Bosnian Girl May Die if She’s Not Evacuated

Sarajevo doctors are pressing relief agencies to evacuate a 5-year-old girl with abdominal wounds, saying she will die soon without proper treatment.

The doctors, interviewed Sunday, complained that officials representing the U.N. high commissioner for refugees are dragging their feet on the demand to get Irma Hadzimuratovic out of the besieged city. But a UNHCR official said the agency had to solve a host of problems first.

Irma was wounded July 30 in her neighborhood about two miles from central Sarajevo. The shell that wounded her killed her mother and wounded three other children.

“If this kid stays in this hospital, she will die,” Slavenka Strauss, an intensive care doctor, said Sunday. “Despite the fact that she has been seriously wounded, she has great chances to survive if evacuated to any other hospital.”

Her doctor, Davorka Matkovic, said Irma’s condition had deteriorated since the U.N. refugee agency was first notified on Thursday. She complained that U.N. agency officials “have raised 100 problems connected to the evacuation of this poor child; at the same time I know of cases when it took them only hours to evacuate other wounded.”

But U.N. representative Peter Kessler said the situation was more complex than it seemed.

He said a medical evacuation plane had to be provided, a country and hospital willing to accept the child had to be found and a visa issued. That could take weeks, he said.

“Every day in Sarajevo a child is wounded or killed,” he said. “Sarajevo is a city under siege, and this child is a representative of what the situation in Sarajevo is.”