Fear and Hopelessness Grip Muslims in a Bosnian Town

About 800 Muslims are left in this town, where once there were 2,000. And if those remaining had power over their immediate fate, they would be gone too--as soon as possible.

“For God’s sake, help us,” said one Muslim man who had been working with his neighbors to try to connect an automobile generator to the sprocket of an upturned bicycle in a vain attempt to generate enough electricity to power a radio. “Help us organize a convoy so we can get out of here.”

The remaining Bosnian Muslim residents of this once-peaceful town on the banks of the Una River on the northern Bosnian border are frightened, and they have given up hope of remaining here safely in the face of the “ethnic cleansing” that has swept out their neighbors and those from scores of surrounding villages.

They have now become pawns in a power struggle. On one hand, Serbian “extremists,” as the Muslims call them, are conducting a campaign of fear and economic intimidation against them, trying to force them to leave. And the campaign, by the testimony of dozens of villagers here, has succeeded.

But the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which has been pressed by Serbian authorities in the region to organize an official exodus for the Muslims, is resisting the pressure, insisting that the agency’s job is to care for refugees, not to help create them. Officials of the commissioner’s office say that to organize convoys to guarantee safe passage for the Muslims would make the United Nations an accomplice to the Serbian policy of “ethnic cleansing.”

For the Muslims remaining in such villages as Bosanska Kostajnica, however, the “cleansing,” while not yet physically accomplished, is psychologically complete.

At night, residents say, carloads of Serbian toughs--the Muslims say they are from outlying villages--drive through the Muslim district shooting guns into the air and sometimes at their houses.

The mosque, which marks the center of the neighborhood, has been blown up; its walls have collapsed and its minaret has crashed to the ground. (The Roman Catholic Church, once attended by the town’s Croatian population, also has been burned. The Orthodox Church, with mostly Serbian members, has remained untouched.)

Most of the Muslims here have not had jobs to go to in more than a year.

“We have no money,” said the man working on the generator, who declined to give his name. “We are running out of food. We are afraid of winter.

“We would like to leave as soon as possible. We would like to go to Germany, to France, anywhere. We are afraid. We are afraid that if Serbian people are killed anywhere (in fighting), they will come here and kill us. We want out.”

Last month, the Serbian regional authorities in the district headquarters at Bosanski Novi organized a convoy that removed 1,000 villagers of Bosanska Kostajnica to refugee centers in Croatia. But it was that same convoy, swollen to about 7,000, that caused the refugee commissioner’s office to dig in its heels in resistance to additional removals. The U.N. officials, in the wake of that exodus, protested that they had been “blackmailed” by the Serbs into participating in the cleansing operations.

Then, last week, the Serbian authorities in northern Bosnia told relief officials that 28,000 Muslims were “ready” to be escorted out of the country and asked for assistance from U.N. Protection Force personnel and from the refugee agency. Both agencies promptly refused, and the resistance has continued to harden.

“The message we’re putting across,” said refugee agency spokesman Peter Kessler, “is that the United Nations is not going to be blackmailed. We are not going to participate in ethnic cleansing.”

Kessler said the agency has sent “protection officers” into the northern Bosnian towns where Muslims are being pressed to leave but admitted that a “handful of men in United Nations vehicles”--whose job is to interview people whose human rights may have been violated--is “not likely to make much difference.”

Indeed, refugee agency personnel on Saturday were ordered out of the northern Bosnian town of Sanski Most, where Serbian officials and militias are in control. U.N. Protection Force jurisdiction ends at the Croatian-Bosnian border.

The distress of a young non-Muslim woman in Bosanska Kostajnica was evident as she led a small group of journalists to the Muslim area of the town, where she helped to translate their comments. She asked that her name not be published.

Before the war broke out between Croatia and Serbia last year, her father was the police chief in a larger section of Kostajnica across the river in Croatia. Her father, she said, is Croatian and has fled the town. Her mother is Serbian and, “possibly losing her sanity,” is trying to hold on to the family house, which has been bombed.

As for her own ethnicity, which never mattered here before, “I don’t know what to call myself,” the woman said. She is married to a Serb, and her fondest hope now is to leave with her husband and year-old daughter.

“I haven’t a real word for what has happened to us here,” she said. “There is no word for it. Everything that has happened here is crazy, something of the worst kind. Last month, when I saw that convoy go, the Muslim people leaving, I just cried. That was all I could do. I could cry and do no more. I don’t believe in anything in this country anymore. I just want to leave.”

The Muslims, she said, “are terrified. They cannot work. They have no money. They have no food. They are being forced to sign over their homes. They have nowhere to go. They are not living, they are only surviving.”

In the shade of a thick grape arbor, where three men were working on the bicycle and the generator, a neighborhood crowd quickly gathered, competing to appeal to the visiting foreigners for help to escape the town.

“No,” said one man, “we cannot stay here. There is nothing left for us now. We have to get out.”

“We went to the town government last week,” said another, “and asked to be allowed to leave. But they said there was no way for us to leave now.”

Every Muslim automobile in town, they said, has been confiscated by the Serbs. Only a few horses, belonging to farmers, remain.

Some of the Muslims, they said, had signed over their houses and property already, mostly to town authorities, and renounced any future claim to their possessions.

“I haven’t signed yet,” said one of the men. “But I will. I will sign it over to a Serbian friend.”

He would receive no money for it, he said. The only thing he would get in return would be the hope that, someday--if it ever became safe to return--his friend would return it to him. But all of that was a far distant hope. His larger concern was more immediate.

“Please,” he said, “do what you can. Help us get out of here.”