Weary Refugees Wait in Tuzla, Without Tears

Nihada Avdic, a chubby 6-month-old, waited for her bath Friday in splendid form, wearing a sunsuit and a Mickey Mouse hat promising “Forever Friends.”

But how could she know that her mother’s milk is drying up with anguish? Or that her soldier father was last seen, wounded, being carried through the woods by friends who were themselves running for their lives? How could she know that she is a bottom line of war in the Balkans?

Nihada is a refugee from the fallen “safe area” of Srebrenica, one of 6,846 dispossessed Bosnian Muslims who baked in the summer sun at an unused airport here Friday under international supervision.

Many were relocated Friday night. But nearby, in a rural Muslim enclave like the one where the Avdic family lived until last week, new refugees were being created by unrelenting ethnic violence beyond international control.

Caring for 21,000 people driven last week from Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs, international officials now say that an additional 7,000 to 8,000 Muslims are expected to emerge soon from the besieged enclave of Zepa.

Beyond the numbers Friday were the homeless kids, mooching mischievously around the tent city here, and the Muslim women who watched over them and waited for word of their fathers.

“We had no time to say farewell,” Fetaneta Avdic said of her disrupted domestic situation. “My husband said: ‘Take care of our child. I will try to make it through the woods.’ ”

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International pressure has failed to halt the bloodletting in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but international workers here are keeping score of its toll.

Laurent Sauby of the International Committee of the Red Cross sat in a large green tent at the airport Friday watching a battery of Bosnian relief workers take statements from refugee women.

“We are taking testimony about the people who have been left behind. There are by now thousands of reports of missing persons. They are telling us their stories--although many of them are still in shock,” he said. “For us, the most urgent thing is to bring separated people back into contact.”

The Bosnian Serbs, the Muslim refugees assert, took away all but the youngest and oldest men when Srebrenica fell. For interrogation, the rebels said. Since then, the nationalist Serbs, by now stalked by accusations of atrocities, have refused to allow international relief officials access to the men from Srebrenica.

Yuri Shishaev, a U.N. spokesman at the airport camp, said that ongoing negotiations between the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian government officials over civilians at Zepa have been dogged by the Serbs’ insistence that the men remain in custody. For future prisoner-of-war exchanges, the Bosnian Serbs say.

As they await the next group of refugees, aid specialists here say the situation has improved. “Things are much, much better. Humanitarian problems are under control. Water, food, sanitation are all good. Today, Friday, a day of prayer for Muslims, we opened a mosque tent,” spokesman Shishaev said.

Besides those camping at the airport, which is intended to be a temporary facility, up to 15,000 refugees from Srebrenica have been scattered in school gymnasiums and other shelters and villages around this northern Bosnian city.

For Fetaneta Avdic, the white tent she shares with other women and their babies is a restless halfway house between the home she may never see again and the terror of the flight that made her a refugee in her own country.

“Life in Srebrenica was hard,” she said through an interpreter. “Food was scarce. We had no electricity and not much water, no place to buy things or much money, for that matter, but we helped each other out.”

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Then the Bosnian Serbs attacked. A kind of Bosnian “home guard” in Srebrenica proved no match for the invaders and their heavy weapons. U.N. peacekeepers did not intervene.

“As the fighting got worse,” Avdic recalled, “we fled Srebrenica to a U.N. camp in Potocari, where we found a shelter in an old battery factory. We stayed there for three days and three nights on the floor. Then the Serbs came.

“At first, they said we would not be ill-treated, that they would not take the men away,” she said. “But they took us out to buses, and my father was behind me waiting to get on when one of the soldiers said: ‘You, old man! You must come back with us.’ They took him away. He was 54 and he is ill. He is a farmer, not a soldier.”

Avdic told her story calmly, almost as if it were something that happened to somebody else. She had last seen her husband Nihad, 21, a baker-turned-soldier, a few days before that. “The only word I have had is that he was wounded and that friends were carrying him. I don’t know if they left him,” she said in a voice eerily empty of emotion.

Other women who had gathered with their babies around a UNICEF trailer listened in silence. They had their own missing husbands. They told their own stories. No tears.

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“These are strong people,” said Samir Pejdah, a worker for the U.N. children’s relief agency. “When they left, some had to walk about two hours from where the Serbs released them. Along the way, one of the women said, ‘I must stop here and have my baby.’ It was her first. Some other women came to help. All they had was cold water. She had the baby, they cut the cord, and that was that. It was like the movies--except I’ve never seen anything like that even in the movies.”

Habiba Mustafic, 28, is also made of stern stuff. When the fighting started, her unborn baby stopped moving.

“I was afraid I had lost it,” she said. Then came the flight and the baby began moving again--too much. “I prayed to God. ‘Not here, not here,’ I prayed. He listened.” Seolma Mustafic, 5 days old Friday, was born at the airport a few hours after her mother arrived here. The baby’s father is missing; her 67-year-old grandfather was bundled away by the Bosnian Serbs.

In Tuzla on Friday, it was Nihada Avdic’s turn for a bath and a clean diaper. As her petite mother entered the trailer, she looked around at the airport, the tent, the surrealistic setting so alien from anything a farmer’s daughter could ever have known. “Where will we go now?” she asked. “What will we do?”

After dark Friday, buses came to take several thousand of the airport refugees to more permanent resettlement areas around Tuzla. Citing security concerns--the airport has been shelled by the Bosnian Serbs in recent months--the Bosnian government decided on the move, to the surprise of U.N. officials, spokesman Shishaev said.

* SERBS CONTINUE ATTACKS: Bosnian Serbs renewed their heavy mortar fire on Zepa. A10