Sarajevo’s Human Targets Despair as Winter Nears : Bosnia: The West says it won’t permit capital’s ‘strangulation.’ But life is being choked out of the city.

Pasa Kulendar weeps as she relates how her neighbor’s son chopped down her plum tree. She is not distressed over loss of the last vestige of her cherished orchard; rather, she is overcome with gratitude for the wood that may keep her from freezing to death this winter.

The 71-year-old, bedridden widow also has a secure source of water, at least as long as someone kind enough to fetch it is at hand. Local workers have reopened an ancient well that was capped in her garden 40 years ago when city water pipes were extended to her hillside home.

For at least a few families near Kulendar’s walled garden, the efforts of encircling Serbian gunmen to deprive them into surrender have been foiled.

Her meals, though, are now limited to gluey clumps of flour floating in broth, just enough caloric sustenance to keep the despondent woman alive. The U.N. relief packages on which this entire city of nearly 400,000 depend have slimmed down over a flagging 16-month airlift, providing each Sarajevo resident less than half of a survival ration.

This Bosnian capital is described by humanitarian relief workers as the bright spot in the bleak, besieged republic this winter, because meager supplies of flour, rice and beans can be flown in to the U.N.-run airport, bypassing the legions of renegade gunmen thwarting deliveries on the ground.

But on the grim fringes of Sarajevo, from the shell-pocked high-rises of Alipasino Polje to the centuries-old Turkish cottages in Kulendar’s Kovaci district, the human targets of a nationalist rebellion that has cut off this European city for 19 months are hungry, shivering and huddled in the dark.

Western politicians such as President Clinton have vowed that they will not allow the “strangulation” of Sarajevo. But the elderly and infirm, like Kulendar, provide a convincing argument that life is slowly being choked out of the city.

“I would be dead now if it wasn’t for my devoted friend. I’m such a burden to her,” Kulendar sobs, kissing the hand of 54-year-old Advija Selimbegovic, who checks on her invalid neighbor five or six times a day. She helps Kulendar to the bathroom, feeds the wood stove and prepares a starchy gruel for her dinner.

Selimbegovic shushes the tearful older woman, smoothing back her matted hair. But out of earshot, she confides to a visitor that Kulendar lately talks of wanting to take her own life.

At least five elderly Sarajevans have killed themselves in despair over winter hardships in the past two weeks. Two jumped from the upper-story balconies of heatless high-rises, and three others hanged themselves, said Alija Hodzic, director of the morgue at Kosevo Hospital, where the bodies of the pensioners were taken.

“This will surely happen with greater frequency as winter proceeds,” Hodzic predicted. “There are so many people who cannot take care of themselves, and unlike last year, there is no longer any reason for hope.”

Even conditions at the hospital, a prewar model of efficiency, have deteriorated to what doctors describe as a return to the Middle Ages.

“Last winter we had no electricity for long periods, but we had a generator and enough oil to keep vital equipment and the heaters going. This year we have no fuel at all,” said Faris Gavrankapetanovic, one of Kosevo’s overwhelmed surgeons.

He said the hospital also has sustained at least 15 direct artillery hits in recent weeks, forcing hospital staff to pull back from rooms with exposed windows, where they had been operating to take advantage of daylight in the absence of electricity.

“It is different from one day to the next, but the fear is permanent. It is another part of the slow strangulation of the city,” Gavrankapetanovic said of the Serbian forces surrounding the capital. “Their aim has been the same from the beginning of the war. They want a Greater Serbia, and that will never be complete without Sarajevo.”

Nearly one-third of Sarajevo’s prewar population of 600,000 was Serbian, making this Bosnian capital the most significant settlement of Serbs after Belgrade and the Croatian capital of Zagreb.

Tens of thousands of Serbs still live intermingled with Muslims, Croats, Jews and other ethnic groups in Sarajevo, but the nationalist factions took to the surrounding hills after Bosnians voted to secede from Yugoslavia in March, 1992. They have been pounding the city with heavy artillery and starving it of vital utilities ever since.

Because they control all approaches to the city, the gunmen loyal to Serbian insurgent leader Radovan Karadzic have been able to cut the supply of electricity, plunging Sarajevo into darkness and idling its water pumps.

No public transportation operates due to lack of fuel. Smuggled gasoline sells for nearly $60 per gallon on the black market, emptying the debris-strewn streets of almost all motorized vehicles.

Both Serbian and Croatian gunmen have blocked or hijacked deliveries of humanitarian goods such as food, medicine, fuel and wood, creating a citywide food shortage and leaving most civilians exposed to bitter cold.

Alisa Kuna’s 29-year-old husband, Edim, was wounded by shrapnel more than a month ago and has been confined to a crowded ward of the dark and unheated State Hospital. Each day she lugs at least two gallons of water more than a mile from a communal tap to his hospital bedside, along with whatever food she can find to supplement the institutional ration of bread and soup.

“He is luckier than most, because he hasn’t suffered any infections,” Kuna says of her husband. “The doctors and nurses try hard to keep the wounds clean, but they can’t do much if there is no water.”

Even when the besieging forces ease up on the electrical supply in response to occasional Western threats of military intervention to break the siege, many homes still go without heat, light or water. The distribution system has been damaged by shelling, and ill-maintained pumps cannot get water to upper floors of tall apartment buildings.

Osmana Vatres and six family members, victims of the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” that swept Muslims from the surrounding towns and villages, have taken over an empty three-room apartment on the ninth floor of one high-rise that is no warmer inside than the subfreezing temperatures outdoors.

She and her sister are found late one November afternoon draining soaked bulgur wheat, the only food they have been provided for months by the U.N. relief effort on which the city depends. They are down to their last few candles, so they prepare the evening meal for their children in the dark.

“Everyone says Sarajevo is taken care of, that the aid brought here is enough,” says Vatres, a gaunt 33-year-old, gesturing incredulously at the few cups of soggy grain spread on a tea towel. “But it is not. This is barely enough to keep us alive.”

Adults, especially refugee women, are wasting away as they often give up their own paltry rations of food to their children.

Despite these sacrifices, at least one-third of Sarajevo’s children suffer from malnutrition. And cases of hepatitis, dysentery and other diseases are reaching epidemic proportions as the falling temperatures exacerbate people’s weakened resistance.

Some heat may be emanating soon from central Sarajevo homes equipped to burn natural gas. Russia recently agreed to supply the fuel to Bosnia via a pipeline through Serbia, with the tacit understanding that some of it will be siphoned off by the Belgrade regime.

Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic has complained to the U.N. sanctions committee about the delivery scheme. He calls it “a kind of blackmail” because it allows Russia to contravene U.N. sanctions imposed on Serbian-led Yugoslavia for instigating violence in Bosnia and gives Belgrade effective control of Sarajevo’s gas taps.

“Our government cannot allow that the aggressor, Serbia, be put in control of our fuel supply,” said Munib Usanovic, a deputy economics minister in charge of energy issues.

But he conceded that there is little the Sarajevo leadership can do if it wants any heating fuel at all this winter other than to tolerate the system that lets Bosnia get at least half of what it has paid for in return for letting the Serbs take the rest.

Meanwhile, another winter disaster is in the making. The U.S.-based International Rescue Committee estimates that hundreds, if not thousands, of Sarajevo families have rigged up homemade gas-heating contraptions and illegally tapped into the city supply line. This has led to a profusion of deadly explosions since temperatures dropped severely in mid-November.

“We are working with Sarajevo Gas to put odor into the gas so that leaks are detectable,” said Lt. Col. Sylvain Hilairet, head of the engineering sector of Sarajevo’s U.N. Protection Force.

But most homes in this city exposed to on-again, off-again bombardment are equipped only with electrical heating systems, for which there is virtually no chance of sufficient current, or with wood stoves, in which books and furniture are all that is left to be burned.

* CAUTIOUS U.S. SUPPORT: Washington will warily back new Bosnia peace plan. A15