The Washington Post
January 6, 1993
SARAJEVO – Just down the road from the United Nations headquarters here, 10 elderly Bosnians died from the cold in the past three days at a wretched nursing home that has almost no heating, few windows and more than 100 helpless oldsters waiting for their turn to die.
“It’s terrible, unbearable,” said Gen. Philippe Morillon, who commands U.N. humanitarian aid forces in Bosnia. “We are facing a dramatic situation and not only in this nursing home. Thousands of people are endangered in Sarajevo.”
Morillon dispatched a squad of U.N. troops to the home today to pick up the 10 corpses, which were wrapped in dirty blankets, too short to reach past their ankles, and bound with white ropes. Three of the corpses were heaped into a utility closet.
The troops took the bodies away this afternoon in the flatbed of a white U.N. truck.
The nursing home is in Nedzarici, a front-line Sarajevo neighborhood, and during the summer at least 25 of its residents were killed by sniper or mortar fire as they shuffled past windows or lay in their beds. A few days ago, while a U.N. official was visiting the home, an old man who was chopping wood in its courtyard suddenly collapsed, dead of a bullet to the head.
Now, with indoor temperatures there rarely getting above freezing and sometimes falling below 20 degrees, two or three old people die every day, according to the staff. Since winter began, U.N. officials say the death toll at the home from the cold and cold-related afflictions has reached 45.
For now, it is Sarajevo’s first epidemic of death from freezing. Health officials, who have forecast tens of thousands of deaths in Sarajevo this winter, always warned that the first victims would be old people. Their prediction is turning out to be true.
Journalists who visited the home during the past few days found old men and women — Muslims, Croats and Serbs alike — shivering under layers of dirty blankets, mumbling one word over and over: “cold, cold, cold.” The only sure way to stave off death is to find a place near one of the home’s three stoves — one in the staff room, the two others in sitting rooms — but the bedridden residents cannot reach them.
The four-story, bullet-splattered nursing home stinks of urine and feces that has built up around the hapless people who cannot leave their thickly soiled beds. Dirty laundry is often thrown outside and freezes under the snow. There is no running water, no electricity. And no hope.
Only five people work at the home — one-tenth the number at the start of the war. As a result, sheets are changed perhaps once a month, bedpans a bit more often. There are no longer any doctors at the home; the last one was shot by snipers last month.
The main reason conditions are so abominable at the home is its proximity to the front line. Bullets whiz around the building all the time, and mortar explosions are frequent. Normal food and fuel deliveries have been virtually cut off because it is so hazardous to venture into the area. Even an evacuation of the residents has been impossible to arrange.
Jose-Maria Mendiluce, special envoy of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees here, fended off charges that his agency has failed to act quickly enough. He said the agency, which has 33 employees in Sarajevo, is swamped with work in a city of 380,000 endangered people.
“This is not UNHCR responsibility,” Mendiluce said. “The people are dying because of the war. We can’t operate against the will of the warring parties. A humanitarian organization cannot feed an entire country.”
The nursing home is the best illustration yet that the Western world’s relief effort is failing in Sarajevo and several other cities the Serbs have surrounded. It buttresses the contention of critics who say that only peace, reached through a negotiated settlement or military intervention, can avert a disaster.
At the home, U.N. aid deliveries have been infrequent and too late. U.N. relief officials, who managed to make 10 visits to the home during the past five days, simply say they have been overloaded with the work of moving thousands of tons of food into besieged Sarajevo.
One of the nursing home’s remaining staff members, Lidia Groznika, today showed journalists a copy of a letter that she said she sent to U.N. officials on Aug. 13. “Please help protect these old people,” the letter said. “They are helpless, homeless and sick. They are not guilty for this war.”
Groznika said that in August she requested more wood-burning stoves to help keep the home warm during the winter. Today, five months after her initial request, eight stoves were delivered by U.N. relief workers, but it was unclear if they were installed.
The residents subsist on meals of a gruel-like soup. Staffers say the U.N. supplies of firewood have not helped measurably because they do not have a decent saw to cut the big logs into small bits for their three stoves.
“I don’t feel guilty,” Mendiluce said. “My organization and my people are risking their lives 100 times more than I can ask for. I don’t have 200 fingers to plug all the holes in the wall.”
He emphasized that the worst is yet to come. “Sarajevo is at risk,” he warned.
