Freeing of Bosnia Captives Slowed by West’s Inaction : Balkans: Lack of refuge abroad prevents evacuation of notorious Serb-run camps that outraged the world.

Serbian extremists took Ibrahim Colak prisoner in May and burned down his house. They exiled his wife and three children to Tuzla, now itself a target of siege. For months, the Serbs tortured and starved their Slavic Muslim captives for defiling, with their very existence, the purity of a new Serbian state.

But Colak’s current suffering is not the fault of the Bosnian Serbs.

He is trapped in a miserable transit center in this bullet-riddled Croatian city because Western countries that demanded his freedom now refuse to take him in.

The evacuation of the notorious concentration camps set up by Bosnia-Herzegovina’s rebellious Serbs has been halted for lack of any haven to which relief workers can send those already freed. Cold, dank and squalid as the Serb-run camps may be, they are the only refuge open to at least 10,000 Bosnian prisoners of war whose mistreatment stirred international outrage only a few months ago.

“As long as we are here, that means that the others cannot get out,” Colak said of those left in the camps, including his four brothers. “We have to wait for third countries to take us, however long that takes, and hope our families will find us once we are in a safe place.”

Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross in August succeeded in securing promises from all warring factions in Bosnia to release prisoners of war to foreign intermediaries and to close down their camps.

Most of the Muslim- and Croat-held prisoners were released in exchange for equal numbers of those held by the Bosnian Serbs. That allowed detention centers in Mostar, Tomislav Grad and Livno to be emptied and put out of business.

But because the Serbs took many times more prisoners than did their rivals in the 7-month-old war, most of those still in detention are Muslim men, like Colak’s brothers.

Their release and survival now depend on Western largess.

“We cannot transfer these people out if we have nowhere to take them to. Most of them are civilians who were expelled from their homes and villages,” complained Pierre Gauthier, a Zagreb-based representative of the Red Cross. “We are obliged to help them flee to other countries, but so far the response has been too slow.”

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has been appealing from Geneva for months for the relatively wealthy countries of North America and Western Europe to open their borders to the most abused victims of the Bosnian war.

Fighting and “ethnic cleansing”--the largely Serbian practice of sweeping out other ethnic groups to create “ethnically pure” areas--have already killed 50,000 people in Bosnia, according to the estimates of Sarajevo officials. Almost 2 million others, mostly Muslim civilians, have been forced at gunpoint to abandon their homes.

Few foreign countries have taken in more than token handfuls of the refugees. That has left war-ravaged Croatia to deal with 700,000 homeless, and most of the rest of the displaced have been stranded in dangerous border camps or embattled Muslim strongholds like Tuzla and Bihac.

Wary of the humanitarian nightmare already in the making in mountainous Bosnia, the U.N. commission and the Red Cross got the Serbs to agree three weeks ago to a complete and immediate POW release by assuring the captors that the prisoners would be relocated abroad. The evacuation looks to some like complicity in the Serbs’ campaign of “ethnic cleansing.” But relief officials say their first responsibility is to save lives.

To leave the weak and emaciated Muslims in the hands of Serbian jailers through the winter would surely result in innumerable deaths, aid workers warn, because the crude camps and detention centers lack heat, food, medical care and plumbing.

Yet fewer than 800 former POWs and close relatives have been granted refuge abroad. That is delaying the closure of the brutal detention camps and exposing the prisoners to new forms of harm.

Lela, a 55-year-old construction worker taken prisoner at his home in Sanski Most nearly six months ago, was released from the Manjaca camp in northern Bosnia on Saturday but had to leave behind his only son.

“I don’t want to talk about what they did to me there for fear they will retaliate against my son,” said the bleary-eyed Muslim, perched atop a scaffold of bunk beds in a cluttered and foul-smelling room. “If there is any military action taken against the Serbs while men are still in the camps, (the prisoners) will be harmed as punishment.”

Many of the 755 men freed from Manjaca over the weekend fear their relatives and compatriots will be vulnerable to the elements and sadistic captors as long as they are in enemy hands.

One 60-year-old Muslim from Prijedor says he will remain silent about the indignities he suffered in hopes of sparing a missing son, though he knows in his heart that his son is probably dead.

“As a father, I cannot accept that he is gone,” he says. “He was so young and fresh-faced, a doctor with his whole life to look forward to. But his name was called one night, along with 10 other professionals--professors, engineers, economists--and we never saw them again. I pray each day for a miracle, that he was able to get out and join my wife in Prijedor.”

No one has the heart to tell him or other former prisoners not yet caught up on the progress of the war that Prijedor and other northern Bosnian cities have fallen to the Serbs and been thoroughly “cleansed.”

A gray-haired man from the town of Kljuc, who identifies himself only as an “intellectual” for fear Serbian rebel leaders would know who he is, says he plans to wait here until his son is released so the family can leave together for a new home abroad. But volunteers at the barracks say no more POWs will be brought to safety until the 1,600 trapped here now are offered somewhere else to stay.

The former army barracks is the only facility that will receive outbound POWs. It is so packed that it imitates the squalor of life in the camps the prisoners escaped.

Three-tier bunks are crammed side to side, with only enough room at the metal footboards for the exiles to crawl in. Meals are eaten standing up in the muddy halls or in a rear courtyard puddled with rain and sewage. A cloud of cheap tobacco smoke fails to overpower the stench of the barracks’ flooded toilets or the odor of unwashed bodies living too close for hygiene or comfort.

Relief workers risking their lives to evacuate the Bosnian prisoners have reached their own level of outrage at the world’s collective indifference.

“It’s not a good feeling to go around being ashamed of your own country. But that’s how I feel,” said Alf Nordstrom, a Swedish volunteer with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies that is managing the Karlovac barracks. “My own country’s response to this crisis has been to take in 150. That is better than most, but still I have to hang my head when I walk in this place.”

Nordstrom says he worries that the foreign invitations for shelter will diminish even further as those in the West focus on the approaching holidays, when government officials who might be asked to organize refugee relief efforts are likely to be away from their jobs for days or weeks.