Five Little Girls, Bleeding and Broken on a Bosnian Street : Balkans: Deaths symbolize one town’s dilemma--evacuate the children, perhaps signaling capitulation, or risk keeping them home.

The east bank of the Una River in Bihac is the side of town that Serbian militiamen in the surrounding hills particularly want to pound. It contains most of the city’s factories.

But there are houses there, too, and schools. Dzenana Zjakic lives there, in a small house tucked between two larger ones. One day a mortar shell fell into her quiet street and killed five little girls who were playing in the sunshine. Zjakic hasn’t been to her house for two weeks, even to get clothes, largely because she cannot get the idea of the little girls, bleeding and broken in the street, out of her mind.

At least 103 other people have been killed here since June 12, when Serbian gunmen began firing daily on the 70,000 mostly Muslim inhabitants of Bihac in an attempt to drive them from their homes in an operation they call “ethnic cleansing.” But the killing of the five girls is infamous all over Bihac, mentioned repeatedly by officials and ordinary residents as a symbol of the city’s suffering.

The girls’ deaths have become a symbol of another controversy in this struggle for survival against a war machine bent on uprooting the 300,000 Muslims who live in the area of Bosanska Krajina in northwest Bosnia.

The controversy is focused on the children of Bihac, and it comes down to this: Should they remain here in the city, essentially hostages to the conflict? Or should they be evacuated, thereby signaling to the Serbian militias that the people here, like those in a dozen other northern Bosnian towns, are ready to capitulate to the “ethnic cleansers”?

“We have 8,000 children in Bihac under 6 years old,” said Zjakic, who works in the local office of the International Committee of the Red Cross. “We also have 1,000 pregnant women. I don’t think we have any choice. We have to get them out.”

But Dr. Irfan Lubjankic, who works in the local hospital and also holds the town’s highest office as president of the District Assembly, disagrees.

“It is true that we have thousands of children here, and there are people who want them to leave,” Lubjankic said. “But I think this is unacceptable. It would be the first sign of weakness. It would be convenient to let some mothers and children and sick people leave--but of course there would be a lot of healthy people who would leave, as well. But we have to realize that if they leave here, they may never be able to come back.”

It is a vicious dilemma, because the evacuation of women and children is the first sign that resistance is crumbling, said Lubjankic, basing his assessment on the experiences of other Bosnian towns that have faced the Serbian siege.

“It is very hard,” Lubjankic said, “but it is a matter of maintaining morale. If the women and children leave, then it is not the same. People worry about them more when they are gone than when they are here. They lose their will.”

Lubjankic may be the only city official arguing publicly against an evacuation of the children. But the debate has raged throughout the town.

A pediatrician at the hospital, who asked that her name not be used, appealed to the city government to work through the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for an evacuation.

“We are in a very bad situation here,” she said. “We do not have adequate food supplies. There is virtually no milk. There is no baby formula. We are running out of drugs. We are down to, perhaps, one week’s supply.”

Daily, she says, parents--mothers, particularly--come to her seeking help in getting out of Bihac. But the town is cut off, except from the rest of Bosanska Krajina to the north. And cities in that direction are already crowded with refugees.

A month after she made her request, the pediatrician was told an evacuation would be impossible.

“Why? I don’t want to know anything about politics,” she said. “But I don’t want children to be made hostages to a political problem.” Lubjankic, she said, “is both a politician and a doctor, and he answered as a politician.”

Nenad Ibrahimpasic, the mayor of Bihac, agrees with her.

“In my opinion, we have to evacuate them,” he said. “If not all of the women, at least all of the children up to the age of 15.

“But the problem is that we are surrounded by Serbs on all sides and there is no way out. There are three problems. First, we have to ask the Serbs in the (Croatian) Krajina to let the women and children pass through territory under their control. The second problem is that you cannot trust them and they would use that convoy for their own purposes. And the third problem is that Slovenia and Croatia are full of refugees already and we would have to start negotiation for visas with third countries.”

What the mayor and virtually everyone else in Bihac would like to see is international intervention--the massive force that would stop the Serbian attacks and end this nightmarish dilemma. But that solution seems unlikely.

In the meantime, the artillery shells and mortar rounds continue daily, driving up the tension. The city remains without electricity or telephone communications to the outside world. Food supplies are running out. And the children suffer.

“I know the children are having nightmares,” the mayor said. “I wonder what problems this is making for them, what kind of psychological damage it will inflict on them, for the rest of their lives.”

The mayor acknowledged that his children, and Lubjankic’s children, have left Bihac--a sore point with some residents, who argue that the politicians are willing to allow other people’s children to be held hostage by the Serbs but not their own. But both say their children left before the blockade went into effect in May.

In a shelter across the river, where the family of Dzanica Senija has been living for nearly two weeks in near-darkness, there is little doubt about what to do. The smallest of the children, a 3-year-old girl, has not been outside, her mother says, for two weeks. The mother is terrified of the random mortar shell in the street, like the one that killed the five little girls. She wants out of Bihac.

“It’s better to leave than to suffer here,” she said.