Thursday half a dozen trucks from surrounding
neighborhoods waited all day for a delivery due at 10 in the
morning.

    It never came, fueling already rife rumors of corruption
and inefficiency. But within its strictly peacekeeping mandate,
the U.N. is doing a good job in near impossible conditions. Last
week a convoy of four trucks loaded with baby food was pinned
down at the airport for half an hour by sniper fire before it
could roll out. Says Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie,
commander of the 1,200 "blue helmets" in Sarajevo: "There's no
cease-fire, and there was supposed to be one before the airport
opened. We're doing our job in the eye of a hurricane."

    The families in Puzic's building do not believe in
cease-fires anymore. They see the war in their city not as an
ethnic conflict but as an onslaught by terrorists, who will
never hold to any agreement, against a civic tradition built on
tolerance. Eight of the families there are either wholly or
partly ethnic Serb, yet they are no less a part of the food
sharing, the fearful waiting and the common suffering of the
building's residents as they huddle under fire. "It never
mattered before whether my neighbor is a Serb, and it doesn't
matter now," says Makcic, a 25-year-old student whose father is
half Serb.

    The growing pressure in the West for some kind of military
intervention heartens Sarajevo but also begs scores of
unanswered questions. Finding and destroying Serb artillery
emplacements and mortar sites in the rough hill country of
Bosnia could prove tougher than taking out Scud launchers in the
Iraqi desert. But it would be a simple action compared with the
nearly impossible task of restoring common purpose for the
peoples of Bosnia as the terror continues and the body count
mounts.