To Save Her Child, Muslim Flees a Feared Slaughter : Bosnia: Serbs ‘are killing us,’ mother says after harrowing evacuation. But thousands are left behind.

When 14 flatbed trucks pulled into the savaged town of Srebrenica on Thursday, Azreta Habibovic stowed her emaciated baby daughter inside her denim jacket and clawed her way to the top of the panicked mob scrambling aboard.

Three artillery shells that had smashed into her latest place of refuge the night before had convinced the 27-year-old mother that it was time to choose between saving her toddler’s life or sacrificing two more Muslims to what she fears is an impending slaughter.

“I was determined to get onto that truck and I didn’t care if I was killed trying,” Habibovic said as she coaxed a tiny cup of milk into the mouth of Alida, her stunned and hollow-eyed, not-quite 2-year-old. “No one wants to stay. There is nothing to eat and the Chetniks (Serbs) are killing us.”

In the latest chaotic release of starved and terrified hostages of the Balkan conflict, 1,500 women and children braved an icy four-hour hurtle in the open trucks through burned villages and rock-throwing enemies to reach the relative safety of this Muslim stronghold 45 miles to the north.

Several women and at least one child were injured in the crush or when Serbs in the town of Bratunac stoned the convoy as it passed through. Thousands of other civilians were left behind, wailing and desperate.

“The Chetniks won’t be letting anyone else go, I know it. They cursed at us as we were driven out,” said Habibovic, an embittered war widow who refused to let a last chance for escape become the latest in a staggering series of losses that have robbed her of her husband, most relatives, her baby’s health and her home.

Despite exhaustion from the journey more suited to cattle than hapless victims of “ethnic cleansing,” Habibovic railed against Western indifference to the plight of Bosnian civilians being blasted daily from their homes.

“When is the world going to see what Serbia is doing to us?” she lamented, warning that Srebrenica could collapse under the onslaught within days.

Serbs have steadily advanced on the town that is one of only three eastern enclaves still home to Muslim Slavs, who were the largest of Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups, outnumbering both Serbs and Croats.

The nationalist forces are within a mile of the town center and have stepped up attacks this week despite a purported cease-fire, according to humanitarian relief workers recently returned here from the besieged town.

Fears that Bosnia’s rebel Serbs and their allies in Belgrade are softening up Srebrenica for a final kill were distressingly bolstered earlier Thursday when the commander of U.N. peacekeeping troops in the embattled republic was forced to retreat from the symbolic gesture of bringing a token force of foreign troops in to protect Srebrenica.

French Gen. Philippe Morillon and a small advance party of the 150 Canadian troops he ordered to Srebrenica were turned back by rebel gunmen and jeered by Serbian civilians who pelted their convoy with stones.

Bosnian government officials in the capital, Sarajevo, had resisted allowing a massive evacuation of Srebrenica, which has been starved by Serbian blockades of food aid at the same time that it has been swollen with tens of thousands of refugees forced to flee other vanquished areas of eastern Bosnia.

U.N. evacuation of endangered civilians, rather than defending them against shelling, has been characterized by some Sarajevo officials as complicity with the Serbian terror tactic of ethnic cleansing.

The U.N. refugee agency’s special envoy, Jose Maria Mendiluce, warned that Srebrenica has become a “test case” of the international community’s will to put a halt to the horrors gripping Bosnia.

Mendiluce complained bitterly that the most recent Serbian artillery barrages against the 50,000 Muslims huddled in and around Srebrenica had been deliberately targeted at the town’s hospital and refugee camps.

Deployment of the Canadian company had been vital to “reassure the population and make a military offensive against them more difficult,” Mendiluce said of Morillon’s failed gesture of stationing troops inside Srebrenica.

It was not the only setback Thursday for the U.N. aid operation in Bosnia. One of its convoys carrying food from Sarajevo’s airport to a Muslim suburb was found also to be carrying more than 7,500 rounds of ammunition.

The convoy had been stopped by Serbs at a checkpoint and searched. After the discovery of the ammunition, it returned to the airport, where more ammunition and bags of gunpowder were found hidden among sacks of flour.

The discoveries were embarrassing, and potentially dangerous, to U.N. officials, who have vehemently denied Serbian charges that they are smuggling arms to Bosnian Muslims.