War, Winter Make Bosnia Asylum a Nightmare : Balkans: Every morning, orderlies collect the bodies of those too weak to make it through the night.

Mira Dubljevic can no longer wait for a peaceful solution to the war in her homeland. She died this month of malnutrition and cold.

Like thousands of others housed in institutions deprived of food, heat and visits from loved ones, the 43-year-old Bosnian Muslim succumbed to a lethal combination of hardships as politicians debated options for ending a war that daily exacts its cruelest toll on civilians.

The bitterly cold Balkan winter is the latest accomplice of hostile gunmen who have blocked aid deliveries to Bosnia and put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk.

Overwhelmed nurses and matrons at the Fojnica asylum, struggling to care for 900 mentally handicapped children and adults, say their charges are particularly vulnerable to the twin terrors of war and winter because they have been progressively weakened by starvation rations.

More than 150 have died at Fojnica since war broke out in April, according to director Kadira Pasic, including Dubljevic and two dozen others during the latest and most severe cold spell.

“It’s mostly the older ones who are dying, although we have also lost several children,” Pasic said. “Some are just too weak to last all night in the cold.”

Each morning, orderlies comb the frigid wards to collect the corpses of those residents who lacked the calories to rock themselves for warmth through the night.

“We are working here under the most primitive of conditions,” the director said woefully as the sounds of wood-chopping echoed from the asylum’s vast yard. “This was the most modern facility for the mentally handicapped in all of Yugoslavia before the war, and naturally it had central heating. Now we have to cut our own wood for stoves the aid agencies brought in, and there are not enough of them to keep all of the living spaces warm.”

Electrical supplies are frequently interrupted and washing machines have broken down, requiring matrons to work around the clock washing soiled linens by hand in cold water to prevent a catastrophic spread of disease among the debilitated population.

An overpowering odor of human waste emanates from the wards for older patients, who are at the end of the receiving line for increasingly scarce clean diapers and bedclothes.

Fojnica’s care-givers say the patients here are trapped by a deadly dilemma: Many will die of exposure or malnutrition before spring if the war is not stopped, yet the solution they see as the sole hope for halting the conflict could kill even more.

“If it comes to intervention, and the humanitarian aid is cut back because of it, our people will die,” said Pasic, mindful of Western warnings that relief teams might have to be pulled out of Bosnia for their own protection if the West orders military strikes to end the war. “But I cannot say that I’m against intervention because that is the only way to change the situation we have now, which is unbearable.”

The asylum depends entirely on monthly deliveries of food and medicine from a network of relief groups, who were able to push through Serbian rebel roadblocks only in September.

Deliveries are still irregular, and even at the best of times, the patients’ diet is limited mostly to bread and soup.

Bosnians living in institutions and in rural areas inaccessible to aid convoys are the most at risk, according to the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. The agency’s special envoy to the remains of Yugoslavia, Jose-Maria Mendiluce, has warned that 400,000 could die in the republic this winter.

Few in Bosnia put any faith in a diplomatic solution drafted at peace talks in Geneva, which proposes to divide the republic into 10 ethnic provinces. Since a map detailing the proposed division was disclosed in Geneva in early January, intensified fighting has broken out among the militias vying for control of each province.

One doctor, who declined to give her name, exuded the bitter disappointment felt by many Bosnians when she described the continued pursuit of a negotiated settlement as a “farce” conducted by Western governments embarrassed by their reluctance to take the hard steps needed to end the war.

Shells explode and bullets fly only a few miles away from here, but the asylum tucked at the end of a wooded valley and shielded by mountains on three sides has so far been untouched by the gunfire. Because of its naturally protected position, the rural facility designed only for children has become a last refuge for the unfortunate of all ages evacuated from other areas of Bosnia.

The influx of more charges at a time when the institute’s services have all but broken down has placed a heavy burden on the staff and boosted the risks for the original patients. Meager food supplies must be stretched even further, and matrons must practice triage in apportioning sleeping space near the wood stoves, with priority going to the youngest children.

While the physical hardships are taking their toll on those housed in isolated institutions like this one, the psychological damage has been even more wide-ranging.

Fojnica lies within the ever-shrinking finger of territory in central Bosnia still under the Sarajevo government’s control. More than 70% of the republic’s land has been conquered and occupied by Serbian gunmen, severing those areas and much of the rest of the former Yugoslav federation from any communication with the Fojnica home.

“Most of the children are too severely handicapped to understand what is going on. As long as their immediate needs are being met, they don’t seem to miss their relatives. I think it is much harder on the parents,” said nurse Saveta Beba, explaining that only a handful of the residents are from nearby towns where it remains possible to travel.

Some patients, like Jelena Susac, have the misfortune of understanding the horror surging around them. The 9-year-old girl from Sarajevo is a deaf person who suffers no mental handicaps. She was moved to the Fojnica facility for refuge when the Serbian guns began firing on the capital in April, a move that has cut her off from her family living only 15 miles away.

“She is very sad and longs for her mother,” Beba said, ruffling Jelena’s cropped head. “We haven’t heard from her parents since the war began. We don’t even know if they are still living.”

As long as the front line dividing the Serbian rebels and Bosnian government forces remains several miles to the east, Fojnica workers say they are confident that they will somehow keep the asylum running.

But with little promise of a lasting peace settlement, workers say they have more than the brutality of winter to fear.

“What we fear most is that the war will come here,” said Zdenka Jovcic, an attendant watching younger children. “We have a cellar here, but it is not large enough for everyone, so we would have to take some of the children into the woods to hide. If the war comes, we are finished. We have no place to run to from here.”

Times Vienna Bureau chief Williams was recently on assignment in Bosnia.