New Enemy Attacks Sarajevo – Winter; Besieged Bosnian Capital Is Stripped for Scraps of Firewood

The Washington Post
December 29, 1992

SARAJEVO – Desperate to stay alive, the freezing people of Sarajevo have begun to devour what’s left of their shattered city.

Trees in parks and along once stately boulevards are being cut down at a hurricane pace as men, women and children scavenge for firewood. Buildings shelled by Serb forces besieging the city are being stripped of anything that burns — beams, flooring, roofing, wallpaper, foam insulation.

Usually, it is government militiamen with chainsaws who fell the decades-old trees and appropriate the biggest chunks. Civilian men with axes cut up the branches, then grandmothers and children move in, scurrying around to pick up the twigs.

“It’s cold, and we have to stay alive, so we cut the trees,” said Sarija Misut, 19, as he sawed through one of the last pine trees in Sarajevo’s main cemetery. Nodding toward the frozen mounds marking new graves around him, the young man added: “It’s better than ending up like the ones here.”

Many people, unable to find a tree to cut down, are reduced to hacking away at tree stumps, and a recent lull in the fighting has seen the boom-boom-boom of mortars replaced with the chip-chip-chip of axes attacking wood. Sidewalks are crowded with people carrying, pushing or dragging loads of firewood. Some bear sacks of wood on their backs, sherpa-like. Some transport sticks and logs and broken boards in wheelbarrows or baby carriages. Some tote huge beams on their shoulders, like workers at a construction site. But Sarajevo, if anything, is a deconstruction site.

There are those like Himzo Babic, 42, who roamed through a shell-blasted store today looking for cardboard to burn in his 12th-floor apartment so that his 18-month-old infant would not freeze to death. Babic, a Slavic Muslim who sought refuge in Sarajevo to escape the advancing Serbs, has neither saw nor axe with which to forage for fuel, and the hammer and screwdriver he does have don’t work very well. So it’s easier to collect cardboard — and to burn everything loose around him. “I have burned most of my furniture,” he said. “I burned the wood parquet from the floor. I’ve also burned books.”

There has been no electricity in Sarajevo for three weeks. That means no lights, no running water and, most importantly as sub-freezing weather sets in, no central heating. Mild fall weather has turned nasty all of a sudden, with a light snowfall dusting the city Sunday night and temperatures hovering around 10 degrees.

Without central heating, most of the 350,000 people trapped in Sarajevo have rigged up makeshift stoves, and entire families eat and sleep together in one room because it is impossible to find enough wood to heat two. For the people of Sarajevo, it’s the same battle against death they’ve waged for eight months now, except that the cold could kill more of them than Serb bullets and bombs.

“There is no wood left in my neighborhood,” said an off-duty policeman named Zoran who walked two miles before finding a thick tree stump to hack at. “Everything has been wiped out, even the stumps.” There were open blisters on Zoran’s hands as he flailed away at the stump, his labored breathing forming a cloud of steam in front of his haggard face. He has two children at home, aged 4 and 8, and no powdered milk or fresh food to feed them. “Please tell the outside world to stop this siege,” he pleaded. “Any way it can. This is insanity.”

Nedzib Beso, a Muslim refugee whose home outside Sarajevo was burned down by the Serbs, had a stroke of luck, finding a 25-foot-long beam in a vacated military barracks. Beso, 64, lugged it to the bare room in a half-completed building where he and his wife have found shelter. “It should be good for three days,” he said.

Beso’s wife, who spends much of her days crying about her two slain sons, stays in the room with her feet propped on a brick that she warms by the stove. The Besos sleep with their clothes on, under four blankets and with their sweaters pulled over their heads.

But bad as things are now, some officials of Bosnia’s Muslim-led government fear they will soon get worse. Fuad Babic, who is in charge of civil defense in Sarajevo, estimates that with winter only barely begun, nearly half the city’s trees are already gone. “I have tried to physically stop people from cutting the trees, but I lost the will to do it after a woman came to me crying and said she needed the wood to keep her two babies warm,” Babic said. “One disaster follows another in Sarajevo,” he said with a sigh. “This city is cursed.”

It is the weakest who give out first. At a nursing home in Nedarici, a frontline suburb between Sarajevo and its airport, eight elderly people have died of the cold in the past four days, staff members say. The remaining 114 patients live in filthy, unheated rooms and, for the bedridden ones, fouled sheets. “The meals they are getting are adequate,” said a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency. “It’s the cold they are succumbing to. . . . This is just a microcosm of what we’re going to see across Sarajevo.”

At the State Hospital, nurse Stanislava Pasagic, 24, has been unable to work for five days because her hands are frostbitten — covered with blisters and cold as a corpse. “Five other nurses have the same problem,” she said, explaining that she cannot wear warm gloves while performing her job. The hospital’s emergency heating system is powered by generators that have enough fuel to operate for just three hours during the day and three at night, and patients shiver under layers of blankets.

But staying alive in Sarajevo is not just a matter of staying warm. It also means finding water to drink and wash with. Because there is no electricity, water pumps are idle except in the rare buildings that have their own generators and fuel to run them. And so the streets are filled with people lining up to fill containers at wells and water storage tanks.

Walking anywhere in Sarajevo can be deadly because most streets are within range of Serb snipers and mortar batteries, and malnourished people do not walk very briskly. Weighed down with buckets of water, they walk even slower, and when they stand in line for hours at an open well, they become stationary targets.

According to doctors here, several people are being shot every day as they stand in water lines. On Sunday, one middle-aged man was rushed to a hospital after a sniper’s bullet tore through his chest. Doctors took one look at him and wrote down a Latin phrase that is becoming more and more common in their log book: Mortus ad latus. Dead on arrival.