Team Effort Brings Relief to Weary Sarajevo

To travelers in a plane flying low into this besieged, war-torn capital Sunday, Sarajevo looked like a city whose life was ebbing away.

The main roads were empty. The only movement visible from the air in outlying areas of this city of 380,000 were two cars, crawling slowly along side streets, and a few dozen human figures, some of them on bicycles.

Roofs of houses around the airport were caved in; smoke blackened many facades.

Damage was also heavy at the airport itself, with radar and most communications gone, the main buildings damaged by artillery and small-arms fire. Spent cartridges from earlier fighting still littered parts of the Tarmac.

Amid the debris, a contingent of blue-helmeted Canadian soldiers, part of a U.N. peacekeeping force, strengthened positions along the runway and taxiways to defend what has become a lifeline of hope to the city as a major international airlift to break the three-month siege of Sarajevo gathered momentum.

Aside from its size, the airlift marks a rare humanitarian relief operation carried out under combat conditions.

Sunday, three days after it began, the multinational Sarajevo airlift still showed signs of confusion and disorganization, but U.N. officials said the flow of supplies was improving, despite occasional sniper fire into the airport itself and the sound of automatic weapons exchanges in nearby districts.

“We were amateurs on the first day, but we’re getting better day by day,” said Anders Levinssen, a Danish national and coordinator of the U.N. relief efforts at Zagreb airport, a major jumping-off point for the airlift. “For us, the main problem is communicating with Sarajevo.”

The nations involved in the humanitarian effort, including the United States, most other Western alliance countries and several former Communist nations, reflect the extent to which former Cold War adversaries now are cooperating to make the operation work.

As the third U.S. Air Force C-130 to reach Sarajevo since the airlift began landed Sunday afternoon, Russian and French cargo transports were already being unloaded, while a Swedish air force C-130 arrived only a few minutes later.

With engines running, the U.S. aircraft was quickly unloaded by Canadian troops and, within 35 minutes, was lumbering down the runway on its way back to Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, Germany, where it began the day nine hours earlier.

U.N. officials said they are trying to minimize the time each plane remains on the ground, in part to make room for other aircraft approaching the city.

Ramp capacity at Sarajevo’s Butmir Airport is restricted, and Levinssen said that on Saturday, Italian and Norwegian aircraft had been held in Zagreb because there was no place for them to unload in Sarajevo.

Security concerns also play a part in the quick turnarounds, with snipers frequently harassing operations, according to Canadian officers.

“Soldiers digging the trenches have been getting shots for three days,” said Canadian army Maj. Roger Boivin.

Cases of infants’ milk and jars of baby food brought by the U.S. C-130 totaled 26,300 pounds--not quite 1.5% of the estimated 930 tons of food daily that relief officials say the city needs to survive.

Although the plight of Sarajevo is especially dramatic because of its size and importance, the city is said to be merely one of several enclaves under similar siege in the brutal war among Croats, Serbs and Muslims for control of ethnically mixed Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In Belgrade, the capital of the Serbian-dominated remnants of Yugoslavia, more than 30,000 chanting demonstrators took to the streets late Sunday for the seventh day of protests against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic has been accused by Western nations of fomenting the ethnic warfare during Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

Levinssen said that newly arrived cargo-loading equipment both at Zagreb and Sarajevo would soon enable flights to transport up to 200 tons of food daily into the city. That is nearly double the 110 tons unloaded Sunday.

Land routes into the city, which sits in a broad valley, were also being reviewed by relief officials.

With the airport operating on only limited communications, relief planes flying close to the city Sunday frequently relayed messages to aircraft farther out, advising them whether to come ahead or to hold in place.

“It’s very much a team effort up there,” said Lt. Col. Larry Radov of the U.S. Air Force’s 37th Airlift Squadron and senior officer aboard the first of the two American C-130s into Sarajevo on Sunday. “We worked with Italian and German planes on the way in.”

A fourth U.S. aircraft arrived later in the day.

U.N. officials in Sarajevo stressed that the job of getting relief supplies from the airport across the final few miles into the beleaguered city proper was also proving to be extremely difficult.

Rick Garlock, a senior logistics coordinator for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees working here, described the security situation around the airport as “tense” and said U.N. supply convoys had been repeatedly held up by fighting along key routes into the city.

He said that, so far, all material that had landed during the first three days of the airlift had been moved to five warehouses in the city--usually within a few hours of arrival, but only with considerable risk.

Four of the warehouses are in Bosnian-controlled areas of the city, and one is in a Serbian area.

“It’s a very difficult situation,” he said. “Convoys have to wait an hour to an hour and a half because of the fighting.”

He said it was proving even harder to complete the final step of the distribution process: getting food from the warehouses to individual households.

Although the city was relatively quiet Sunday afternoon, occasional bursts of small-arms fire were audible coming from a district near the airport.

Garlock said that Sunday, convoys ranging in size from three to 12 trucks were escorted to the warehouses by armored personnel carriers.

“The APCs first reconnoiter the route, then set up at potential danger spots along the way,” Garlock said.

Shortly before the first American C-130 arrived Sunday, a convoy made up of 12 trucks left the airport carrying nearly 120 tons of food supplies to make the relief effort’s first delivery to a Serbian warehouse.

Despite the arduous conditions, morale among the Canadian troops defending the airport seemed extremely high.

Some waved to visitors, while others exchanged light banter as they unloaded food supplies.

Sunday morning, the first Canadian aircraft landed at Sarajevo, and its crew was met personally by the commander of the airport’s defense force, Maj. Gen. Lewis W. MacKenzie.

Because of the poor communications at Sarajevo, U.N. officials are trying to funnel relief planes through Zagreb to better control the timing of flights.

French insistence on flying directly into Sarajevo from France has added to the confusion, Levinssen said.

“These wild flights cause a lot of trouble,” he said.

French aircraft were the first to land at Sarajevo, bringing relief supplies earlier last week.

Despite the drama and tension of the airlift, occasionally more mundane problems have stymied the flow of relief.

A Greek air force C-130 was delayed in its departure from Zagreb to Sarajevo for several hours Sunday because the privately owned Croatian fuel company at Zagreb airport demanded cash from the Greek pilot before agreeing to refuel the plane.

The pilot, Maj. Constantinos Moutsios, complained that he had to scrape together $3,000 cash for enough fuel to get to Sarajevo and back because the Zagreb company refused to take normal credit cards.

“How we are going to get back to Greece, I do not know,” he said. “My voice is not very good for singing.”