Wounded Child Airlifted From Sarajevo--Thousands Remain : Victims: Girl, 5, will be treated in London. ‘Precarious existence’ for others is decried.

A critically wounded 5-year-old girl was airlifted out of Sarajevo on Monday for emergency care in Britain, but for the hundreds of thousands of civilians left behind, health and living conditions remain appalling and dangerous, a public health expert said.

Cesarean sections are performed by candlelight at Sarajevo’s power-starved hospital; residents take long treks under sniper fire to get fresh water, and international relief operations feeding Sarajevo managed last month to bring in just 60% of the needed food, said the expert, Donald Acheson.

Former chief medical adviser to the British government, Acheson completed a fact-finding mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s battered and besieged capital this month on behalf of the World Health Organization.

Of Sarajevo’s estimated 350,000 blockaded residents and tens of thousands of people in nearby towns and villages, the Briton concluded bleakly, many are “leading the most precarious sort of existence possible” in spite of recent moves toward peace.

The physician said he was particularly frightened by what he said was the decision of Sarajevo authorities to effectively shut the mental ward of the city’s hospital--an act he said would put scores of psychotics and helplessly demented patients into a gunfire-raked cityscape.

Irma Hadzimuratovic, 5, wounded July 30 in a Serbian mortar attack that killed her 30-year-old mother, came to personify the plight of Sarajevo’s civilians as their city perishes around them.

Her toys at her side, the little girl was carried onto a British transport plane on an inflatable rubber stretcher Monday, and the plane took off for the American Bosnia aid relief base in Ancona, Italy. There, she was transferred to an air ambulance flight for Britain.

A team of doctors stood by at London’s renowned Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children as Irma arrived. Dr. Kathleen Wilkinson said Irma was in stable condition after her arrival but may need an abdominal operation, the Associated Press reported.

In addition to her injured stomach, Irma suffered severe spinal and head wounds in the mortar attack. U.N. officials had said that any decision to remove her had to be taken by a committee.

Faced with U.N. red tape and hand-wringing, Irma’s doctor, Edo Jaganjac, brought the girl’s case to world attention and raised an international media storm that evidently forced U.N. officials and the British to arrange Monday’s evacuation. But, his voice choked with emotion, Jaganjac said the flight was “probably too late.”

“She is losing contact with reality,” Jaganjac said. “She said last night that she had a little doll in her stomach and it hurts.”

Acheson, who had been World Health Organization representative in Sarajevo from July, 1992, until last March, told a news conference in Zagreb that it was necessary to view Irma’s case in the “context” of a full-scale urban siege in which two to three children have been dying each and every day.

The British official said it was imperative that Bosnia’s war end before the already undernourished people of Sarajevo have to endure another winter. But he paid tribute to their doughty and determined nature.

“People retain their dignity and self-respect,” Acheson said. Women in Sarajevo, for example, still carefully apply makeup and regularly shampoo their hair--though they need to use minute quantities of precious water often obtained at the risk of their lives.

“It says something about the people--they are unbroken,” Acheson said.