Battered Bosnians Revel in America, but Mourn the Life They’ve Lost : Civil War: U.S. will admit 3,000 such refugees, especially ex-detainees of Serb detention camps, relatives of U.S. citizens, rape victims. Wrenching stories include torture by a childhood friend.

The end of Umusa Selimovic’s life on a Bosnian farm came May 16, 1992, when she hid in the woods, clutching her baby granddaughter as she watched the Serbs execute her neighbors.

About 5 p.m., five Serbian military vehicles had entered Zaklopace, a village of 500 in eastern Bosnia. Selimovic, a 57-year-old widow, ran with 1 1/2-year-old Sanela and the child’s mother, Hurija.

Through the trees, they saw soldiers lining up and executing about 40 Muslims--including women and children--who had been on their way to till the fields. Whoever came along was shot or stabbed.

“Everyone was screaming, screaming . . . and bloodied,” she said.

When Selimovic came down from the hills about 5:30 p.m., “the whole village was lying dead, killed, in piles.”

Selimovic will carry the memories of that moment--and of all the horrors of the Yugoslav blood bath--to her grave.

But now, they are just memories. As she retold the story, she sat in her neat, walk-up apartment in Queens.

The State Department has agreed to grant U.S. residence to up to 3,000 Bosnian refugees, especially former detainees of Serb-run detention camps, relatives of U.S. citizens and victims of wartime rape. Selimovic and her son, Sead, 21, are among 139 Bosnians who immigrated to the United States in February.

The New York Assn. for New Americans, the resettlement agency that received them in this country under a State Department contract, pays for their rent, language lessons and vocational and psychological counseling.

In addition to a $630 per person lump sum from the federal government, each refugee receives $160 cash a month, transportation, Medicaid coverage and food stamps. Furniture and clothing are donated.

After the first 90 days of their stay, the Bosnians are eligible for help from Social Security. They must learn English and find jobs, but the time in detention camps has made the men near-invalids.

“We want to work. But we are broken,” said Sead Selimovic.

The Selimovics keep coming back to May 16, 1992. On that day, just hours before his mother fled the massacre, a Yugoslav official stopped Sead as he drove home from his job at a bauxite factory.

The ethnic Serb took him to the police station and questioned him at gunpoint. “I did nothing except that I am a Muslim,” Sead Selimovic said.

He was transported to the Karakaj camp near the town of Zvornik. During seven months in detention, he was fed two slices of bread a day and lost 60 pounds--one-third of his weight. Among the thousands of prisoners, “one man had the duty of counting how many had died,” he said.

One torturer was Nesa, a Serb who had been his best friend in the days when Serbs, Muslims and Croats lived peacefully in the Yugoslav federation--before the Serbs began “ethnically cleansing” territory by killing or driving out Croats and Muslims.

“I have to beat you or they will kill me,” Sead Selimovic quoted his old friend as saying, the last time Nesa came to torture him.

“I pulled together my courage, looked at him and said, ‘So, hit me, I will bear it.’ But I started to cry when I saw my best friend’s face,” he said.

Nesa turned and left. They never saw each other again.

“When they were younger, I gave Nesa the same food as my child,” Selimovic said, speaking in Serbo-Croatian. “I covered him with a blanket when he was cold, I cared for him the same as for my son. Why, why this?”

While Sead was imprisoned, his mother, sister-in-law and niece were on an odyssey. For three days, they wandered the countryside, then lived in a schoolhouse for a month. Eventually, they ended up in the embattled town of Tuzla.

While her daughter-in-law stayed to search for her soldier husband--eventually she found him, wounded in Bosnia--Selimovic moved on. Alone in winter, she crossed the border into Croatia on a truck and found refuge in a mosque in Zagreb.

Seven months later, having made her way to a relative’s home in Rijeka, Croatia, Selimovic got a call she did not expect.

“It was impossible, it was my Sead,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “He was alive. We couldn’t talk--he was crying, and I was crying.”

Her son had been released from camp. He was calling from Switzerland, “and he wanted to know if I would come to America with him.”

Osman Kozarac, a 47-year-old construction worker from the village of Gripavce, also came through Switzerland with his wife, Devla, and their four children. Kozarac was imprisoned in the Manjaca camp for five months.

Last year, 12-year-old Nihada Kozarac was living in a cave in the Bosnian woods with her mother, hiding from gunfire.

Now she attends a private school in Manhattan, thanks to an American, Christine Merser, who has mobilized volunteers to help the refugees and invited Nihada to share her spacious Central Park West apartment.

This kind of help from the American government and volunteers is gratefully accepted; no help comes from Bosnia.

“We cannot allow ourselves to encourage our citizens to leave their country,” said Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnian ambassador to the United Nations.

Besides, Sacirbey said in a telephone interview, “We have no status to get involved, and we have no money.”

But, in some ways, money is the least of the immigrants’ problems. Sead Selimovic suffered nerve, spine and hip injuries in the camp. There are rainy days when the vibrant, blond youth gets severe headaches as a result of the torturers’ blows to his head.

In June, the refugee agency made an appointment for him with a New York dentist who speaks Serbo-Croatian--and is a Serb.

“I told them I couldn’t do it. I was afraid I might hurt him,” Sead Selimovic said. “The way I feel right now, even if they handed me a Serbian child, I would be capable of killing him with my bare hands.”

His mother sat on a sofa by the windows, which were filled with fresh flowers that caught the spring sun. She was quick to refill a visitor’s cup with the thick, black coffee she once sipped with friends in her village.

Her dream is to reunite her family; she has had no contact with her three other sons since her arrival in the United States, though she did speak by phone with her daughter.

In the meantime, she and the other Bosnians in the American diaspora are sustained by memories of what the war has wrecked.

“We had a wonderful life there!” Sead Selimovic said.

Selimovic and her husband had lived on a large farm with their children, their daughter-in-law and granddaughter.

They raised their own cattle and sheep, grew vegetables, wheat and corn and cultivated orchards--which yielded hundreds of pounds of plums to make traditional slivovitz brandy.

“All we had to buy were things like salt, sugar and coffee,” Selimovic said proudly.

“Bosnia is better,” said 7-year-old Elvis Kozarac, grinning.

But Selimovic silenced him.

“No, my child, they chased us away there,” the matriarch said. “America is better now. We are here.”