Bosnia Families Fight to Reunite : Balkans: War leaves multitude of children without parents. Many are among the hundreds of thousands of refugees now living in Croatia.

Spring, 1992. War engulfs tranquil Bosnia-Herzegovina. Tens of thousands of parents, desperate to save their children, send them off on buses, trucks, even on foot.

Two years and 200,000 dead or missing later, many of those children have no idea where their parents are, and parents search for their children in vain.

Most of the children left alone are Muslims, who suffered most when Bosnian Serbs launched the war in response to Muslim and Croat declarations of independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

As the fighting ebbs, international aid workers are trying to help reunite divided families. Sometimes the search crisscrosses the globe. At home, it is hampered by disrupted road, rail, telephone and mail links between Bosnia and Croatia, where up to 300,000 Muslims and Croats from Bosnia have taken refuge.

Some lost children are in Serbia, but most Serbs who fled Bosnia did so in a more organized fashion.

Three agencies are trying to reunite families--the International Committee of the Red Cross, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and Unaccompanied Children in Exile, a Croatian group.

No one knows just how big the problem is.

The Red Cross lists 1,200 children as “unaccompanied,” or separated from both parents and without a guardian. The U.N. agency and the Croatian organization so far have registered 1,100 children under 18 without at least one parent, including 110 who have had no contact for about two years. U.N. officials fear the total number of unaccompanied children could be as high as 40,000.

Even many children who are safe with other relatives no longer have clear memories of their parents. They tend to grow up quickly, burying the emotional loss under a tough surface.

When Nejra Sprzo was 15, a year older than her brother, Mustafa, their mother put them and five cousins on a bus leaving Sarajevo for Zagreb, where their grandmother lived. Her mother promised Nejra they would all be back in a week and she would get a new dress. That was 27 months ago.

In April, when telephone lines to Sarajevo were finally restored, Nejra talked to her mother again for the first time. “Mummy, I’m not your little girl any more,” she said. “Don’t worry about us. We learned how to take care of ourselves.”

Mirsada Omercevic, now 12, and her sister, 14-year-old Suada, last saw their mother in April, 1992, when they were sent by bus from Ribnica in northern Bosnia to an uncle in Zagreb.

“For two years, we did not know what happened to Mum or Dad,” Mirsada said. “We only heard that our house was burned down.”

When their mother finally called on a mobile phone a few weeks ago, “I almost didn’t recognize her voice,” Mirsada said. “She only had time to tell us they moved to another village and are all alive.”

Many other parents cannot call because they don’t know where their children are.

Sanela Huskic, 40, asked Unaccompanied Children in Exile to help find her son, Almir. He was 14 in August, 1992, when Serb guards took him and his father separately from the prison camp in eastern Bosnia where the family was held.

“Since then, I never heard from him,” Huskic said by telephone from a refugee camp in Denmark, where she and her daughter, Alisa, now 14, landed after a long journey through Croatia.

She keeps Almir’s photograph deep in a drawer because “if I looked at it, I couldn’t stop the tears.”

Vesna Bosnjak, head of the Croatian agency, said it is trying to help at least 40 parents with missing children.

Some were working abroad when the war began and had left their children at home in Bosnia, she said. Others “were in such a panic that they just gave their child to someone leaving a war zone, to a group or person, without asking anything, without papers. And now they do not know where their child is.”

“When the war began, people were scared and the only thing they thought of was to try and guarantee safety for their child,” she said.

Alexandra Zivkovic, another official of the agency, said it may take months, even years, to track down the missing parents and children.

“A lot of people are still fighting for their lives in Bosnia,” she said. “When the war stops, we’ll maybe have more cases.”

The U.N. refugee agency has announced plans to establish a computer network across former Yugoslavia as part of its Operation Reunite.

Bosnjak’s organization has relied on word of mouth, ham radio and newspaper ads to connect parents and children.

Red Cross offices use their unique message system: Anyone can send a message from any of the 112 nations where Red Cross or Red Crescent societies operate. Red Cross convoys carry the messages even to remote areas of Bosnia.

Elizabeth Twinch of the Red Cross said 7 million such messages had crossed the battle lines in former Yugoslavia.