Medical Aid Group Pulls Out of Bosnia

A Western relief agency that had been bringing in surgeons to mend some of the most grievous wounds of Bosnia’s war suspended the project Thursday, claiming that medieval conditions in Sarajevo hospitals subject their malnourished patients to exposure and disease.

“We no longer feel we can operate safely,” said Philip Garvin, director of the Bosnian office of Humanitarian Aid Medical and Development, a British relief group. “The patients are at too much risk to sustain operations.”

Like the rest of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s capital, surgery theaters are at the mercy of Serbian gunmen who routinely cinch off supplies of food, fuel and medicines, forcing makeshift operations by candlelight in the freezing cold.

“To perform elective surgery under these conditions is life-threatening,” Garvin said in announcing an end to the project at Sarajevo’s unheated State Hospital.

Since June, the aid agency had been bringing in specialists for reconstructive surgery that averted some amputations.

Its decision to give up, made after several procedures were botched because of power failures and lack of water, provided the latest example of the frustration that humanitarian relief workers endure in trying to ease civilian suffering while the war rages on.

As the outlook in Sarajevo remained grim, U.N. officials who convened a meeting of rival Bosnian political leaders in Geneva announced that they had won fresh assurances from all three factions that humanitarian aid will be granted safe passage through the battle zones.

The accord announced after the talks--the first face-to-face meeting of the Bosnian combatants for two months--raised some hopes that a humanitarian catastrophe could be avoided.

In this second winter of a war that has already killed 200,000 people, more than 2.7 million civilians rely on foreign aid for their survival.

But fierce fighting along the aid routes persisted while the faction leaders talked in the Swiss city, and relief workers in icy Sarajevo said they doubted that the latest agreement was a breakthrough.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata claimed to be “very hopeful” of an improved relief operation after gaining assurances from Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Croat chieftain Mate Boban.

But another official of her agency expressed grave reservations as to the value of verbal assurances from politicians and warlords whose forces routinely target civilians and have repeatedly violated previous agreements.

The U.N. refugee agency suspended relief convoys to central Bosnia nearly three weeks ago after fighting along one aid route killed a Danish driver. That suspension cut the lifeline to 1.5 million civilians who were already considered among the most at risk.

Attempts to bring supplies to children and the elderly at front-line institutions have also been thwarted by nationalist gunmen.

Five patients at a heatless mental hospital only a few miles west of Sarajevo have died from exposure since temperatures dropped to freezing earlier this week, said Ray Wilkinson, Sarajevo spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency.

Other patients at the desolate facility in Pazaric were found to be wandering around naked. And 600 retarded children and adults at two other neglected facilities near Fojnica were at risk of freezing or starving to death because Croatian gunmen continue to block U.N. efforts to deliver supplies, U.N. refugee agency sources said.

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The Fojnica hospitals straddle the violent Muslim-Croatian front line west of here, exposing the patients to recurring waves of shelling. Pazaric is nominally under the control of the Muslim-led government, but supplies would have to pass through Serbian-held areas.

Diplomatic initiatives aimed at negotiating an end to the war ceased in late September, after the Sarajevo government refused to endorse an ethnic partitioning of Bosnia.