The Washington Post
January 7, 1993
SARAJEVO, Jan. 6 – At a nursing home that is becoming a tomb, the haggard face of death met the shamed face of the United Nations today.
Mustafa Dizdarovic, 82, who had seen enough of his friends die of cold to know that his time would come soon, shuffled through a freezing corridor at the Old People’s Home and tugged at the sleeve of Jose-Maria Mendiluce, a top official of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Trembling and gaunt, Dizdarovic clutched Mendiluce’s warm hands and sobbed for deliverance.
“Help us, or we will all die,” the old man pleaded over and over again, bending at his knees in supplication. “We can’t live here in winter. We will freeze. You must help us.”
As the conversation unfolded, the men’s breath condensed in front of them. There are three tiny stoves in the four-story building. The few windows that have not been shattered by bullets or mortars are layered in ice. The home is colder than a barn in winter, and 108 old men and women are trapped inside. Twelve of their friends have died of the cold in the last four days.
Mendiluce, visibly shaken, assured the old man that the eight U.N. stoves that had been delivered the day before — but not installed — would be installed immediately and fired up with wood by tonight. He promised that four additional stoves, beyond the eight already there, would be delivered.
“Don’t worry, we will not let you freeze,” Mendiluce said, emotionally hugging the frightened old man.
Tonight, more than five months after the nursing home staff first requested stoves, more than two months after the staff asked for the home to be evacuated, and more than a week after the United Nations learned of the frozen horrors unfolding there, the stoves had still not been installed. The proper chimney attachments were lacking, a U.N. official said.
And so, as overnight temperatures plunge once again into the teens, Dizdarovic will spend another night of shivers and tears amid the darkness and cold of Sarajevo’s Old People’s Home.
The home is an example of how U.N. deliveries of food to besieged Sarajevo have failed to make much of a dent in the suffering of innocent people who need help the most. It is a reminder, as U.N. relief officials readily admit, that the only way to stop the human misery in Bosnia is by stopping the war.
The nursing home is less than a mile from U.N. headquarters, where hundreds of military officers and relief officials are overseeing the massive humanitarian airlift. A few hundred yards away is a major supply route used by U.N. trucks to ferry food and fuel into the city from the airport.
When dawn broke at the unheated nursing home this morning, two old women were found frozen to death in their beds. Milena Topalovic, 70, was one of them. Several hours after her death in the icicled hell of Sarajevo, the tiny blue eyes of her corpse were still open, a knitted brown cap still on her head.
Her body lay unattended on a bed that was flanked, a foot away on each side, by the beds of two women who had survived the long night. The women looked up, bewildered and lost and frightened, when a few journalists entered the room.
One of the women was curled into a fetal position, her soiled sheets slipping up to her exposed ankles, a puddle of urine under the bed. Her discolored feet and hands were swollen. She cried out, so softly that no one could understand her at first, for water.
The other woman, who was trying to wash her bony face with some water from a bedpan, repeated the one word that haunts the nursing home. “Cold,” she muttered. “Cold, cold, cold.” She said she was 91.
A few doors down the hallway, in another unheated room, another trio of shivering old women were trying to stave off death. One of them was already in a coma, her toothless mouth wide open, her breathing softer than a bird’s. She didn’t move. A sleepless, harried worker came into the room, felt the woman’s cheek and snapped, “No, not yet. But soon.”
The other two women shivered under woolen blankets as they watched their friend die. The frightened look of their childlike eyes seemed to say that they knew they were seeing their own bleak futures. A female journalist took one of their hands, stroked a forehead and got an amazed smile in return.
The home is filled with the stench of decay and the silence of desperation. The lucky ones — the oldsters who are able to get out of bed — trudge through the shrapnel-splattered hallways to one of three sitting rooms that have a bit of heat. Some wear wool coats; others just bathrobes. Few have gloves.
Before the Bosnian war broke out nine months ago, the Old People’s Home in the Nedzirici neighborhood of Sarajevo was a nice place to grow old. It had pool tables, a big dining room, a green courtyard. Its plight reflects the destruction of Sarajevo, host of the 1984 Winter Olympics. The nursing home has become a house of horrors on the front line of war.
No one wants to deliver food or fuel there. No one wants to work there. No one wants to repair the windows. And no one, it seems, really wants to help the helpless old Muslims, Croats and Serbs who, at the current mortality rate, will be dead by the end of January.
At the nursing home, Mendiluce said U.N. officials’ hands were tied because neither the Bosnian government nor the Serb nationalist forces besieging the city have cooperated in permitting aid deliveries or evacuation. “I have talked with them 25 times,” he said. “It is like a ping-pong party.”
Even so, the nursing home’s plight has raised a question that testy U.N. officials are being confronted with more often these days. If the United Nations cannot arrange to save a few freezing old people less than a mile away from its headquarters, then how will it manage to save the hundreds of thousands of other people who are at risk this winter?
