Bosnia Muslims Feel Victims of Vacillating West

The tiny, shrouded corpse of 10-month-old Vedad Hamzic joined a dozen battle victims in the Kosevo Hospital morgue Monday in what many in this disillusioned capital consider sadly appropriate testimony to the West’s contribution to the Bosnian crisis.

Vedad was not one of the 24 Sarajevans killed by Serbian shells and mortars the previous day, when U.N. troops here to observe but not intervene in the war counted more than 1,400 “impacts” on the city.

The curly-haired boy died from encephalitis that went untreated for more than two weeks after detection because U.N. forces refused to allow the infant’s parents from the suburb of Hrasnica to cross the siege lines they patrol near the Sarajevo airport.

Desperate to get care for their child available only in the city, Vedad’s parents braved both Serbian sniper fire and the U.N. security cordon to make a death-defying dash across the airport tarmac under cover of night and into the heart of the capital during one of the fiercest bombardments witnessed this year.

When the couple finally reached Kosevo Hospital, the child’s infection was so advanced that he died a few hours later, said Bisera Vranic, head of neurological treatment at the crowded hospital complex overwhelmed with the human wreckage of war.

“All guilt for the death of this child rests with UNPROFOR,” the angry doctor charged, referring to the U.N. Protection Force, which is deployed at the airport to provide security for a humanitarian airlift.

The U.N. troops control the sole access point into the city on condition they allow no civilians to use it as an escape route from the encircled capital to the government-held territory on the other side.

“For 3 1/2 hours he lay in trenches with his parents as they tried to get him across the airport,” Vranic said of the Hamzic boy, who died as she vainly tried to arrest the infection. “By the time they got him here, it was just too late.”

Sarajevans say they have become used to the horrors of the indiscriminate shelling that has ravaged their city and compelled those who refused to abandon it to shield themselves from the random shooting by huddling indoors or scurrying through back alleys rather than risking a walk along the riverfront boulevard in the snipers’ scopes.

But what many claim they cannot get used to is the constant disappointment they have suffered as a result of having counted on outside forces to do the right thing.

The most recent plan of the international community, which proposes to herd the remaining Bosnians into six U.N.-protected safe areas, is seen here as the latest in a long line of failures by the world’s leading democracies to live up to their own vaunted principles.

“We are now being humiliated beneath any indignity. The West has shown its true face,” Vranic said bitterly. “If they have decided to exterminate a race, why don’t they tell us so we can do something for ourselves? This seems like a biological test to see how long we will last.”

Bosnians committed to the integrated life embodied in this once-elegant capital have withstood for 14 months a deadly Serbian drive to add Sarajevo to the vast stretch of territory conquered by nationalist gunmen and expunged of non-Serbs.

They say they put their faith in U.N. resolutions promising help for the beleaguered civilians clearly identified by outraged Western countries as the victims of savage aggression. European security accords spoke of the sanctity of borders and threatened those who used violence to change them, further boosting the confidence of the predominantly Muslim people under siege that justice would ultimately prevail and end the brutality inflicted on them.

Yet after each lengthy and agonizing diplomatic venture, the proponents of a united and ethnically mixed Bosnia saw their cause set back. First, U.N. troops were deployed, but without either the equipment or mandate needed to deter the attacks that have continued, even intensified, as the foreign soldiers helplessly watched.

Later, with the West’s capitulation to ethnic division with the peace plan proposed by U.N. mediator Cyrus R. Vance and the European Community’s Lord Owen, Bosnians realized that the international community accepted the Serbian demand for segregation. And when even the Vance-Owen plan failed to satisfy the rebellious Serbs, the United States, Russia and Western Europe came up with the Washington “action plan” proposing “safe havens” but stating no intention of restoring the U.N.-member state.

“They want to put us in these safe zones so Bosnia won’t be a problem for them anymore,” Vice President Ejup Ganic complained in an interview. “Maybe they’ll come back to us in a few years. . . . But with this plan, the international community is killing us.”

By proposing arms deliveries and U.S. air strikes to break the noose of Serbian artillery destroying the capital, Washington raised the hopes of the Bosnian people that relief was on the way, Ganic said.

But those expectations were crushed two weeks ago when President Clinton retreated to the “havens” plan on the advice of militarily skittish European allies.

“I feel like I was cheating the people, because I was the one advocating Western democracy all the time,” said Ganic, an MIT doctoral graduate who lived for 10 years in the United States. “I believed in it.”

The now-evaporated prospect of Western intervention has disillusioned the people, but it has also instilled a stronger fighting spirit among Bosnia’s soldiers, who say they now realize that the rescue of their country is entirely up to them.

“We waited too long and trusted the world too much,” said Cazim Bulbul, a 37-year-old fighter wounded by shrapnel in Sunday’s fierce clash with Serbian forces on the Trebevic mountain slopes that rise from Sarajevo’s old town center.

Sarajevans concede that those still fighting for Bosnia are so outgunned by the Serbs that their prospects for military success look bleak. But many make convincing arguments that the victims of an internationally condemned aggression can hardly be expected to simply succumb, for the West’s convenience, to virtual imprisonment in the blighted war zones now being proposed as safe areas.

“Hope is at a very low level that we will survive,” said 50-year-old Ervin Hibert, a Bosnian Croat measuring flour donated by foreign aid agencies into the plastic sacks proffered by his apartment-house neighbors.

A financial adviser for the local school district and the father of two teen-agers, Hibert expresses the sad mixture of disbelief and wishful thinking that compels Sarajevans to hold out hope of another Western turnabout.

“People will not surrender. We have to live, and to live we must fight,” Hibert said calmly. “But how long we will be able to do this, we just don’t know. We have the right to defend ourselves, but someone should help us.”