Some Lucky Children in Bosnia Find Their Families; Others Only Hope : Refugees: The Muslim-Croat truce was a boon to some. But one 13-year-old girl still has no word, and sits silently, hallucinating that her mother has returned.

Adisa Muratagic, 10, glanced at broken windows and a shattered wall in her small apartment, one of very few that survived the fighting on Bulevar Street, the former front line in Mostar.

“I’m home with my Mum and sister, and that’s all that matters,” she said.

After nearly a year away, Adisa is back home, where a March cease-fire between Muslims and Croats brought an uneasy peace between ethnic factions whose fighting wrecked much of the city.

For much of the time she was gone, she and her family feared the worst.

She was evacuated to Zagreb, the capital of neighboring Croatia, after her left arm was hit by a sniper’s bullet last New Year’s Eve. Then she went to a rehabilitation center in Krapinske Toplice, in northern Croatia, and waited in vain for her mother’s call.

Adisa worried her mother, Angelina, was dead.

But it turned out her mother simply had the wrong telephone number. Without a phone of her own, or contacts who could give her the right information, Adisa’s mother could only hope.

“I simply prayed to God that someone was taking good care of Adisa,” said Muratagic, 32, an ethnic Croat whose Slavic Muslim husband died seven years before Bosnia’s war began in April, 1992.

Mother and daughter were reunited via the International Red Cross’ system for relaying messages through its delegates in Bosnia and 112 other countries. Despite the tension still gripping Mostar, and the danger of fighting erupting with nearby Serbs, Adisa returned home in September.

She is one of the fortunate children struck off a list compiled by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees of some 2,000 “unaccompanied” children--young refugees known to be separated from their parents.

Last March, UNHCR announced “Operation Reunite,” a project aimed at tracing what the agency estimated could be as many as 40,000 missing children. Computer centers were set up across former Yugoslavia and in Paris to coordinate the search.

Later calculations lowered the estimate of possible lost children to 10,000. But the agency does not have nearly that many names because registrations have been conducted in only a handful of countries and are incomplete.

Few parents have used the centers. One problem is poor communications, like those that kept Adisa and her mother apart. Word of the system has not reached many refugees who straggled into cities from rural areas or who still live in the hinterlands, struggling for survival under siege or amid warfare.

“This system will work better when peace comes, when all roads will be reopened and newspapers will reach all areas,” said Alexandra Zivkovic of Unaccompanied Children in Exile, an aid group in Zagreb.

The war in Bosnia has displaced an estimated 2.1 million people from their homes. Thousands of parents scrambled to send their children from combat zones. Statistics justify their fears.

Approximately 17,000 children are among the 200,000 people reported killed or missing in the war, according to Bosnia’s Muslim-led government. Some 34,500 more children were wounded, the government says.

Despite that toll, some families have been determined to reunite as fighting ebbed in some areas after the Muslim-Croat cease-fire and the end to the Serb bombardment of besieged Sarajevo.

In August, 17-year-old Nejra Sprzo and her brother, Mustafa, 16, returned to their battered home in government-held Sarajevo, 500 yards from the front line. They had left Sarajevo in April, 1992, expecting to return the following week.

After more than two years of safety living with their grandmother in an apartment in Zagreb, the teen-agers and grandmother came back.

But the bus service between Zagreb and Sarajevo--which resumed after Serbs stopped artillery attacks on the capital--took them only as far as Pazaric, about nine miles southwest of Bosnia’s capital.

Their anxious father walked out of the city, then trekked back with his children and a guide past Serb positions on dangerous Mt. Igman. They crawled through the improvised tunnel below Sarajevo airport, moving carefully and silently to avoid Serb fighters and U.N. peacekeepers.

“I lived two years for a return, and I don’t regret it,” Nejra said. “I choose war and a besieged city instead of peace in our refugee exile in Zagreb, but I feel I made the right decision.”

“We thought it would be only for a week or two and wanted to get them out of the war zone, but it lasted too long,” said Nejra’s mother, Pehka, 39. “The danger is less now, so we decided it’s better to share it than to be separated even longer.”

The risk is high, since Nejra has yet to learn war rules.

“Two days ago, I walked through the streets, and somewhere close a mortar (shell) fell. Everybody started to run, but I just stood there,” she said by telephone from her home. “I didn’t feel fear; I just cannot perceive the danger.”

She is only scared by the blood stains on the road to her school, she said.

For Dina Hrbinic, 13, the hopeless search for her mother and the burden of refugee life led to a severe depression.

In the spring of 1992, Bosnian Serbs expelled all non-Serb inhabitants of Dina’s native Foca, in southeastern Bosnia. Dina and her handicapped brother, Elvedin, 11, walked more than 40 miles with their aunt and uncle before they could get a bus to Croatia.

Dina’s mother, Magdula, was in the hospital in a part of Foca cut off by Serb forces. Her father died years ago.

Since then, Dina has sent a dozen messages to parts of Bosnia where her mother was rumored to be. Negative answers came from everywhere, except Gorazde. No reply at all came from that eastern enclave isolated by Serb troops, and Dina clings to the possibility that her mother found refuge there.

Her plight caused a depression that recently hospitalized Dina for 15 days.

“She began seeing her mother’s face through the window. She would run out, but, of course, it was just imagination,” said her uncle, Zaim Aljkic. “And more often, she would hear her mother’s voice calling her.”

Dina lost interest in anything, became reluctant to speak, and sat for hours.

“She never cried, she never showed her emotions, ever since we left Foca,” Aljkic said. “She was just thinking and thinking about her mother, torturing herself.”

“I only hope we will be with my Mum again. When the war ends,” Dina whispered.