Serbs Play Out Macabre Scene at Bosnia Cemetery

Nikola Ljesic rose with the sun Wednesday, arrived at the sprawling Vlakovo Cemetery on the outskirts of this Serb-held suburb, spread out a small feast of pork and plum brandy, and went about the task of pulling the body of his dead son from its earthen grave.

He kissed the wooden cross marking the resting place of the 18-year-old youth, who was killed in the war, and then he kissed the soil and lighted several amber-colored candles.

Grimacing against the pain and looking older than his 56 years, Ljesic watched as two cemetery workers and a friend used shovels and their bare hands to remove dirt from the grave. A backhoe finished the job, clearing more dirt and finally lifting the rickety wooden coffin from its deep, wet hole and onto a patch of grass by a metal garbage dumpster.

“Since Dayton,” Ljesic said of the U.S.-brokered peace agreement that formally ended Bosnia’s war last month, “we have to take away our dead. They cannot rest in peace.”

Here in this cemetery, where thousands of Serbs, Muslims and Croats are segregated in burial, each group with a large section of neatly lined tombstones, Serbs are acting out what is probably the most macabre and unsettling manifestation of the panic that is sweeping their communities.

Under the peace accord, Ilidza and other Serb-held Sarajevo suburbs will be handed over to Muslim-Croat government control. The transition begins Friday, and Serbs who fear that their enemies will desecrate the grave sites have been digging up their dead and transporting them to other cemeteries deep in Bosnian Serb territory. Many residents are joining a gradual exodus from the Sarajevo districts.

Fifty bodies have been taken from this cemetery since the end of November, according to officials, and plans are being made for an en masse exhumation of hundreds of bodies, should it become necessary.

“We are doing this because we do not want to leave the graves to Muslim fanatics,” Ljesic said. “They would dig up the bones and burn them.”

That the Serbs are convinced the Muslims will tamper with their dead is a sign of the extreme depths of mistrust that exist after 3 1/2 years of cruel and devastating war.

Ljesic said his only son and youngest child, Dragoslav, was killed by a sniper in June 1992, early in a war that raged around Sarajevo and prevented the elder Ljesic from attending the funeral.

In incongruous sunshine Wednesday, Ljesic supervised the three men who unearthed the coffin bearing Dragoslav. They paused occasionally to participate in the graveside ritual of eating pork and pieces of bread with salt, washed down with shots of homemade plum brandy. They made the sign of the cross before each drink.

As the coffin was lifted, Ljesic removed his brown pile hat and mumbled to the workers.

“If I could, I would just take him and kiss him,” he said, holding out his arms in a cradle. “My life is finished. When I bury my son, it’s the end of my family. Nothing good can happen to me anymore.”

As the men worked, Milivoje Matic approached. His brother was buried a couple of plots over. He joined Ljesic for a drink, then seized a pickax and began tearing apart the grave of his brother, Slobodan, who Matic said was tortured to death in a Muslim jail in 1992. Matic tossed aside Slobodan’s wooden cross, then worked until he sweated in the frigid air, removing pile after pile of dirt.

A few yards away, a woman dressed in black wailed over the grave of her son while another male member of her family knelt in prayer. “Why did you have to die?” she moaned.

Ljesic said he couldn’t afford 200 German marks ($140) for the metal coffin most people are using for their exhumed loved ones. Instead, his friend, Blagoje Cajevic, and one of the workers, Bozo Maric, pieced together the dark brown coffin that had lain underground for more than three years. They nailed it shut with rusty nails after placing a gray flannel blanket over the lumpy shroud covering Dragoslav’s remains. They used towels to scrape away some of the mud caked on the wooden planks.

Maric, the laborer, has been putting bodies in the ground, and more recently taking them out, since the war began. He said he sees the work as his duty, a way to serve the soldiers who protected him and his town. Now that his town is being sacrificed, duty calls again.

“When I finish digging up all the bodies, then I will leave,” said Maric, his weather-beaten face framed by a dark shock of hair. “I buried the first one, I will dig up the last one.”

Ljesic and the three other men then wrapped the coffin in the plastic sheeting that humanitarian organizations give to war victims to place where their windows used to be before they were shelled to pieces. The blue initials UNHCR--standing for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees--were emblazoned on the white material.

“Here is how much help we get from the United States,” Ljesic scowled, “a plastic bag to wrap our soldiers in.”

The men loaded the coffin into the back of another friend’s dusty red van--the end poking out the back--and headed off for a new cemetery in Serb-controlled eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Ljesic has not seen his wife, who has not been able to leave Sarajevo, since before the war. They last spoke on the phone in August 1993. She does not know that her son has been exhumed.

“If she came here, she would die,” he said. “She could not stand to see this.”