The Washington Post
January 13, 1993
SARAJEVO – Through the static of a shortwave radio, Fadil Heljic made a frantic plea from hell.
“The town is like a big cemetery,” he shouted from the Muslim-held town of Zepa, which is surrounded by Serb forces and has had no food deliveries since April. “Overnight there were 92 deaths. Fifteen people died during the day today. . . . There is no food at all. Now we are eating the bark from pear trees.”
In a 20-minute transmission that consisted of shouts thrown back and forth over a crackling shortwave set, Heljic described an ordeal of freezing and starvation that dwarfs the amply chronicled misery of Sarajevo, which gets regular U.N. aid shipments.
Heljic said the 29,000 people of Zepa are too exhausted to dig graves in the frozen ground. Corpses are simply dragged down the streets — there is no fuel for cars — and thrown into a common ditch. Thousands of people live in caves or snowbound huts, he said, because most homes in the city have been destroyed by Serb shelling. There is no electricity, no running water, no central heating.
Many Muslim refugees who sought safety in Zepa months ago are said to have worn through the few clothes they have. Heljic said his own primitive shoes are made of leather from a cow that was killed by a Serb shell. There are no more cows, sheep or even dogs, he added. All animals have been killed by Serb artillery fire or eaten by hungry people.
“There is the threat of cannibalism soon,” he said. “There are suspicions that it has already happened.” Nothing Heljic said could be independently confirmed, since Zepa — situated in mountainous terrain about 40 miles east of Sarajevo — has been cut off by Serb nationalist forces since Bosnia’s factional war began nine months ago.
Not a single journalist, aid worker or U.N. soldier has reached the town; its only contact with the outside world has been through people like Heljic, who makes daily contact with a ham radio operator in Sarajevo.
Throughout the Bosnian war, tales of suffering on all sides have been stretched into epics of brutality, and it is difficult to assess the truth of Heljic’s statements. But what made his descriptions credible is the fact that similar reports have been coming out of Zepa from other radio operators — and from other Bosnian cities that have been cut off from humanitarian aid shipments.
And there was no doubting one aspect of Heljic’s account, even though it came over a static-filled shortwave transmitter that made some of his words inaudible. It was his desperate plea for help.
“I beg and suggest to all humanitarian organizations to help us,” he shouted down the line. “My personal statement, and from {all the people} of Zepa, is that we don’t trust the United Nations any longer. . . . But we have great confidence in American people. It’s only the Americans whom we can trust now.”
For several weeks, Bosnia’s Slavic Muslim-led government has pleaded with U.N. humanitarian relief forces here to make urgent aid deliveries to Zepa, where shortwave operators say hundreds of people — mostly children and old people — have died of hunger and exposure in recent days. Two U.N. reconnaissance patrols were sent out, but neither managed to reach Zepa. The first was halted by heavy snow; the second was turned back by the Serb militiamen besieging the city.
Now, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has agreed to consider making emergency airdrops of food to Zepa and two or three other beleaguered cities, but U.N. officials told the Bosnian government today that this could be done only if the Serbs agree, which seems unlikely.
Bosnian government officials are angry that the United Nations is not taking immediate action to supply these cities, and they have accused the world body of ignoring a Security Council resolution last summer that authorized aid deliveries in Bosnia “by all necessary means,” including force.
Heljic’s shortwave contact in Sarajevo, a ham operator named Devedzija, has installed a military transmitter in his apartment, and refugees from Zepa gather there to listen to disheartening news from home. “We hear this twice a day,” sighed Rasid Kulovac, 58, who has 14 relatives in Zepa.
Heljic, 43, a former postal employee, said he saw four frozen bodies being hauled through the streets this morning, three of them children. The corpses were found under a pear tree, Heljic said, and were being hauled across the snow on a mattress of branches.
“There’s a big ditch,” Heljic said. “The bodies are left there until later; they are all frozen.”
He added that the “suspicions” of cannibalism stem from reports that some bodies found in Zepa appear to have been cut up.
Confirming reports reaching here over the past few days, Heljic said thousands of desperate townspeople have decided to march out of Zepa in hopes of making it through Serb lines in search of food, warmth and safety. He said the march could begin Wednesday and will consist “mostly of women and children . . . waving white flags.”
Heljic said the Zepa hospital now barely functions as such, that there are no bandages, so clothes are torn up to bind wounds. Operations are conducted without anesthesia and there are no antibiotics. Most injured arms and legs sawed off under these conditions quickly turn gangrenous, and most such patients die, he added.
Heljic said he lives in the hills above Zepa — “out in the snow,” as he put it. Among the 13 members of his extended family, two have died since the siege began and three have been wounded, he said. Unless something dramatic happens, he added, the cold will claim more of his relatives than the artillery shells the Serbs keep lobbing into the city.
“When I go back tonight, and I need one hour to walk there, I don’t know how many of them I will find alive.”
