Many Bosnian Refugees Can’t Go Home Again

Seated on a cot in the tiny room where she lives with her blind mother, Jasmina Sinanovic cradled her weeks-old baby against the autumnal chill and the future’s freeze.

As Muslims who fled the conquered U.N.-designated “safe areas” of Srebrenica and Zepa two months ago, Sinanovic and scores more who sought refuge here in a decrepit former school dormitory are among the Bosnian war’s most recent outcasts. And they may be the last to go home, if they ever do.

“Please, look at me now, at my condition, at my little son,” said the 33-year-old woman. “Tell me how I should survive. If the Serbs want our land, then we have to give it up. They have the power, not us.”

Regardless of what negotiators decide--last week in New York, next time somewhere else--the refugees who have flooded Sarajevo during 3 1/2 years of war stand to lose the most from a peace plan that will inevitably sacrifice their homes.

As much as many here and throughout government-held Bosnia-Herzegovina may want peace, the probable terms of a settlement will be hard to swallow: Refugees will lose their ancestral villages; the writers and intellectuals who sip coffee at sidewalk cafes here in the capital will lose the multiethnic Bosnia whose vision, at least, they cherished.

It is the price of an imperfect peace, they are being told.

The peace plan that is under discussion effectively divides Bosnia along ethnic lines into a Muslim-Croat federation in the west and a Bosnian Serb republic in the east.

Although the maps showing exactly what territory each side will get are yet to be negotiated, U.S. officials privately acknowledge that Srebrenica and Zepa have been written off and will remain in Serbian hands.

“Who cannot be angry?” asked Sinanovic, who was forced to flee Zepa on July 27 after the Bosnian Serb army seized control of the remote mountainous enclave. She, her 8-year-old daughter and her blind 68-year-old mother made the journey to Sarajevo, rescued along the way by a U.N. armored personnel carrier. Sinanovic was nearly nine months pregnant at the time.

Sinanovic has had no news about her husband, a government soldier, or his fellow troops since Zepa fell. She gave birth in Sarajevo’s Kosevo Hospital. Like the other refugees, she depends solely on humanitarian aid for food and other supplies.

Tens of thousands of refugees have poured into the capital since the war started. Because most are from rural villages and have brought their country habits with them, they have changed the once-cosmopolitan nature of Sarajevo, where goats now graze on the main avenues and people do laundry in the river that intersects the city.

The principal transformation that Sarajevo has undergone, however, was caused by the siege the Serbs have inflicted for 41 months. Though now starting to ease, the siege reduced Sarajevo to a camp under fire and cut off from water, electricity and normal communication with the world.

For intellectuals and artists such as Ferida Durakovic who made the salvation of Sarajevo an international campaign, the current prospects for peace are bittersweet.

Durakovic, a Sarajevo native, poet and author of four books, witnesses the debate in her own home. Her brother, a soldier, no longer sees the point of going to the front line and wonders what he was fighting for, after all. Her mother simply wants the violence to end, whatever the terms.

For her part, Durakovic said she long ago stopped entertaining illusions that anyone would save the Bosnia she knew.

“It was clear from the beginning there would be no Bosnia [like the one] I used to know,” Durakovic said in her apartment, borrowed from a writer friend who left the country. Her own place was too close to the fighting to be safe. “So I ask what were these victims for? Whatever happens [with peace talks], it’s 10,000 dead people too late.”

If Sarajevo is ultimately divided into Muslim-Croat and Serbian sectors, as some have suggested, the image of a multiethnic, tolerant capital will be finally shattered.

Durakovic, 38, is resigned.

“If the monsters don’t let me live in a whole Sarajevo, then I will live in a smaller Sarajevo,” she said.

Getting used to utter poverty also seems to be the fate of Sarajevo’s refugees. Unlike the refugees of northwestern Bosnia, who started returning home after a government offensive recaptured territory there, the majority here are from eastern Bosnia and have little chance of going home.

Mustafa Colic, a 57-year-old man with desperate, dark eyes, is among a group of refugees who occupy a school once used for deaf pupils. “Bosnia cannot be divided,” Colic said. “I should not have to give up my land. My father left his properties to me, not to Radovan Karadzic [the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs]. Karadzic cannot take my animals. I never saw Karadzic’s name on the deed.”

Colic fled to Sarajevo from Zepa at the end of July. On Aug. 28, his wife was killed in the shelling of a downtown marketplace, in which nearly 40 people died. The incident triggered NATO air strikes.

Colic carries a worn photocopy of his wife’s identity card, the only remembrance of her that he has. Everything else was left behind when they fled Zepa.

“I’m here, I have nothing to eat, nowhere to stay. I am all alone,” Colic said, shifting uncomfortably on a false leg, the result of an accident before the war. “I left my land, my farm. No one had a farm so large, and now I am poor. I am terrified.

“There is no life for me. I do not expect any future,” he said. “But I hope Bosnia will be free.”

As he spoke, another refugee, 67-year-old Fata Avdagic, wailed: “This damn war! What it did to us!”

Avdagic and her husband, Hasan, 73, fled at the start of the war from Visegrad, a town in eastern Bosnia less than 15 miles from Bosnia’s border with Serbia proper, and then escaped again from Zepa in July. They have not seen some of their 11 children since 1992.

“What can we do?” said Hasan Avdagic. “I do not have the power to influence anything.”

“I would like to die where I was born,” he said. “I would just like to go back to see my land and die.”