6 Die in Scramble to Flee Bosnia Enclave

At least six people died Wednesday in the desperate struggle for space on a convoy of U.N. trucks evacuating women, children and the elderly from Srebrenica, the most vulnerable of the besieged Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia.

A panicked crowd stampeded toward the 14 trucks in Srebrenica, and in the urgent scramble to climb aboard, at least two children were trampled to death, U.N. officials and eyewitnesses reported.

“Thousands of people were trying to get on board. Desperation was so great, there was no way to stop them,” said Laurens Jolles of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

At least four more people, two of them children, died on the 45-mile journey to Tuzla, apparently crushed or unable to breathe in the squeeze of 2,000 bodies compacted together on the open-top cargo beds of the vehicles. Tuzla, northwest of Srebrenica, is the largest remaining Bosnian government stronghold in the region. There were unconfirmed reports from Tuzla’s morgue that a fifth child also had been crushed to death.

“Nobody shot at us, but people died just because there were so many people in the trucks and they didn’t have enough air,” Zafa Mustafic, a 38-year-old woman, told the Reuters news agency.

U.N. officials quickly suspended the evacuation operation.

“We are putting this evacuation on hold until we get sufficient U.N. presence on the ground in Srebrenica so we can have an evacuation in a dignified and organized manner,” said U.N. relief official Peter Kessler in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

Sarajevo Radio reported that Srebrenica’s emergency war council also announced that it was suspending the operation on the grounds that it was tantamount to aiding the besieging Serbian forces in “ethnic cleansing,” their drive to expel all Muslims from Serb-captured areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Srebrenica has been under attack for almost a year, its usual population doubling to nearly 60,000 as refugees from the region fled the attacks by Serbian rebels fighting the declaration of independence from the former Yugoslav federation.

After weeks of blocking U.N. or Red Cross convoys carrying humanitarian aid to Srebrenica, Serbian military commanders agreed to a cease-fire last week and to permit the evacuation of all civilians except able-bodied males from Srebrenica.

The first evacuation convoy removed about 2,340 refugees from the town Monday. There were six deaths on that occasion, some occurring when a tailgate burst open, spilling evacuees onto the road.

The 72-hour-old cease-fire appeared to be very fragile, U.N. spokesman Cmdr. Barry Frewer told the Associated Press. Frewer said U.N. vehicles came under small arms fire at Sarajevo airport. Bosnian government officials charged that Srebrenica was under renewed attack, and radio reports charged that Serbs had torched nearby villages.

Relief workers said people in Srebrenica are frantic to escape the imminent overruning of the Muslim pocket, as well as the chronic shortages of food, medicine and shelter. Most of them are afflicted with scabies and body lice and many are malnourished.