The Tale of One Bosnian Girl’s Tragedy : War: An O.C. woman waged a battle in a war-torn city to save life of a badly wounded child.

Sonja Hagel descended into the cellar of Mostar’s civilian hospital. The upper floors were favorite targets of snipers, so when Hagel wanted to see patients, she had to tour the basement bomb shelter, where the few who make it to the facility are treated.

She walked past a room filled with injured on hospital cots, down a long corridor crammed with gurneys of more wounded, and toward the dim light of a corner room.

There, beside a soldier lying quietly on bloodstained sheets, Hagel found an eighth-grade girl named Mersiha Veledar.

Shot in the side weeks earlier by a sniper just outside her front door, Mersiha’s long frame and lanky limbs were contorted into a fetal position, exposing the white gauze that only partially covered the bullet wound. She turned slightly as Hagel approached, gazing at the visitors.

“Why would anyone shoot a 14-year-old girl?” Mersiha asked as she tried to adjust to a more comfortable position. “If you could take off the bandage, you would see such a hole!”

Her father, Hamo, though a Muslim, sided with Croats when fighting broke out between the two groups in Mostar. The city has been racked by skirmishes between forces of the Bosnian Croats, or HVO, and those of the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Army.

Because her family lived on the Croatian-controlled side of the once-picturesque Ottoman city, Mersiha was probably shot by another Muslim, only to be scooped up by an HVO soldier and driven to the hospital.

“I never thought about any differences between Muslims and Croats, but there are people who think they shouldn’t be friends,” the girl said.

Later, Hagel--a hospital administrator from Huntington Beach in California who had organized a 2 1/2-week mission to bring U.S. surgeons to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina--left the girl’s side to return to the hospital courtyard. But just as she was leaving in the ambulance that had brought her to the hospital, she caught sight of the hospital’s director, Miljenko Martinovic.

She leaped from the ambulance, leaving the HVO driver with his motor running, and strode back to the courtyard. Beside a pile of sandbags and below shattered windows taped over in plastic, Hagel asked Martinovic about Mersiha’s odds in a hospital without water, air conditioning and basic drugs.

What did he think about evacuating her from Mostar and, if possible, sending her to the United States? The surgeon smiled and at first tried to persuade Hagel that the young girl just might survive in Mostar. But, of course, it would be better for her most anywhere else.

“We’ll ask the parents tomorrow,” he said.

Hagel began plotting.

This was her third trip in two years to the Balkans, and she was determined to use her clout on the Croatian medical community. Everything she had done before had prepared her for the most difficult element of evacuating a person from war-ravaged Bosnia-Herzegovina--penetrating a bureaucracy seemingly designed to institute paralysis.

But first, she would have Dr. Louis Kwong examine the girl. The Beverly Hills orthopedic surgeon was in Mostar as part of the U.S. medical team. If Kwong said Mersiha Veledar critically needed further treatment, Hagel would try to arrange for her to go.

Hamo Veledar, the girl’s father, was waiting at the hospital the next afternoon. Pacing on a bare cement floor, he watched Kwong remove his daughter’s bandages, put pressure on her hip, and move her leg.

Kwong spoke with Hagel and the Mostar hospital physicians about the risk of infection, and about the possibility that without the proper antibiotic treatment, Mersiha would die. He was also concerned that infection might destroy the hip joint near the wound.

Hagel then explained to the girl’s father that if she were able to get Mersiha evacuated to the United States, one of the parents could go with her. But only one.

But Hamo Veledar, a dentist who worked for the Bosnian Croat forces, objected. He had to work. If his wife went, who would take care of their 4-year-old son? Either he and his whole family would go, or Mersiha would stay.

“In this time of war, I don’t want to split us up,” he said.

“It’s the U.S. government,” Hagel said, trying to explain through an interpreter that she had no power to change the regulations governing visas. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Hamo Veledar ran his fingers through his hair, then stalked over to a Mostar physician watching the exchange.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think this is crazy,” the physician answered testily. “It is a circus they have created. They are just using your daughter.”

Amid all the commotion, Kwong and Hagel returned to the girl’s bedside. Kwong leaned forward to hear her.

“Please don’t let me die,” Mersiha Veledar begged. “I want to live. Please save me.”

Her father was holding firm.

“Thank you for all your help,” he said. “But we must stay together.”

Stunned and frustrated, Hagel and Kwong started to leave and got as far as the parking lot before they decided to try one more time. A member of the hospital’s staff was brought in to interpret.

Noting Veledar’s persistent queries about who was going to take care of his 4-year-old son, Hagel promised to ask whether a visa could be granted for the boy as well as the mother. If that was the case, Hamo Veledar said he would agree. Hagel put her hand out, touched his crossed arms and said: “I’ll do what I can.”

Hagel got on the phone with Dr. Goran Dodig, the head of the largest nearby hospital in the port city of Split in Croatia. Should a helicopter be arranged to transport the teen-ager? Perhaps a call to U.N. protection forces in the area? Because of the possibility that an abscess would rupture and kill Mersiha, time was short.

Kwong was concerned about the girl’s chances. “The fact that the body is not mounting a good immune response means the body is not actually trying to fight the infection off,” he said of Mersiha. “The only thing that has kept her alive is that she started out strong. But as you can see, she looks like she survived a concentration camp.

“She’s using the one thing she had to her advantage: her good health and her youth,” he said. “And now, her time is running out.”

The next day, Hagel, who had returned to Split, arranged for permission for the first leg of the journey to Dodig’s hospital. But hospital officials said that Hamo Veledar had returned to his original insistence that he and his entire family must leave together.

By the next morning, four days after Hagel first decided to help, Dodig himself brought the word: The hospital chief would arrange for Mersiha to be put on an ambulance and driven about 70 miles to Split.

The move was shrewd, bypassing the bureaucracy and permissions needed to transport her by helicopter and sidestepping any potential criticism that a Muslim was being given preferential treatment while Croats were being refused emergency airlifts from hospitals under siege in central Bosnia.

Hagel just leaned her head back against a window in relief. Her eyes welled with tears. “I thought she was gone,” she said.

All four members of the Veledar family arrived in Split later that afternoon. Hamo Veledar had wangled special permission to accompany his daughter.

That afternoon, only a few moments after Mersiha was safely in the emergency room in Split with her father and medical specialists hovering over her, her mother, Meliha, was able to take a breather.

As she stood beside the orange waiting room chairs, standing guard over the few bundles of possessions the family had managed to carry out of Mostar, Meliha Veledar talked about what happened the day she stepped outside her house with her two children to go to a relative’s house.

Mersiha “was only three or four meters behind me,” Meliha Veledar began. The sniper “was trying to kill me, but he hit her instead. She fell beneath the balcony. I saw that she had been shot. I panicked. I didn’t know whether to help (my son) or her.

“I ran across the street, and left him with other people there. I ran to where (Mersiha was). I first looked to see if she had been hit in the head. I tried to pick her up, and I couldn’t. There was shooting all around. Then my son came back, and tapped me on the shoulder. Finally, one HVO soldier picked her up. He told me to pick up my (other) child and run.”

For now, she said, “I just want my daughter to be better.”

Hagel appeared from the emergency room, to bring the news that her daughter’s chances of recovery were improving. Every ounce of reserve Meliha Veledar had retained gushed out in hugs and kisses.

“You are a gift from heaven,” she said to Hagel, who smiled in return.

Mersiha never made it to the United States.

Hagel returned a short time later and lined up a team of doctors at Century City Hospital in California, where she is an administrator. She also arranged for a medical evacuation through the International Organization for Migration. But at the last minute, Mersiha’s father had a change of heart and decided against the evacuation.

“She’s doing well in Split,” Hagel said Thursday, “but she needs more treatment. Her hip is in a situation that could be tragic.”

Despite all the money she raised, all the arms she twisted, all the bureaucrats she battled, she could not persuade the one person who mattered.

“He doesn’t want the family separated,” Hagel said. “There is a lot of anxiety and fear . . . (and) he thinks that because visually she’s getting better, she doesn’t need to be evacuated.

“I can’t make the father do what he doesn’t want to do.”

For additional information, write to “Operation Second Chance,” Attention: Sonja Hagel, 7605 Santa Monica Blvd, No. 685, West Hollywood, Calif. 90046, or call (310) 458-2849.