39 Escape Sarajevo in Medical Evacuation : Bosnia: The sick and wounded are flown to Britain and Sweden in first major airlift. Hundreds are left behind.

A lucky few escaped the grim prison of Sarajevo on Sunday in the first major medical evacuation of its 16-month siege.

They left behind hundreds of other casualties and a bitter international dispute over who deserves to be taken out.

But Sarajevo’s war-weary people shrugged off the bickering, saying the rescue was better late than never and they were grateful for fresh hope for at least some victims.

The mercy airlift evacuated 39 sick and wounded adults and children on two military transport planes bound for Britain and Sweden.

Among the 21 who landed in Britain on Sunday afternoon was Belma Shalaka, a 3-year-old girl who had to be placed on an artificial respirator during the flight.

Like Irma Hadzimuratovic, the 5-year-old girl whose emergency evacuation to London last week provided motivation for the airlift, she has meningitis and needs treatment urgently. The evacuees were bound for hospitals that can offer a level of care unavailable in the besieged capital.

Eighteen patients arrived in Sweden on Sunday evening.

An embittered U.N. doctor said the airlift had turned into a public relations show, parading sick and wounded children like “animals in a zoo.”

Patrick Peillod, French head of the U.N. medical evacuation committee, said the mission had been hijacked by a British team with orders to please public opinion back home.

“It is a show,” he told reporters. “And I don’t like it.”

But Mukesh Kapila, a senior British health adviser, denied charges that cynical, popularity-seeking governments were sent to Sarajevo to find mangled children whose anguish would pluck the heart strings of television viewers.

“I don’t think any of these injured people here are or have been treated as cattle,” he said, adding that Britain was ready to take more cases.

On the streets of Sarajevo, people said the West was plainly out to salve its conscience but that didn’t matter.

“It’s never too late for the sick and the wounded. . . . Whatever the reasons for helping us now we should be grateful,” one woman said.

At least 400 more casualties remain imprisoned by the siege, crippled by horrible war wounds or wasting away from diseases that could be treated in a civilized world.

“We stress there are many more critically ill and wounded people in Bosnia,” said Peter Kessler, spokesman in Sarajevo for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees.

Serbian, Croatian and Muslim armies fighting in central Bosnia to dismember the doomed republic kept up the killing over the weekend, oblivious to the much-publicized rescue.

Sarajevo’s 350,000 citizens were still trapped with little running water, power, medicine or fresh food--and still living under the deadly menace of Serbian artillery.

Serbs withdrew from two recently captured peaks overlooking the city Saturday but still held the semicircle of heights from which they have battered Sarajevo almost with impunity since the war began in April, 1992.

Snipers claim victims almost every day, and the only way in and out without crossing the front line is by military transport plane.