Bosnians Rejoice as Safety Returns to a ‘Safe Area’

Tuesday was a day like none other in this town, a place whose name has become shorthand for the cruelty of war in the Balkans.

It was happy here. Almost delirious.

“I can’t remember the last time I felt this way,” said Dijana Ibrahimefendic, holding back tears of joy as she stood with her husband and curly-haired son. “It is so lovely to see you all!”

The road to Bihac, long a treacherous route through rebel Serb and renegade Muslim territory, opened to the world Tuesday, setting off a spontaneous celebration featuring family reunions, curbside revelry and ice cream cones for the kids.

There was no killing, no starvation, no new heartache over loved ones captured or missing.

Instead, busloads of journalists, relief workers and family members from neighboring Croatia rolled into this besieged, U.N.-designated “safe area” to the staccato of rapid gunfire--for the first time in years the melody of rapture, not rancor.

“The last few months we have spent more time in the bomb shelter than outside like this,” said Ibrahimefendic, one of hundreds of excited residents who gushed into the streets to greet the visitors. “Everything is happening so quickly I just can’t believe it.”

The winding road into Bihac was cleared by this week’s victory of the Croatian army and Bosnian government forces over nationalist Serbs and renegade Muslims who had held the northern Bosnian town at gunpoint and occupied the neighboring Krajina region of Croatia.

The separatist fighters had terrorized Bihac and its surrounding villages, sometimes starving residents to death, sometimes killing them with relentless shelling--and always threatening to overrun them, even though the town was under the protection of U.N. peacekeepers for more than two years.

In bittersweet testament to the inexplicable shifts in the fortunes of war, tens of thousands of desperate Serbian refugees were locked Tuesday in one of the biggest humanitarian crises of the war, just 30 miles away from the jubilation here.

Scores of looters from villages surrounding the town clogged the only route to and from the vanquished Serbian territory with horse-drawn carts. The rickety getaway vehicles were piled high with the spoils of war--everything from chickens to televisions.

“They feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are somehow entitled to it,” one relief worker said as a family of grinning looters flashed the victory sign at passersby.

In Bihac, suffering remained. The hospital was crowded with wounded soldiers and was short of medicine and equipment. Air raid sirens warned that the war was not over. Most families had no electricity. A large downtown bulletin board displayed fresh death notices, green for Muslims and black for Roman Catholic Croats.

But at least for this warm, sunny Tuesday, the war-sickened people of Bihac put it behind them. Not a soul stirred when the sirens sounded. No one flinched when the jubilant unloaded guns into the air.

“We were thirsty and hungry, but we never wanted to leave,” said Nafa Smajic, 45. “We waited for this day.”

Women dressed in pretty skirts strolled the town in high heels and donned the leftover jewelry they had not sold to buy food. Young girls wore makeup. Fathers cuddled babies and bought ice cream for their children. People talked of miracles and--for the first time in years--about the future.

“We want our whole lives to change,” said Sabiha Kasum, 60, who stretched the waistband on her bright red skirt to demonstrate the weight she had lost from food shortages. For months at a time, she said, she and others survived on beans and corn flour, with an occasional helping of milk or cheese.

“We hope to be free and have food to eat,” she said. “The kids here, they don’t know about candy or chocolate.”

In a nearby house, in a crowded living room lighted by a single overhead bulb, some of that was changing. Two-year-old Elvis Karabegovic darted from the room, his fingers thick with a gooey chocolate bar and his tongue probing the chunks smeared on his face. He dashed past a pot of colorless beans boiling on the stove, the dinner he had gleefully spoiled.

His brother, Dinko, 6, was admiring a new pair of sneakers. Their parents, and a dozen other friends and family members, were in tears. The boys’ grandfather and uncle had made the journey from Zagreb, the Croatian capital, bearing the exotic gifts. Their father had arrived the day before after being freed from an enemy prisoner-of-war camp.

It was the first family gathering in four years.

“It is the first time my brother and father have seen my 2-year-old,” said Minka Karabegovic, barely able to speak without crying. “You don’t have to ask how I feel.”

Her husband sat on the couch in shorts and a T-shirt. He spoke of disappointment in the United Nations and gratitude for the Croatian offensive against the Krajina Serbs. It was the imminent fall of Bihac less than two weeks ago that the Croatian government says prompted “Operation Storm,” the blitz against those who had helped to besiege this town.

“I think our new relations with Croatia will last,” he predicted.

Almost everyone here was counting on it. Bosnian government and Croatian military leaders were shaking hands and pledging continued cooperation. And many residents, trapped in a city with no way out for the better part of three years, were looking to Croatia for food and medical care.

Aladin Hodzic was one of them. The blond little boy is barely 4 years old. He is missing a leg. It was blown off during a shelling attack last year. He joined the celebration Tuesday on a pair of crutches crafted by his father.

The little boy with a stern face doesn’t say much. His father, Abdulah, said he was one of nearly 200 Bihac children maimed in the war. The newly opened road out of Bihac, his father hopes, will someday take him to Zagreb.

There Hodzic hopes to find his son an artificial leg.